A Multinational Brain:
ESPAÑOL
As a five-year-old boy living in a middle-class household in Ciudad Obregon,
Sonora Mexico, I always thought of myself as a lucky boy because I was in a better
condition than the homeless people I would often see in the streets. As I mostly recall the
early beginnings of my childhood, I was joyful, creative, and always eager to learn
things. I became literate through my mother’s teachings since she was a housewife
committed to my brothers and myself. I began my literacy adventure in Mexico, a
country that holds the largest Spanish-speaking population in the world and was my
home until early adolescence.
My earliest thoughts on reading and writing involved the pressure my mother
placed in me learning the difference between vowels and consonants and accents and no
accents. I later received my first set of books, a small 20-volume Disney encyclopedia
for kids in Spanish. It had numerous interesting facts about the most random things in
the world from nuclear energy to types of spiders but was presented in a way that kids
can relate to it. This was the first time in my life that I was interested in reading the
content of a book. I was beginning to immerse myself in the Spanish language through
reading and writing at this time and I remember that going to school was beginning to
seem more interesting. At this point, language and literacy were identical to me because
I was always surrounded by people who communicated the same way I did.
This is an example of a poster in an elementary school in Mexico. It is a message to all
parents to attend a meeting and it reminded me of the letters my teacher would dictate to
us for our parents.
ENGLISH
I was a Mexican teenager living in southern California when my skills in literacy,
language, and culture became challenged, as I was to immigrate to the United States with
a very slim knowledge of the English language. I was directly immersed in Englishlearning classes with little use of the Spanish language inside the classroom. Because of
contemporary laws regarding bilingual education in California, I was unable to make a
smooth transition to the English language. I was directly immersed in a language I could
barely understand. As I recall the extensive feeling of frustration I felt, I can easily say
my early months in the United States were tough in the sense that I was no longer
confident in myself when it came to academics. At times, I had to even depend on some
classmates to translate what the cafeteria lady was trying to tell me. I remember that I
would make very basic mistakes due to my confusion of languages from misspelling to
misusing words in speech. For the most part, my introduction to the English language
was both traumatizing and tiresome as I had to learn new material in English and I also
had to learn the actual language.
As my classes got better and I became fluent in English, I began to feel more
confident about myself. However, even after a couple years of studying and living with
the language, there were still come words that I had difficulty with. The following
presents the top three most frequent mistakes in writing that I would make regarding my
transition to an Anglophone environment.
1. Whether or not, the weather will be cold tomorrow.
I always questioned why some English words had to be so similar. I made
this mistake usually in high school and it took me a while to really remember
the difference.
2. Is it too much money to go to that concert?
How am I using the word? Should I put an extra ‘o’ in there or not? It was
probably until freshman year of high school that I learned this rule of thumb.
3. Its problem goes far beyond that because it’s not usually taken into account.
When should I put the comma on the top, as I would often call the apostrophe?
FRANÇAIS
In my last year of high school, I became interested in the French culture and
language largely because I would encounter French influence in a lot of academia. I
started to learn French and when I got to college, I studied it more intensely until I
decided to spend a semester in Lille, France. The experience was something I had never
experienced before. Oh wait, I actually have. Except this time, it was much less
traumatizing as I had studied the language intensely before living in the foreign country.
I chose to learn French and was not obligated to learn it from nothing. The foundation I
had in the French language before travelling to France was nowhere comparable to that of
English in America. It was the level of confidence that I had in the language what made
learning French much more easier.
While in France, I had an interesting conversation with a French girl that made
me realize how complex my notion of languages has gotten. I cannot recall the topic we
were discussing but I remember describing a dangerous moment in my life. I used the
term “peligreux” which is not an actual word but a combination of peligro (dangerous in
Spanish) and dangereux (dangerous French). This was a mistake I made while speaking
in French with the girl and I had not noticed my clumsy mistake until she looked at me in
a funny way. This comes to show that my literacy has been changed in so many ways
throughout the course of my life that I’m now mixing Spanish and French!
FRANGLAIS? SPANGLISH? FRASPANOL?
Why is this happening? Is there something wrong with the way I am learning
these languages? Should I even complicate my life by learning all these ways of saying
the same thing? I would have never thought I would be studying in France when reading
the Disney encyclopedia in Spanish after class. Life in Mexico made me concentrate on
my community, largely influenced by my school. I was more or less content with
learning how to read and write and it was a fun experience for me because I was making
sense of the writing all over me. The challenges of bilingualism overwhelmed me in
California but also allowed me to expand my knowledge. It almost feels as if you have
two brains, two different lives, two different ways of thinking, and, more importantly,
two different ways of communicating. As I learned to differentiate the door from la
puerta, I was using my brain in ways I had not used it before. The mixture of languages
was something I had to watch myself for and something my parents always frowned
upon. The true challenge, however, was when I was to leave the Spanish and English
world in my head to concentrate on the French world. As soon as I immersed myself in
the French language, I noticed that it was difficult to think in a third context but I soon
overcame this challenge and found it even easier to learn French because I would apply
my Hispanophone and Anglophone techniques to understand French better. Because of
similarities between the three languages, some of the things I would read or listen in
French I could relate to other concepts and meaning in Spanish and English. I began to
use my first two languages as tools to improve my third language.
As I reached adulthood, these three languages revolutionized the way I thought
about literacy, language, culture, and communication. As I developed into adulthood, I
experienced numerous literacy challenges that tested my ability to communicate with
very different people. To me, literacy is a complex multilingual institution that rests in
my brain in three different forms. Multilingualism causes problems, but it gives you the
best tool one can ever have: the grace of understanding and relating to people that are
strikingly different from you. Learning from them and their language is a benefit no one
will ever take away from me.
I asked my friend Andrea, a graphic design major at SCU, to compose something that
encompasses my multiculturalism. She came up with this.