I Grew Up Bilingual. I Also Grew Up Learning Which Bilingualism Was Acceptable.

I think I first became aware that people were reading me as white when I was really young. Probably early elementary school.

I had friends who were also very light-skinned, even blonde, but there were other little phenotypic things that made them read as more obviously Mexican and me less obviously Mexican. Kids notice those things. They might not have all the language adults have for them yet, but they notice.

And so there were these conversations on the playground that were probably, in some ways, normal kid conversations, but they also had this quality of testing each other.

“We had mole for dinner last night.”

“Do you know Juanes?”

“Do you listen to Arjona?”

And underneath it there could be this little bit of sass. This do you even know what I’m talking about?

And I remember feeling like I needed to prove it.

Of course I know Juanes. I have his CDs.

Of course I know Arjona.

Of course I know mole. I’ve made mole from scratch myself.

Looking back, I don’t even know how much of that testing was really coming from other people and how much of it was already happening inside of me. How much of it was my own insecurity saying: I need you to know that I belong here.

The complicated thing is that I am half white.

I am not rejecting that.

It is part of me.

It just isn’t all of me.

And so much of the white American cultural experience people sometimes assume from looking at me simply was not the world I grew up in.

I grew up in El Paso, Texas, in a city where Spanish was not an “extra language.”

Spanish was everywhere.

It was in stores and restaurants and family conversations and schoolyards. I had friends who lived literally across the border in Juárez and crossed into El Paso every day for school. I also had American friends who spoke mostly or only English.

My life moved naturally between both.

I went to Spanish immersion school. And when I say immersion, I mean Spanish was the academic language of much of my childhood. I learned to read and write in Spanish. I learned math and science and all the ordinary things children learn in school in Spanish.

English was also one of my native languages. But at school, English was almost the “extra” language, in the way Spanish is treated as the extra language for so many children in this country.

At home, Spanish was everywhere too. My mom. My grandparents. My cousins. Family life.

Then we would visit my dad’s side of the family for holidays once or twice a year, and suddenly everything was English because they were white and none of them really spoke Spanish.

So I did not grow up with one home language and one school language.

Both languages were mine.

They just did different jobs.

I am what linguists generally describe as a simultaneous bilingual. But that does not mean two languages develop identically, like two matching ladders being climbed at exactly the same pace.

Exposure matters.

Schooling matters.

Literacy matters.

Community matters.

Relationships matter.

What we use a language for matters.

I did not have words for any of that then.

I just knew I spoke English and Spanish.

“Speaks Spanish” did not actually tell you very much about us

This became much more obvious when I left my Spanish immersion school and went to Catholic middle school.

Suddenly there was a visible divide.

The kids who lived in Juárez and crossed over for school mostly sat together. They spoke mostly Spanish. Many of them were navigating an English-dominant school while still developing parts of their academic English.

The American kids mostly sat together and spoke English.

And suddenly I was in this strange position where I could sit at either table and also not completely belong at either one.

With the Juárez group, I spoke Spanish fluently. I understood the references. I understood the culture. But I did not live in Mexico. My Spanish sounded different in certain ways. I was much lighter-skinned than most of them. My face did not immediately read Mexican to people in the same way.

With the American group, I was American. I spoke completely native, unaccented English.

But culturally there were all these things that simply were not my lived experience.

Shows.

Food.

Family rhythms.

References.

Ways of living.

I understood them.

They just did not feel as instinctively mine.

There was another difference that I could not have explained then.

I had been educated academically in Spanish.

Many of my Spanish-speaking peers had not.

Some were more culturally Mexican than I was. They lived in Mexico. They spoke Spanish at home and socially all the time. But they had not necessarily been developing formal Spanish literacy and academic vocabulary through school in the same way I had.

So even among a group of kids who all “spoke Spanish,” our Spanish was not the same.

Someone might have much richer colloquial or regional vocabulary than I did.

I might have vocabulary for school concepts that they had never been taught in Spanish.

Someone might sound far more naturally Mexican than I did in one context while I had stronger formal literacy in another.

And all of us could simply be labeled “bilingual.”

The older I get, the more inadequate that word seems when we use it as though it tells us exactly what a person can do.

I was also learning which bilingualism was respectable

Growing up, there was a very keen awareness of the quote-unquote correct ways to speak both English and Spanish.

There was a huge emphasis on not speaking Spanglish.

Not using pochismos.

And that is funny to me now because one of the things I love most about being multilingual is how playful language can become.

When I am really comfortable with people, when I feel like someone sees me and understands both of my languages, the pochismos come out.

That is how my brain works.

I can speak entirely in English.

I can speak entirely in Spanish.

I can code-switch.

I can translate.

I can interpret.

But when I am relaxed, my languages loosen.

They play with each other.

There is language for this now. Translanguaging helps us understand multilingual people as drawing from a broader linguistic repertoire to make meaning, rather than imagining two completely separate monolingual systems taking turns inside one person.

But growing up, that kind of linguistic freedom belonged mostly in private.

With family and friends, it could be funny.

Out in public, there were rules.

Speak English correctly.

No accent.

Use the right grammar.

Do not throw in Spanish, because then it looks like you do not know enough English.

Speak Spanish correctly.

Do not throw in English, because then it looks like you do not know enough Spanish.

And there was real shame attached to getting that wrong.

Poor.

Uneducated.

Lower class.

Uncouth.

Too Indigenous.

Those were messages I remember hearing in different forms.

I was not only learning two languages.

I was learning a hierarchy of speakers.

College gave me words for things I had already been living

College was where I started getting language for experiences I had been having my whole life without knowing how to name them.

I read The Souls of Black Folk.

I read bell hooks.

I read Simone de Beauvoir.

I read Gloria Anzaldúa.

At the same time, I was taking advanced Latin American and Latino studies courses entirely in Spanish and studying conquest, colonialism, race, class, gender, culture, history, and whose stories get preserved and whose get pushed to the margins.

Feminist philosophy shifted something fundamental in the way I thought.

I started asking different questions.

Who is telling this story?

Who gets treated as objective?

Whose experience counts as knowledge?

Whose experience gets dismissed as emotional or anecdotal or particular?

What changes when we center the person who was colonized instead of beginning with the colonizer?

What happens when the perspective we have been taught to think of as “neutral” is actually a socially situated perspective that simply had enough institutional power to become the default?

And inevitably I started turning some of those questions toward myself.

Reading W.E.B. Du Bois on double consciousness opened something for me.

Du Bois described the experience of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

He was writing about a specifically Black American experience rooted in a history that is not mine, and I do not want to collapse his argument into my own.

But the mechanism of knowing yourself while simultaneously monitoring how you imagine you are being interpreted from outside?

That I knew.

Latina, while wondering whether everyone around me simply saw a white girl.

Bilingual, while hearing people assume I would not understand Spanish.

American, while feeling culturally foreign in spaces that were supposedly mine.

Mexican enough to understand exactly what someone was talking about, but apparently not Mexican enough to be believed without proving it.

And then there was Anzaldúa.

Borderlands/La Frontera gave me another way to understand the border itself.

Not just the actual border between El Paso and Juárez.

The linguistic border.

The cultural border.

The racial border.

The psychological border.

I had spent so much time experiencing the in-between as evidence that perhaps I had failed to fit cleanly on either side.

Anzaldúa helped me begin to see that the border space could be a place of its own.

And then a professor told me my English was not English enough

I still remember one professor.

A British priest.

He gave me a C on paper after paper and kept writing some version of:

“This is not technical Anglo-Saxon English.”

I cannot explain how deeply that hurt.

Because I had no fucking idea what he meant.

English was one of my native languages.

I was one of the most verbal people I knew.

I had a huge vocabulary.

I could wrestle with philosophy and literature and history in English.

I was doing difficult academic work in English.

What the fuck did he mean, this was not English?

That was the feeling.

I knew he could hear something in my writing that I could not hear myself.

But nobody had taught me how to hear it.

I had gotten similar feedback before.

Be more direct.

Stop beating around the bush.

Get to the point.

The strange thing is that I never experienced myself as beating around the bush.

To me, I was getting to the point.

Sometimes the kind of directness expected in conventional academic English felt almost abrupt to me.

I wanted to establish the relationships between ideas.

I wanted context.

I wanted to circle the meaning enough that the reader could see why I had arrived there.

To someone else, I was being indirect.

To me, I was communicating completely.

Years later, I can make educated guesses about what some readers may have been hearing.

I grew up in El Paso inside a speech community shaped by generations of Mexican American history, migration, bilingualism, and language contact. Chicano English is a legitimate variety of American English, not simply “bad English” or English spoken by people who failed to learn Standard English.

And a person does not even need to be bilingual to participate in the linguistic patterns of a community.

That matched something I already knew intuitively.

I know people from El Paso who speak very little Spanish and still sound unmistakably El Paso to me.

Language travels through communities.

At the time, though, none of that had been made explicit to me.

I was receiving correction without metalinguistic instruction.

Someone could tell me the product was wrong.

Nobody was showing me the pattern, where it came from, why it worked in one linguistic context and not another, or how to move intentionally between the two.

Meanwhile, my Spanish was exposing another gap

At the same time that I was being told my English was somehow not sufficiently Anglo-Saxon, I was taking advanced academic courses completely in Spanish.

And there I was having almost the opposite experience.

I understood the ideas.

I could have the conversation.

I could do the critical thinking.

But I had not been formally educated primarily in Spanish since roughly sixth grade.

So I could have this huge, mature, complicated thought and sit down to write it in Spanish and suddenly feel like I had rudimentary tools.

I could write a sophisticated multi-page essay relatively quickly in English.

In Spanish, the same level of thinking took me forever.

I would stop constantly.

How do I say this?

Is that actually the word I mean?

Is this a direct translation that makes perfect sense in English and sounds ridiculous in Spanish?

My thinking had kept developing.

Parts of my academic Spanish had not developed at the same pace.

And even that did not give me a clean “English strong, Spanish weak” story.

There were things that came more easily to me in Spanish.

Emotion.

Description.

Everyday life.

Certain kinds of intimacy.

There were thoughts where Spanish seemed to give me five ways to say something and English felt strangely blunt.

There was never a simple dominant-language story.

Both languages were mine. They had simply been educated differently.

There was another thing nobody knew about that student

As an adult, I know something else about her.

She had ADHD.

She had dyslexia.

She did not know it.

Nobody around her knew it either.

Which is complicated because I have always loved learning.

I was curious.

I was ambitious about what I understood.

I wanted rigor.

I wanted to know why.

I wanted to go deeper.

I was also not always a particularly good student in the conventional sense.

I could spend hours doing something that seemed to take the person sitting next to me a fraction of the time.

They could be listening to music, IMing somebody, doing three other things, and somehow turn in something neater and more complete than mine.

Meanwhile, I could be completely hyper-focused, working incredibly hard, and still forget an assignment.

Or copy something down incorrectly.

Or misread my own notes.

Or study the wrong thing.

Or know the content extremely well and somehow produce a messy paper that did not show everything I knew.

I knew I was working harder. The results kept telling me I was not doing as well.

And I did not have an explanation for the distance between those two things.

At the same time, there were things my brain did that seemed almost bizarrely easy.

I remember sitting in English class, hearing someone reference a line from the novel we were reading, and saying:

“That’s on page 52.”

And it was.

I had read the book once.

The teacher had taught it for years.

I could remember where things lived spatially on a page. I could make connections between ideas that other people had not noticed yet. I could become completely consumed by something I wanted to understand.

I am not saying that to turn neurodivergence into some magical superpower.

I am saying there were very real difficulties and very real strengths.

The difficulties were much more likely to become the story.

Looking back, I also wonder how much Montessori helped me without any of us realizing that it was helping me.

Movement.

Manipulatives.

Visible order.

Sequences.

Concrete representations.

Choice.

The ability to work through something rather than receiving everything in one format.

I wonder whether some of those structures functioned as accommodations before anyone knew I needed accommodations.

And I wonder whether they helped me develop enough strategies that, when I moved into more traditional schooling, I could compensate well enough that the underlying difficulties were easier to miss.

I was successful enough.

That is not the same thing as being supported.

Again and again in my life, I was enough of something to make the support I actually needed harder to see.

I also internalized the hierarchy

This is where the story gets less comfortable.

When I left El Paso for college in New York, I was suddenly surrounded by mostly white, mostly monolingual people.

And all the things I had spent years feeling like I needed to prove suddenly became things that made me distinctive.

I spoke Spanish.

I knew the music.

I knew the food.

I knew what “real” Mexican food was.

I could tell who sounded fluent.

And sometimes I used that knowledge badly.

I remember sneering at what I thought was fake Mexican food.

I remember judging people’s Spanish.

I remember participating in those same authenticity tests that had made me feel insecure growing up.

Looking back, I think there was something powerful about finally getting to hold the measuring stick instead of constantly being measured by it.

And I used it.

Being hurt by a hierarchy does not automatically teach you how not to reproduce it.

Sometimes it teaches you exactly how the hierarchy works.

There is a cost to constantly watching yourself

Before I had language for any of this, that constant self-monitoring created enormous self-doubt.

How am I being read?

Am I too much?

Not enough?

Too Mexican here?

Too American there?

Too informal?

Too direct?

Not direct enough?

Too loud?

Too messy?

Too sensitive?

Too difficult?

There is a kind of exhaustion in constantly experiencing yourself from the outside.

And because belonging mattered so much to me, I learned to pay for it.

Sometimes the price was making myself smaller.

Sometimes it was tolerating things that hurt.

Sometimes it was laughing along.

Sometimes it was proving I could take the joke.

And sometimes it was becoming part of the same cycle and doing to someone else what had been done to me.

I do not think most of the people who hurt me were evil.

I think many of them were doing what had been done to them.

And I was doing some of the same thing.

That is one of the hardest things for me to understand about systems of harm:

You can be hurt by them and participate in them at the same time.

We dominate and feel dominated.

We judge and feel judged.

We exclude and ache to be included.

We learn that belonging has to be earned, and then we begin charging other people the same price.

It is exhausting.

It is suffocating.

Becoming a teacher changed the way I understood my own languages

The strange thing is that I do not think I fully understood my own bilingualism until I started teaching language.

I had internalized grammar long before I understood grammar.

Once I had to teach vocabulary, syntax, grammar, literacy, reading, writing, oral language, and language development intentionally, I kept discovering things about myself.

Things I had always said correctly but could not explain.

Things I had always said incorrectly and somehow felt were wrong but did not know why.

Rules I had absorbed unconsciously.

Rules nobody had explicitly taught me.

Places where Spanish influenced how I approached English.

Places where English influenced my Spanish.

Suddenly I had the metalinguistic tools I wish someone had given me years earlier.

I became a better writer in Spanish.

I became a better writer in English.

I became better at translation and interpretation.

I became more intentional about the ways I moved between my languages.

And I became much more suspicious of the idea that fluency means effortless perfection across every context.

Fluency can coexist with gaps.

It can coexist with searching for a word.

It can coexist with uneven literacy.

It can coexist with different registers developing at different speeds.

Fluency is not sameness.

Then I got to have some of the conversations I wish someone had had with me

When I later taught Spanish to majority-Black high school students, we talked about

language explicitly.

Not just vocabulary and conjugations.

Language.

Identity.

Code-switching.

Academic language.

Casual language.

What we say with friends.

What we say with grandparents.

What we might choose in an interview.

What we might choose in a classroom.

What we might choose around an authority figure.

Those conversations came up naturally because Spanish kept forcing us to ask:

Which Spanish?

The textbook would give us one word.

Someone’s family used another.

I might say, “You’re going to hear this more often in Mexico.”

Then somebody had heard a completely different word from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, somewhere in Central America, or Spain.

Vocabulary was never just vocabulary.

Language was geography.

Migration.

Class.

Race.

Indigenous history.

Colonial history.

Generation.

Power.

Language was history.

And because many of my students were Black, code-switching was not an abstract concept for them either.

My own borderlands language experience is not equivalent to the Black linguistic experience. The histories and racialization are different.

But learning about African American Language had given me a question that became increasingly important:

What if some of what gets labeled “incorrect” is actually systematic language variation that institutions have chosen not to value?

My students already understood the social expectations around language.

The language policing that I knew happened to many of them from loving parents, grandparents, and elders also happened at school.

It happened between students themselves.

They noticed who sounded “too proper.”

Who was “talking white.”

Who used language that was completely normal with friends but suddenly unacceptable around a teacher.

Those moments became natural places for us to revisit the same conversation.

What language are you choosing right now?

Why?

Who is your audience?

What are you trying to communicate?

What power exists in this situation?

What part of this is clarity?

What part is context?

What part is safety?

And what part might be an inherited message about which ways of speaking are worthy?

There is an important distinction here.

Families sometimes teach children to change their speech, demeanor, or presentation because they are trying to help them navigate racialized institutions or keep them safe.

I do not want to dismiss the love or fear underneath those lessons.

Sometimes adults are handing down survival strategies.

And survival strategies can still carry harm.

Something can be passed down lovingly and still contain a hierarchy.

Something can protect you in one situation and quietly teach you that some part of yourself is less respectable.

Over time, external policing can become internal policing.

You stop needing someone else to tell you that your accent is wrong.

Your grammar sounds ignorant.

Your Spanish is too mixed.

Your English is too Black.

Your body is too loud.

Your behavior is too much.

You start telling yourself.

And sometimes you start telling other people too.

Raciolinguistic scholarship has given me another way to think about this. It asks us not only to examine how a person speaks, but also to examine the expectations of the person doing the listening.

Sometimes the difference is not simply how someone speaks.

It is who people think is speaking.

That reaches right back into my own story.

What did people hear when they looked at me and heard unaccented English?

What changed when I started speaking Spanish?

What did someone hear differently once they knew I was American?

Or Mexican?

Or half white?

Or from El Paso?

I wanted my students to understand the language of power.

I did not want them to confuse it with the language of human worth.

“Correct” language means something different to me now

I still believe grammar matters.

Spelling matters.

Word choice matters.

Register matters.

Precision matters.

But to me, the first job of language is communication.

Can I get meaning from inside of me to you in a way you can understand?

Grammar, syntax, spelling, vocabulary, register, and other conventions can make that message clearer, more precise, more efficient, more digestible, or more useful for a particular audience.

Those are skills.

Skills can be taught.

Practiced.

Honed.

Strengthened.

They are not measures of dignity.

They are not measures of belonging.

Correctness is contextual. Human worth is not.

And I want students to know the prestige registers that give them access to institutions because those institutions are real.

I just do not want to teach them that institutional power proves linguistic superiority.

I want students to have more linguistic choices, not fewer versions of themselves.

Teach academic language.

Teach formal registers.

Teach professional communication.

Teach grammar.

And teach why.

Teach context.

Teach audience.

Teach history.

Teach students how to compare language without turning difference into hierarchy.

Teach the language of power without teaching them to despise the language of home.

I did not learn all of this because I was particularly enlightened

A lot of it came because I kept getting hurt.

During my first job as a lead teacher in a Spanish immersion school, I found myself inside the same dynamic again.

I worked with educators from different parts of Latin America and Spain.

I wanted so badly to belong.

And again there were jokes about how I spoke.

Comments that I would not understand something.

Moments where people laughed about something rather than including me.

I genuinely do not think most of these adults were trying to bully me.

I think they were having fun with their friends.

Intent and impact were simply not the same.

I was a brand-new lead teacher.

Young.

Overwhelmed.

Trying desperately to learn.

And instead of feeling socially held by the community around me, I increasingly felt lonely and insecure and outside of it.

The complexity is that I also had an extraordinary instructional coach, Susana.

She was one of those master teachers who seemed to have magic dust for everything.

Lessons.

Behavior.

Activities.

Classroom systems.

She knew what she was doing.

I learned enormously from her.

And even excellent instructional coaching could not completely compensate for feeling like I did not belong in the community where I was trying to become a teacher.

That experience changed the way I think about new-teacher support.

Competence does not erase the human need to belong.

Someone can have curriculum, feedback, coaching, expertise, and opportunities all around them and still struggle profoundly if the social environment continually communicates, even unintentionally:

You are not quite one of us.

I think this was also around the time I began understanding something much more uncomfortable about myself.

For a long time, when I felt excluded, my response was to try harder to get included.

I tolerated dynamics I should not have tolerated.

Sometimes I joined exclusionary groups instead of questioning the exclusion.

Sometimes I adopted the behaviors of the group because those behaviors seemed to be part of the price of belonging.

It took me much longer to ask:

Do I actually want to belong to a community that requires me to prove myself in order to enter?

There are other ways to relate to one another

It took years of learning for me to understand that domination, hierarchy, competition, and exclusion were not the only ways human beings could organize relationships and communities.

Black scholars helped me see things I had never been taught to see.

Latino and Indigenous scholarship helped me understand conquest, colonialism, language, culture, resistance, and histories that had often been marginalized, distorted, suppressed, or simply omitted from dominant accounts.

Feminist philosophy taught me to question who was centered.

Restorative practice gave me another way to think about what happens after harm.

Not pretending nothing happened.

Not deciding that one person is entirely good and the other is entirely bad.

Truth.

Impact.

Context.

Accountability.

Repair.

Relationship.

And the possibility of doing something differently next time.

That is also why Kaethe Weingarten’s work on compassionate witnessing resonates with me so deeply now.

Her framework helped me think about the difference between witnessing something without understanding what is happening, recognizing what is happening but feeling powerless to respond, and eventually becoming able both to see more clearly and to act with intention.

That feels remarkably close to my own journey.

There were things I experienced long before I had names for them.

There were things I participated in long before I understood what I was reproducing.

Awareness does not erase any of that.

Awareness did not change what had happened. It changed the choices available to me afterward.

I cannot control how everyone reads me.

I cannot undo every system that shaped me.

I cannot guarantee that I will never fall back into an old pattern.

But when I recognize the pattern, I have more choices.

I can reproduce it.

I can retaliate.

I can shame someone because I was shamed.

Or I can try something else.

More curiosity.

More truth.

More accountability.

More compassion.

More repair.

I spent a long time around systems that seemed interested in purity.

Correct language.

Correct behavior.

Correct identity.

Correct belonging.

I am much more interested now in repair than purity.

I think this is what I want students like me to know

If there is a student somewhere who feels anything like I did, I want them to know that true community and belonging do not require you to keep getting hurt in order to stay included.

Relationships are skills too.

We can learn boundaries.

We can learn repair.

We can learn how to recognize when something is hurting us.

We can learn how to ask for help.

We can learn to tell the truth about what is happening without needing to make ourselves helpless victims or everyone else villains.

People cannot help us if they do not see the whole picture.

We cannot help ourselves if we do not see the whole picture.

And I want that student to know something else.

Everyone brings something.

I do not mean that everyone has one secret talent they are destined to be better at than everyone else.

Sometimes what we bring is quieter than that.

A way of noticing.

A question nobody else thought to ask.

A particular kind of humor.

A story.

A language.

A connection between two ideas.

A way of making another person feel comfortable.

Some little charm that comes from being exactly the particular combination of experiences and mind and history that we are.

You do not have to outperform everyone around you for that contribution to count.

I think a lot of my work now is trying to become what I needed when I did not get it from others.

Not because I will always do it perfectly.

I won’t.

But I want to be peace.

I want to be kindness.

I want to be restorative.

Not because there has not been hurt.

Especially because there has.

No one label would have explained me

Looking backward, what strikes me now is how poorly any one school label would have captured me.

Bilingual.

Latina.

White-passing.

English proficient.

Simultaneous bilingual.

Neurodivergent.

Academically capable.

Struggling.

Every one of those can tell you something true.

None tells you what I actually needed.

None tells you that I could describe an emotion more precisely in Spanish while writing philosophy faster in English.

None tells you that I could understand a complicated argument in Spanish and still struggle to write it with the same sophistication.

None tells you that I could remember the exact page of a quotation while forgetting an assignment I genuinely intended to complete.

None tells you that I could be deeply ambitious academically and profoundly disorganized.

None tells you that I could be completely fluent and still need explicit language instruction.

None tells you that I could experience privilege because of the way I was racialized and still experience genuine cultural alienation.

None tells you that I could be included in one way and excluded in another.

That is why I have become suspicious of simple explanations for human beings.

“She’s lazy.”

“He’s disrespectful.”

“Her English is weak.”

“He speaks Spanish.”

“She’s white.”

“She’s Latina.”

“She’s gifted.”

“She’s struggling.”

Every one of those statements can contain something true and still miss almost everything important.

I think a lot of my life has involved being asked to become more legible to other people.

More obviously Latina.

More conventionally academic.

More linguistically correct.

More organized.

More easily categorized.

But legibility and belonging are not the same thing.

I am much less interested now in asking people to become easier for our systems to read.

I am much more interested in asking whether our systems can become better at reading the complexity people already bring.

I do not need one language to defeat the other.

I do not need one part of my identity to prove that another part belongs.

I do not want to become better at winning a belonging game where somebody else has to lose.

I want more connection.

More compassion.

More welcome.

More curiosity.

More room.

Less measuring.

Less proving.

Less comparing.

Less competing for legitimacy.

Less charging other people the price we once paid for belonging.

People say hurt people hurt people.

Sometimes they do.

But hurt people can also learn.

Hurt people can interrupt patterns.

Hurt people can repair.

Hurt people can become people who make another person feel safer than they once felt.

Maybe healing is not something we complete before we are allowed to contribute.

Maybe healing is something we practice together.

And maybe the question I want to keep carrying forward is:

Now that I can see more clearly what shaped me, what do I want to pass on?

Not the hierarchy.

Not the shame.

Not the measuring stick.

Something kinder.

Something more spacious.

Something that leaves more room for all of us to belong.

Sources & Further Reading

W.E.B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk. Particularly his discussion of double consciousness.

Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Particularly her work on border identity, Chicano Spanish, linguistic legitimacy, and living between cultural worlds.

bell hooks. Her work on power, education, voice, race, gender, belonging, and liberatory pedagogy.

Simone de Beauvoir. Her work in feminist philosophy and the construction of self and Other.

Research in feminist epistemology and standpoint theory on situated knowledge, social location, and whose perspectives are recognized as authoritative.

Ofelia García and Li Wei. Work on translanguaging and multilingual linguistic repertoires.

Research on simultaneous bilingualism and heritage-language development, particularly the uneven development of oral language, literacy, formal registers, and academic language.

Research on Chicano English and Mexican American English, including work documenting Chicano English as a legitimate variety of American English rather than learner or deficient English.

Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa. “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.”

Research and scholarship on African American English/African American Language as systematic, rule-governed language varieties and on code-switching, racialization, and language in educational settings.

Kaethe Weingarten. Work on compassionate witnessing, particularly the relationship among awareness, empowerment, witnessing, and meaningful action.