Bicultural Vida

Back in August, a question in the Ask an Expert column really hit home with me. The mother who felt that her vocabulary was weak and her proficiency in Spanish was lacking particularly moved me. She was seeking ideas on how to build her own Spanish proficiency to best help her child become bilingual. As a non-native Spanish speaker, I could relate to her fears and insecurities about being a non-native speaker. I was also impressed by her determination to giveRead More ...

Trying to define what it means to me to be Hispanic or Latina is a question I have asked myself all my life and in a few paragraphs I will try to come to a satisfying answer. It’s important to understand that, although I was born in the United States, the fact that I was raised in Mexico makes me a Mexican. However, the fact that I went to college in the U.S., that I have voted in the lastRead More ...

One of the most difficult tasks you need to accomplish when you find out you’re pregnant is to come up with a name for the baby. We really all have so many personal reasons in deciding which name our child is going to have to honor the rest of her life. I mean, it’s a daunting task to get it right and make one of the first of many huge decisions on behalf of this other person. The reason I’mRead More ...

My son Santiago turned two a month ago and I am blown away by how his vocabulary has exploded. Like his sister, he was an early talker. But the real expansion in his repertoire of words has taken place in the last couple of month. He loves music. Not only to dance to it, but also to sing it. Just last night, he was serenading me right before bedtime and even after I could hear him signing through the monitorRead More ...

Living in Orlando, Florida, provides a multitude of opportunities to speak Spanish. Everywhere I go, I hear Spanish speakers. At the bank, I often notice that not a single person is speaking English when I walk in. Sometimes, I find myself jumping in to translate for monolingual Spanish speakers in the grocery store or at the mall. There is one place in which they are not being accommodated, though: education. Latinos make up 24% of the K-12 population of Florida, yetRead More ...

Editor’s note: I am so happy to announce that we’ve invited one more regular contributor to our SpanglishBaby familia. Vanessa, of the beautifully written and illustrated blog De Su Mama, recently accepted our invitation to join us and we know you’re quickly going to see why we are thrilled. Vanessa has a different kind of story to tell, starting with what she writes about today. We hope you all welcome her to our family! My grandparents immigrated to the UnitedRead More ...

This past year I have experienced a transformation many of the SpanglishBaby readers are all too familiar with; I became a mother. Sure, it starts while pregnant, but the real transformation, in my opinion, occurs during the first year of motherhood. There are parts of myself I had to let go of and other parts I had to reinvent. I had to let go of the way I was used to traveling and I was forced to reinvent my idealsRead More ...

My son Secondo was diagnosed with autism in late 2008. There were unfamiliar doctors bearing clipboards, lots of tears and tissues, and I remember riding home from the hospital in a haze, feeling fragile and powerless to stop the bottom from falling out of my world. His diagnosis changed everything. My son Primo was diagnosed with autism late last year. The appointment was more of a formality with a doctor we know and like, and we all shrugged our shouldersRead More ...