As A Latina Child, I Refused To Speak Spanish. Here's What I'm Doing Differently With My Son.

As a little girl, whenever someone would speak to me in Spanish, I was adamant about responding in English. That’s not because I didn’t understand. I grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, learning how to speak English alongside my parents, who moved here from Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution. While my father picked up English from his co-workers on construction sites, my mother did her best to learn from books, TV and the occasional English class. My own education came from television, especially PBS shows like “Mr. Rogers” and “Reading Rainbow.”

By the time I entered kindergarten, English was my primary language. While I was already slowly rejecting my mother tongue, it wasn’t until second grade that I would truly begin to feel shame around it. Despite living in Miami, a bastion of latinidad and bilingualism, among school-aged kids, preferring to speak Spanish was seen as “lesser than,” “uncool,” a sign that you just weren’t “American enough.” In fact, there were a number of playground hierarchies going on in my hometown — I was also teased for my more Indigenous features, for being Central American, and called a “tira flecha” (arrow thrower). So while I still spoke Spanish with my non-English speaking family members, the internal rejection of my bilingualism, and even of my heritage as a whole, only grew.

Yazyth Norelius, founder of One of a Kind Interior Design in Denver, tells me she had a similar experience growing up. Born in Colombia and raised by a Panamanian mother in Miami, Norelius says she tried her hardest to only speak English and reduce her accent as much as possible.

“People with accents were considered ‘refs’ and were made fun of,” says Norelius. (At the time, kids in Miami would refer to