This is an excerpt from by book. https://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Always-Here-Americans/dp/1558859136
The kids playfully running back and forth in front of my
grandmother’s adobe house was a strange and puzzling
sight. It was a blazingly hot El paso afternoon in 1956, but
the boys and girls seemed oblivious to the weather and were
enjoying games of tag and hide and seek. Accustomed to Los
Angeles summers, El Paso’s heat seemed to me unbearably
infernal.
I was a scrawny six-year-old left in the care of my maternal grandmother, Sara Gándara Real y Vásquez. She rarely
smiled and was consistently aloof. Being alone with her in
the house on San Antonio Street was disquieting. My mother
was born in that house in the city’s Second Ward, or Segundo
Barrio, as Mexicans called it. The neighborhood was the common point of arrival for emigrating Mexicans.
A few minutes earlier, drawn by the children’s laughter, I
stepped outside hoping I would be invited to play. But then I
quickly drew back. The kids were speaking Spanish! I recognized the language because my grandparents and parents spoke it. But the children’s rapid-fire loud Spanish was practically incomprehensible. Our frequent family outings to
nearby Ciudad Juárez exposed me to Spanish, a language I
found normal in a Mexican city. But these Spanish-speaking
kids were in the United States. Why did they persist in using
the language of Mexico? Had they chosen not to speak English, or could they only speak Spanish?
I retreated into my grandmother’s rambling house and
stared at the kids laughing and shouting. I vaguely identified
with them because they looked like me. But the language barrier made them unapproachable.
“Why don’t you go play with the kids?” my grandmother
asked in a tone that struck me as more of a command than a
suggestion. I thought of telling her that I didn’t speak Spanish. She always addressed me in English, likely because she
knew my Spanish was sketchy, at best. Still, I decided she
would think less of me had I told her I didn’t speak more than
a few words of Spanish. So, I replied that it was too hot.
I meekly said I would much prefer to stay indoors and
watch the kids. She walked off without saying anything.
Plainly I had displeased her. As a monolingual English
speaker, I realized that not speaking Spanish had denied me
the chance to escape my grandmother’s dreary living room.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 