El Español y Yo
by Edward Levenson
I leave the title untranslated because I wish to avoid the ungrammatical “Spanish and Me.”
My use of Spanish in my Latino teaching environment has been an adventure. A colleague of mine, Belinda Heidenreich, once remarked—or, perhaps, advised—that whereas she would never speak in a second language unless she were one hundred per cent sure of the correctness of her usages the complete opposite is true of me. What follows, among other things, are “whoppers” of mistakes I have made. In most cases, they are simply “jokes on me”; but once an ill-chosen word offended a colleague. I conclude the first part of this essay with an anecdote about a rather interesting Spanish mistake made by a non-Latino student—not a mistake of mine.
All of the coming names are pseudonyms; but, in calling the first student Yousef Ismail, I preserve the flavor of his Palestinian real name. He was sitting in the far left back corner of the room, when into class five minutes late walked Francisco Colon. Yousef waved to him across the room, greeting him with, “Francisco, ¿qué pasó?” Francisco smiled and waved back, whereupon I attempted a friendly correction: “Yousef, ‘¿qué pasó?’ [what happened?] is OK; but ‘¿qué pasa?’ [what’s happening?] would be better.” He replied, “I know, I know, but there’s no big difference.” “But there is a difference,” I countered. He repeated, “I know”; and he added a charming, but wrong explanation: “’Pasó’ is masculine, ‘pasa’ is feminine, so ‘pasó’ goes with Francisco.”
The offense I caused was when I greeted a female teacher as “mi amiguita.” I really thought that in using a diminutive of “amiga,” I was saying “friendly female acquaintance.” I understand that she could have taken the word that way. She, however, retorted that she was not my “girlfriend.” In this vein, I once made a terrible mistake in referring to a student as “mamacita.”
Rosa used to strike me as being very strong when boys started to mess with her. All she had to do was stare them down while raising her left forefinger. I asked her once whether she had brothers. “Yes,” she replied, “four to be exact.” “Well, that partly explains your strength,” I replied; and then, thinking I was expressing something like “Rosa is our young class mother,” I said, “Rosa es nuestra mamacita.” Rosa gave me an uncomfortable look, which I did not understand. A student many weeks later explained to me that “mamacita” connotes “hot ticket.”
To be sure, not all of my forays into Spanish are mistakes. Once I actually coined an original Spanish word that I had never heard before. I have to let an expert Spanish speaker judge just how exquisite, in fact, the word may have been. Juan was a young thirteen-year-old student newly arrived from Ecuador. Every morning he refused to push his hood back. I tried a different approach for days in succession in my attempts to enforce his compliance with the District’s no-hat policy. First, I stated the rule to Juan. I pointed to the hood the day after. The day after that I simply said, “The hood!” He shooed me off with his right hand. On the fourth day I said, “Juan, if the principal walks in, I’m in trouble”; and he replied, “That’s your problem!” I thought that I might subsequently have better luck in Spanish; and so, finding the word for “hood” in the dictionary, I next tried, “La capucha!”—but to no avail.
Now comes my tour de force. It was the sixth day. I looked at Juan, hooded as ever; and, from deep in the bowels of my subconscious, I uttered, “Capuchito!!!” Juan was stunned. With eyes blazing, he raised his voice, “Don’t call me that!!” I hadn’t expected any reaction from him at all, but I realized on the spot that he might have given me a new opportunity; and so he had. I said, “Of course, Juan, I won’t call you that again, but you have to take your hood off.” And he did, shaking his fist at me, “Don’t call me that any more!” To everyone’s surprise, when his hood was off, out flowed a beautiful head of long black hair over a newly-visible good-looking face. The girl to his right was so taken that she jumped up, put her arms around his head, and exclaimed, “Mira, está guapo!!! [Look, he's handsome].” Juan, embarrassed, squirmed from under her arms and sunk lower in his seat.
The next day he was not in class; and, then, he was absent for two whole weeks. I grew concerned, worrying that I might have precipitated some kind of emotional breakdown. But, in truth, he had simply gone on a trip to Ecuador. Lo and behold, first thing in the morning of the Monday of the third week, three students came rushing into my room saying, “Dr. Levenson, Capuchito is back!!!” At the beginning of our class a period later, Juan took his seat and upbraided me sharply. “I told you not to call me that”; and I had to protest to him that I hadn’t, for it was all his friends’ doing.
To this day, I am perplexed why the word upset him so much. A Spanish-speaking colleague actually suggested that he might have interpreted the word not as “little boy with the hood,” but as “little boy from the hood,” “hoodies” being a socioeconomic mark of identification. Another colleague, on the other hand, offered the ingenious analysis that Juan might have thought I said “capullito,” attempting to pronounce the “ll”s as “zh,” “capuzhito.” “Capullo” means “bud,” and “capullito” would mean “little bud.” But on another level the word can have, according to my 275,000-word Oxford Spanish dictionary, a very vulgar colloquial metaphorical meaning. Juan might have thought I meant, “Little dickhead!” I don’t have to stress here that there is a very important lesson about the need for much caution on the part of a person trying to express herself or himself in a second language.
I should well take Heidenreich seriously.
Edward Levenson is a social studies teacher at Edison High School. He participated in PhilWP Summer Institutes I and II in 2007 and 2008. Edward is indebted to his colleague Ms. Vicky Carrion for the reference to "capullo."