Mother Tongue

by Cristina Crocker-Escribano (United States of America)

Making a local connection Guatemala

I’ve always thought of Spanish as an on-again-off-again romance: the lifelong boyfriend whom I will never marry. I tell my sister this, and she laughs. “Story of my life,” she says. We were raised in Kentucky by a Colombian mother and an Anglo father. Like many hispanics raised in the US, we have a complicated relationship with our mother tongue. Growing up, our nightly conversations at the dinner table switched from English to Spanish to a glorious bastardization of both languages. Following the advice of a family friend, I have decided to take an intensive Spanish class in the western highlands of Guatemala. Upon arrival at the Lake Atitlán region, I marvel at the aquamarine lagoon, ringed by lush volcanic mountains, the longtime home of the ancient Maya. Fishermen in canoes throw nets into the shimmering water. Women wash their traditional clothing by the shore. Colorful fabric flaps damply between palm trees, and the deep-blue sky stretches on forever. “I feel like an outsider in Kentucky, but I’m too gringa among Colombians,” I confess to my Spanish teacher, Manuela, on the first day of class. We sit on a terrace, shaded by a palm-thatched roof overlooking the shining water. “Sometimes it is hard to know the difference between the Spanish language as a whole and the eccentricities of how my own family speaks,” I admit. Manuela nods her head. “My children feel the same way about Mayan Tz’utujil. They speak in Spanish with their friends, and when I speak to them in my native tongue they always talk back in Spanish.” Over the next weeks, Manuela gently corrects my grammatical errors. We spend the afternoons looking at the lake and discussing the connections between culture, language, place, and power. Language, she points out, is a living history of conquest, loss, and the blending of different cultures and ethnicities. After the first month of school, Manuela introduces me to her children. They are shy and polite when meeting me but quickly revert to chasing each other on the shore of the lake. They don’t need to talk, already fluent in the subtle language shared between siblings. I think of my own sister and the languages we share. I have always been self-conscious of the Spanish we speak, but isn’t this, too, telling of a particular history we share? The wedding of English and Spanish, with all its richness and inadequacies, is a narrative of dualities and contractions: our very existence.