Bicultural Vida

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 ...

My plan was to write about a completely different topic today, but something pretty amazing has been happening the last couple of days with Vanessa in her Kindergarten class. When I informed her teacher that Vanessa is bilingual, she told me there were two kids in her classroom who also spoke Spanish, but are not bilingual yet and so they are attending ESL classes. I wanted to ask who they were and if I could meet their parents, but IRead More ...

We are deep in Disneyland on a family vacation, tired but happy. The girls have been enjoying the music, make-believe, and spectacle that is this childhood fantasyland. I am happy to report from the glittery trenches that there is plenty of Spanish to be heard on main street, churros in every land, and a pretty decent Mexican restaurant in the park as well. Looking around at the staff that works here in the Happiest Place on Earth, I see manyRead More ...