Personal Narrative: Growing Up As A Latina
Growing up as a Latina and a girl I was constantly reminded of the differences between me and other people around me. Firstly, belonging to a minority group that is always seen as exotic or foreign, becomes tiring and overwhelming because you constantly feel like you don’t belong to the society you live in. It is tiring because I often hear people talking about how they went to a Mexican restaurant and had amazing food or how they love tacos but the tacos they associate as tacos have hard shells. In reality, the food they sell in restaurants and the hard-shell tacos aren’t authentic, not even remotely close to being authentic but that is what people see as Mexican food. Sure, the grand majority of the restaurants are owned and operated by people
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I grew up speaking Spanish as my first language and did not learn English until I entered school so it was and still is normal for me to speak Spanish at home, with my parents and even with some of my friends, but as a young child being told by an adult that you should not speak your language because “this is America, we speak English,” was extremely hard on me. I remember this one time in middle school when a friend and I went out to a restaurant with her mom after school and the couple next to us kept staring at us the whole time while we were eating. My friend’s mom did not speak English very well so she would prefer to speak Spanish to us, making sure that she was understood as well as make us practice our Spanish. To me this was normal and not at all weird, it was something I did on a daily basis, but the couple next to us did not seemed to think that way. They kept taking glances at us, but not the discrete glances you take when you look at someone you’re crushing on and are trying to avoid being caught. They stared at us with a “how dare you?!” look, the only thing they didn’t do was stand up and downright accuse us of being witches. I can still remember their derogatory remarks and hurtful tone directed at us when they were walking out of the
I grew up speaking Spanish as my first language and did not learn English until I entered school so it was and still is normal for me to speak Spanish at home, with my parents and even with some of my friends, but as a young child being told by an adult that you should not speak your language because “this is America, we speak English,” was extremely hard on me. I remember this one time in middle school when a friend and I went out to a restaurant with her mom after school and the couple next to us kept staring at us the whole time while we were eating. My friend’s mom did not speak English very well so she would prefer to speak Spanish to us, making sure that she was understood as well as make us practice our Spanish. To me this was normal and not at all weird, it was something I did on a daily basis, but the couple next to us did not seemed to think that way. They kept taking glances at us, but not the discrete glances you take when you look at someone you’re crushing on and are trying to avoid being caught. They stared at us with a “how dare you?!” look, the only thing they didn’t do was stand up and downright accuse us of being witches. I can still remember their derogatory remarks and hurtful tone directed at us when they were walking out of the