I love the sound of Spanish in all its forms.

As spoken by a resident of Madrid, Mexico City, San Juan, Puerto Rico, the South Bronx, or East Los Angeles.

According to Ehlion Language Consultancy, “Spanish is the official language in 21 countries around the world… In the Americas alone, 19 countries speak it.” 

There is a lyricism, sometimes guttural, often musical, coming at me at 100 words a minute one moment, and in other moments a smooth, almost soft sound that could rock me to sleep.

I wish I could understand it fully instead of catching fragments of phrases or words—my loss.

Not because I believe it to be my mother tongue (some call it the conqueror’s language), but because I missed so many stories from my grandmothers, my mother, and my father, and from the women and men I’ve met in all the cities I’ve lived in, where their primary language was a version of Spanish.

I’ve told this story so often that I can recite it in my sleep. It’s the one about my second-grade teacher, a nun at St. Rita’s Parochial School in the South Bronx, telling my parents to stop speaking Spanish to me at home so I could better grasp the mother tongue of America.

“This is America, and in America, we speak English.” 

And my parents, my Puerto Rican father and my Dominican mother, did what any migrant or immigrant to America did; they stopped speaking Spanish to me. If I remember correctly, they did this to every one of the siblings who came after me (I being the oldest). 

The impact was that by eighth grade and graduation, I was unable to speak Spanish, the language of my parents, their siblings, and their parents.

I am trying to remember whether I resisted by sneaking in a viewing of a novella or two on Spanish-language television or by hauling the kitchen radio into my room to listen to the local Spanish-language station for its news and traditional music.

I think I want to remember it that way.

I remember hanging out with all the other kids at school and at home (2595 Third Avenue, Bronx), watching countless hours of cartoons and afternoon and Saturday morning shows, including The Lone Ranger, Rin-Tin-Tin, The Roy Rogers Show, The Little Rascals, and Howdy Doody.

The downside of abandoning my parents’ language was my inability to communicate with my grandmother, my father’s mother, who would take care of my siblings on Saturday mornings while I accompanied my mother to do the week’s shopping at Hearns, Alexander, the live chicken market, and A&P.

Like so many of her age, our grandmother never thought it necessary to learn American English because she lived with her children, who spoke Spanish, and was surrounded by a Spanish-speaking community.

The truth is, I loved learning American English from television.

As I grew older, through elementary and high school, I never felt it necessary to relearn Spanish.

My world outside my immediate family was one of American English, the language of this country’s settlers. There were no bilingual curricula in my world. Speaking with an accent or only in Spanish sets you up for ridicule or, worst of all, getting your ass kicked.

Of course, when I got to high school, there was a foreign language requirement, and I thought Spanish would be easy for me. Yeah, that didn’t work out well.

One day, Ms. Travieso scolded me, saying she couldn’t believe I was Puerto Rican (I’m half Puerto Rican and half Dominican, but the distinction didn’t matter much in those days). I was crushed by her admonishment that I spoke Spanish with an American accent, whatever that meant.

In the late sixties, when I entered my ethnic-pride stage and began brandishing the Puerto Rican flag (my mother would constantly remind me that I was also Dominican) while dancing salsa, I would shout a couple of Spanish slogans and think, hell, I’m standing up proud for my Islas Puerto Rico and República Dominicana. 

Until I was reminded in the mid-seventies, during a documentary shoot in Puerto Rico, that I was a fraud. A soundman on the shoot didn’t take kindly to my calling myself Puerto Rican.

“You were born in New York. You’re a Nuyorican, not a Puerto Rican.” And the fact that my mother was Dominican didn’t help my credentials.

At that moment, I felt as if the Puerto Rican flag had stabbed me.

A version of this condemnation comes from the descendants of the European settlers.

“You’re not an American because you weren’t born here,” or my favorite, “Where are you from?” It doesn’t matter that it’s evident in my American English response, “I was born in New York,” and in my second-best response, “I’m probably more American than you’ll ever be.”

My only regret is that I can’t say it in Spanish. That would F up their minds.

Contrary to the ignorance of those who maintain that only English (the American version) is spoken here, the truth is that there are upwards of thirty American English dialects. Many immigrants, now American citizens, still hold on to their home language while learning one of the thirty dialects.

Not because they don’t want to call themselves Americans, but because they know they are doing what every immigrant to this country has done throughout its history, adding their culture and language to the great stew that we are as a country.

The United States of America is more than the monolithic version many envision. Instead, we are a hearty stew of cultures and languages, with all its versions, that continue to give us so much as a country and a people united in one crucial vision: Todos Somos Americanos. We are all children of the Americas.