I had a terrible accent on yesterday.
I was speaking English with a thick Spanish accent. I paid little atention to the phonological properties I usually use. Boy am even scared I actually do sound like that when I speak English. I also realized that to really speak native like I must use some level of strain to achieve said effect. I don’t know, however, how much truth there is in that. It felt more natural to speak that way yesterday but perhaps today is another day and the accent I had on yesterday was just an easy way out for my brain to slow down work a tad.
There is a lot of recent research on bilingualism these days that I no doubt say so influenced by said research. I particularly like the one that says that bilinguals can concentrate more. This supports somewhat my previous comment because the research suggests we manipulate our brain in other ways than monolinguals do.
I was even apoligizing to David, author of Refried Gringo, about my English. I was at the Dandy del Sur and I found him there, like all times I pass by el Dandy del Sur. I like him. He represents a sector of Tijuana that, of what I know, no one touches upon to even dare suggest that we have a gringo population in Tijuana which lives in Tijuana. And they long ceased to be passerbys’. They live, work and have families, a story to tell, citizens or denizens which form the very fabric of our miliue. Yet they are incredibly absent from the intrahistoria, as Unamuno said, of the population. So I talk to him and see a little how the gringo population of Tj is doing. Even more surprising is that he frecuents a bar that is well known for the so called litterati of the town. These people of the Spanish letters who offer no measure of restraint in describing Tijuana or detail its wonders are bliss in ignorance as to what is in their immediate surroundings.
I love his tj anecdotes which mixes experiences suffered at the hands of opposing agents and faced with the government diatribes meddling in the everyday. He oftens describes how it is to live trying to serve two masters, the mexican and the american, and how this affects even family ties. His anecdotes blend in classic tj with an American perspective that paint a landscape I can easily traverse across it.
This linguistic barrier is impenetrable and it is one of frontiers we tijuanenses seldom succeed in crossing over. Much has to do with the stupid nationalism that impreginates the mexican ens. I read in some literature blogs that we even have a body of mexican English literature, some as far as Monterrey. I suppose that to acknowledge said literature as mexican is deemed an offense. I hope this sort of mentality is on the decline. It forms a current of thought that is inalienable from the stream of conciousness of México, in particular a body that is ours, we from the northern states.
bilingual, Tijuana, Gringos