Must Reads

I finally filled out and turned in all the registration forms required for my daughter to enter Kindergarten this fall. After getting over the fact that she’s about to reach this humongous milestone, I also had to come to terms with the fact that she won’t be going to a dual language school — at least not for now. I can’t lie. It was an extremely difficult decision to make, but at this time in our lives, I’m confident it’sRead More ...

A couple of days ago, I overheard my daughter speaking in English while she was playing by herself with her My Little Pony collection. I made it a point to observe her a bit more intently – without her knowledge, of course – just to make sure she wasn’t just saying a few words in English, as she’s done in the past. I don’t know why it surprised me, but the whole time the ponies were speaking English to eachRead More ...

Last week I was pretty taken aback when I heard someone say that “el Spanglish es una aberración” (literally an aberration, an outrage). The craziest thing is that this person — an old colleague and friend of my husband’s who is Argentinian, but has lived in Miami for a long time —  said this as he admitted to using it himself! Then I realized I got exactly what he meant because I used to be one of them: the anti-Spanglish,Read More ...

As I typed out the title of this posting I could not help but form a smirk on my face. Here’s the deal. The further I delve into the work of identity construction in my doctoral program, the more I realize that individuals take on multiple identities depending on the context they are in, including several other elements that come into play. Even in the previous sentence I wrote there are several words I would have to define to explainRead More ...

Last week, Chelsea Kyle shared on our Facebook page an excellent opinion piece by New York Times columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof, titled Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen (First learn Spanish. Then study Chinese.) The point he cleverly, and even bravely, makes is that even though Chinese is growing in popularity as the language of choice for parents who want to give their children an educational advantage, Spanish is the language every child in the United StatesRead More ...

Happy New Year to all of you! We hope 2011 bring you lots of happiness, peace, love and success! As 2010 comes to an end, both Ana Lilian and I want to thank you for all your support, inquiries, comments and contributions because without it SpanglishBaby would not be what it is today. This has been a year full of awesomeness for SpanglishBaby. For starters, we celebrated our first anniversary with a major redesign which — after a few minorRead More ...

Welcome! ¡Bienvenidos! We’re so thankful you are here! In case you didn’t know: SpanglishBaby was born out of a real necessity almost two years ago. Two professional, successful, bilingual Latina amigas became mothers and had nowhere to turn for answers to their burning questions about how to raise their daughters not only to speak both their languages, Spanish and English, but also to be very proud of their Latino raíces. While we know a lot of you have been withRead More ...

I posed the following question on our Facebook page last week: Do you think it’s rude to speak the minority language with your children when you’re around people who don’t speak it? What do you do? These are a sample of the first responses we got: I kind of new what to expect, but I was still curious to get a feel for how you deal with this situation which doesn’t seem like a big deal when you have babiesRead More ...