The scenes are as fresh in my mind as if they had happened today. 

The second-grade nun told my parents to speak to me only in English. 

This is America, and in America, we only speak English. 

Or Mrs. Travieso (Yes, that was her name), my Spanish teacher in my junior year at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. 

You speak Spanish with an American Accent. 

She didn’t say the words that followed in my head, but I could feel them. 

You should be ashamed of yourself. 

Then there was the soundman I hired in Puerto Rico when I produced and reported for a documentary on the 1976 Governor’s elections. 

You’re not Puerto Rican. You don’t speak Spanish, and you weren’t born here. (Allow me a slight paraphrasing.) 

He was right. 

“The perpetuation of the idea that Latinxs who don’t speak Spanish are less Latino/a/xs because we speak a different colonizer’s language carries with it an incredibly exhausting burden of insecurity and isolation. It relegates us to a stifling and incomplete identity, oscillating somewhere between American and Latinx but never quite reaching either side.” Justin Agrelo, “I don’t speak Spanish. Does that make me less Latinx?“

I was born in the South Bronx to a Puerto Rican father born on the island and a Dominican mother born on that island, and I didn’t speak Spanish, a colonizer’s language. 

I learned to speak not the English of England but a language that absorbed so much from the people who came from around the world and those born here.

Since first grade, the world around me was increasingly been an American-language one. 

Parochial school with an overwhelming number of descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants (Study the history of the South Bronx). 
2595 Third Avenue of the Patterson public housing projects, where the tenants were overwhelmingly Puerto Rican-born or their descendants and Black, many of whom were migrants from the South. 

My best friends were Mickey (second-generation Puerto Rican) and Skippy (Black American). 

I often joke about Skippy’s mother, Julia, teaching my mother how to cook American food. For a long time, I thought grits were a Puerto Rican dish. Most of my friends at home and school spoke American.

Television was my great language teacher, still in its infancy during the fifties (I was born in 1948). 

Landmark television taught me how to speak American and defined what and who is an American. 

I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Honeymooners, The Howdy Doody Show, The Lone Ranger, and Superman…. I was addicted to television. 

After school, I would rush home to turn on the black-and-white television set and gorge on whatever was on during the weekdays. 

Somewhere between the commercial breaks, I would do my homework. But I learned quickly how to watch television and do homework simultaneously. 

Weekend activities were divided between outdoor play with my friends and watching television. 

That television set was my window into a world beyond 2595 Third Avenue, a world often more interesting than the one I lived in.

However, something was wrong with that window, and I didn’t know then what it was and why. 

There was a filter that excluded not only the images of people of color but also their language and culture. 

I only heard the version of the American language spoken by my teachers, not by my neighbors with their accents, idioms, and slang. 

My worldview became defined by a school that taught us that my mother and father were, to put it kindly, immigrants at best and unwelcome at worst. 

You don’t speak like real Americans (Yeah, tell that to Puerto Ricans who have been U.S. citizens since 1917).

My identity was molded by my parents, who spoke of America as the promised land. My father insisted daily that he was not only an American but a patriotic one. 

No communism was running through his veins, only red, white, and blue (The Red Scare of the fifties and sixties). 

My mother, who had fled the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, wanted what every other immigrant wanted: to be American. 

I would be an American too. Even if many Americans I met would remind me that I wasn’t like them. 

How many times in my life have I been asked, "Where are you from?" Trust me, we all knew what they were asking.