When it comes to languages it seems to me rather curious the stance some people take. I remember as a child how embarrassed I was to speak Spanish. I recall how one day we came to my grandmother’s in TJ and how, in spite of being raised by her, and just only two years before all I spoke was Spanish I claimed not to. English was my de facto lingua. Later, as I grew I did everything in my power to disguise my Spanish accent to the point of only thinking, eating, walking and peeing in English.

However, we are products of our environment and the oppressive years in California, oppressive for me because I lived in such an environment, Spanish was worst than the black plague, it gave you away as a foreigner, in your own country. Unknowingly we youth, as we grew older resorted to a much vile new form of language that everyone from México to Spain disliked, much as Estuary English in London. Spanglish was only spoken then by pochos. Later it became a badge of sorts of pride, to distinguish our unique culture, because we had two cultures, we had things that couldn’t be expressed in neither language except by code-switching.

Spanglish is now more popular than ever to the point of having a translated piece of art like Don Quixote, curious how the world changes.