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When I wish to address a child, a lover, or one of my many small pets, I use Spanish, a language filled with affection and familiarity.
The language of our antepasados, those who came before us, connects us to our center, to who we are, and directs us to our life-work. Some of us have been lost, cut off from this essential wisdom and power. Sometimes our parents or grandparents were so harmed by a society that treated them ill for speaking their native language, they thought they could save us from that hate by teaching us to speak only English. Those of us, then, live like captives, lost from our culture, ungrounded, forever wandering like ghosts with a thorn in the heart.
Didn’t she understand that speaking another language is another way of seeing, a way of being at home with one another, of saying to your listener, “I know you, I honor you. You are my sister, my brother, my mother, my father, my family.” If she had learned Spanish—or any other language—she would have been admitting, “I love and respect you, and I love to address you in the language of those you love.”
