Becoming Fluent in Spanish Was a Reclamation of My Identity

"No sabo" is an incorrect way of saying "I don't know" in Spanish. It's also become an increasingly popular term that's used to describe Latine folks who aren't fluent in Spanish. And while the term might be a humorous play on the trickiness of conjugating irregular verbs like "saber," the shame that often accompanies not being able to speak the language of your parents is anything but a joke. I should know. For many years, I was a "no sabo" kid. And I hated it.

As a second-generation Nuyorican, I grew up surrounded by Spanish. My mother worked a lot, and that meant my sister and I spent the majority of our time with our grandmother. She'd speak to us in fluent Spanish, but we developed the habit of answering back in English. It was partially because we didn't know the proper conjugations of the words, but also because we were discouraged from trying by the way our elders responded to our attempts.

You see, very early on, we learned that if we made mistakes in our pronunciation or in our conjugation, we were made fun of. For an adult, a little cajoling might not seem like a big deal; but as a child, it filled me with so much shame and embarrassment that I simply refused to try to speak Spanish.

My father actually went through a similar experience, not with my grandparents, but with our relatives in Puerto Rico. He grew up speaking Spanish as a kid, but my father never developed the fluency he would have liked. For many of us second- and third-generation Latines, this is an uncomfortable reality. We might feel a strong connection to our ancestral cultures and homelands, but lack the ability to truly embrace our identities fully. This is especially true of Puerto Ricans.

The French King Charlamagne famously said, "To have a second language is to possess a second soul." However, not knowing Spanish as a kid felt like I was cut off from a piece of my soul. I'd listen with envy as my Dominican and Ecuadorian friends seamlessly switched back and forth between English and Spanish, and I'd feel like an impostor. I'd listen to reggaetón and salsa and feel ashamed that other Caribbeans seemed to understand my own cultural touchstones better than I did.

At some point, I started wondering: when did it become a thing that Puerto Ricans born in New York couldn't speak Spanish? At what point did we begin to raise our children to speak English as their first and only language? As with most aspects of the Puerto Rican identity, the answer is wrapped up in a history of colonization and immigration.

While Boricuas had been coming to the states in small numbers for decades prior, it wasn't until after 1945 that a large wave of Puerto Ricans migrated to the US to escape the island's agricultural crisis. When they arrived, they were met with xenophobia and the pressure to assimilate to American culture. And part of that assimilation meant giving up their language. The first wave of Latines to migrate to the states was mostly made up of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans who discovered that speaking Spanish in public painted a target on their backs, marking them as "other" and making it easy for them to be discriminated against. The trauma from these experiences was then passed down to their children, who were forbidden from speaking their cultural language or taught to prioritize English to avoid being ostracized.

We've even seen a resurgence in this kind of discrimination during the Trump years. In light of these incidents, speaking Spanish is akin to an act of resistance against oppression. For me, however, reclaiming my native language was less about fighting against oppression and more about becoming whole.

Ever since I was a kid, both my parents cultivated within me a love and appreciation for our island. Unlike other Nuyoricans I knew, I made pilgrimages back to the island every summer. But my lack of Spanish haunted me and kept me from experiencing the island the way I truly wanted to. My father and I would drive around searching for local spots, asking for directions only to be called "los Americanos" by locals. People would start conversations with me in Spanish and then, half-way through, switch to English for "my benefit." All these instances stayed with me for years, only exacerbating the shame I felt. But I was determined.

I kept trying to speak my language, forcing my way through conversations. My jobs helped, always surrounding me with Latines who seemed eager to help me learn. But I also went back to school and took up a second major in Spanish. When the opportunity came to take an intensive course and live in Spain for a month, I jumped at it. And then finally, the big step: I moved to Puerto Rico. For three years, I lived there, engaging with the locals, living like a local, and only speaking to folks in Spanish. My accent changed. My vocab improved. Finally, I could speak with confidence. And no, I didn't know every word. Yes, there were still gaps in my knowledge. But the more I spoke it, the more those gaps filled in and became less. The more I felt whole.

I realized, too, that I didn't always have the right words in English, so why did I force myself to achieve perfection in Spanish? I gave myself grace to fail, but never to quit. And slowly over the years, I finally reclaimed a piece of my identity that had been taken from me by societal barriers beyond my control. So, to all the "no sabo" kids out there, just know, there's still hope.

Miguel Machado is a journalist with expertise in the intersection of Latine identity and culture. He does everything from exclusive interviews with Latin music artists to opinion pieces on issues that are relevant to the community, personal essays tied to his Latinidad, and thought pieces and features relating to Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican culture.