Isangel Acevedo

9/30/2022

My Two Worlds

If being in a school setting for most of my life has taught me anything it is that I don’t need to be perfect in anything even if it is expected of me and that I don’t have to please everyone. Coming from a Hispanic/ Latino family a lot was expected from me academically wise. There was really no room for failure at all. And that was pretty difficult sometimes considering that my worst subject in school was always math. No matter what grade I was in math was always something that I struggled at. Science used to be my favorite subject until one day in the 7th grade the teacher handed us, calculators, for the new unit that we were going to be covering. I no longer liked science after that one. It was like as if a longtime friend had brutally betrayed me. I was more of an ELA person despite the fact that I absolutely despised reading books from about ages 9 – 13 for no particular reason. I just didn’t want to do it. But I eventually found a great love for it and has become a great hobby of mine. Sometimes I find a book so good that I can’t put it down and I get so lost in it at night that all of a sudden, I don’t notice that the sun has started to shine. Or other times I read a book with an ending so sad and heartbreaking that has me rethinking my decision of even picking it up and reading it in the first place. Honestly, any and all heartbreak I have ever experienced was from reading something. The first time this happened was when I was in the 5th grade and I found out that Zayn was leaving One Direction. I don’t think I ever fully recovered from reading that lengthy Facebook post on the One Direction official page that had made the announcement. I sobbed for

hours. I don’t think I’ll ever get that little part of my soul back, and little, overly dramatic 11-year-old me acted as if the world was genuinely going to end. Growing up I spoke two languages, English and Spanish. Spanish was the first language that I spoke. I don’t exactly remember how or when I learned English all I know is that I started school and I learned it. I spoke English in school and Spanish at home. Any time I tried to speak to my parents in English they pretended like they couldn’t understand me just so that I could speak to them in Spanish, even though both of them, my mom more than my dad, speak and understand English perfectly fine. But that’s just it I only spoke Spanish I did not read it or write it until I was about 10 years old. I learned to read Spanish when I found a book titled “Un Grillo en Nueva York” which was the translated version of the book “A Cricket in Times Square” by George Sheldon that my mom’s teacher had given her as a gift and had been stored away with a bunch of other old things. And even though at this time I had a personal vendetta against reading books for no reason I enjoyed having my mom teach me how to read in Spanish, and how different letters puttogether made different sounds. Like how a double L in Spanish sounded like the letter Y in the English York ‘canyon’. I wouldn’t admit it back then, but I actually liked the story itself.Unlike many people that are the children of immigrant parents, I did not have a language barrier with mine because they spoke and understood English. This isn’t the case when it came to my grandma because although she has been living in the US for almost 40 years she still doesn’t speak or understand Spanish at all. So, whenever it was just the two of us out and about, I had to doall of the translating and explaining. One time we were grocery shopping, and everything was going great until we were ready to checkout and her card had declined for a reason unknown to me to this present day. After two more tries she was very confused as to why her payment wasn’t going through and in a very loud

voice she said in Spanish “Ask her why it’s not working” as she gestured to the cashier. The woman working tried to explain to me what happened, but my 6-year-old mind had no clue what any of it meant. That lady might as well have been speaking in some ancient alien language to me because all of her words went into one ear and out through the other. I remember feeling very anxious and nervous because I had no idea how to explain to my grandma what was happening. Nomy words and imagination. more than five minutes could have gone by of me trying to give her an explanation and, or a translation in a slight panic because she was getting frustrated and the people in line behind us were too. Another worker was called who was bilingual and the issue was then resolved, we went home and we never mentioned it or brought it up ever. I didn’t realize then how scary that must have been for my grandma because something involving her finances and money was having problems and she had no way to communicate, so many endless possibilities on what could have happened were probably racing through her mind, and the only thing I was truly worried about in the back of my mind was whether or not I would have to put my chocolate chip cookies back. One thing that I loved to do when I was smaller is that I loved to write and tell stories. Anytime that I would get a new journal or notebook one of the first things I did after borderline vandalizing it by writing my name on it with giant letters, is that I would write a story. 9 out of 10 times these stories were fictional, and something I completely made up. Very few times I would write about myself and things that I experienced. Of course, one besides me and occasionally my mom would read these but writing stories was one way that I loved to express my creativity. I really contradicted myself when I was younger because for some unknown reason reading books were my personal villain but at the same time, I also had to problem filling pages upon pages of

Something I never noticed until I got older is how differently people get treated when they aren’t exactly American, and they speak little English that was not very good or they didn’t speak it at all and how easily they can be taken advantage of. A few years ago, one of my aunts was visiting from The Dominican Republic and the one thing that she wanted to do most during her time in New York City, like any other tourist, she wanted to visit and see Time Square. It wasn’t difficult to tell that she was a tourist seeing how she stopped every three minutes to take a picture of something. In this area street vendors are all over the place and my aunt wanted to buy one of those I heart NY T-shirt. So she went to one of those tables on the edge of the sidewalk and went tobuy one. The guy working had attempted to give her less change than what he needed to give her and since my aunt barely understood anything the whole and when she came back my mom noticed what had happened, she asked how much change he gave her after she handed him a hundred-dollar bill, she was not going to let slide. My mom angrily made her way over to him and demanded that he give my aunt all her change and when he saw that my mom was not intimidated or scared, he gave up. Whenever I told my friends on school that I knew how to speak Spanish a lot of the reactions that I got were things along the lines of “wow that’s so cool” or “how do you say … in Spanish?” One of my favorite memories that I have from elementary school was when I taught my friends how to say curse words in Spanish and I thought that it was the funniest thing in the world. I also thought it was absolutely hilarious when one someone would ask me what something meant or how to say something in Spanish and I would tell them something completely different. This was kind of an ongoing joke with me and the other kids that also spoke Spanish because only we knew what we were telling other to say really meant. We would tell people to say the most outlandish and things that we could think of at the time. 3

Being bilingual has taught me many things in life, like how to get out of a conversation when a random person decides to start one up with me on the train. I simply pretend to not understand English. One thing that my mom was adamant about was me knowing culture. When I was younger, I never understood why it was so important to her for me to know my background. But growing up I met many people that also had ethic backgrounds and knew nothing about it or even how to speak the language. And I am truly grateful that my mom never let me driftaway from who I was and where I came from even though I was born in the US. The only music that would ever play in my home growing up was Spanish music like Bachata, Merengue and Reggaeton. The moment music starts playing on a Saturday morning that’s when everyone in the house knew that it was time to clean. My mom even tried to teach me to dance to the music but unfortunately that was one of the things that never stuck with me. To this very present day I am still a horrible dancer.