I Don't Speak Our Language

I Don't Speak Our Language - Emily Ramirez (A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, Eleventh Grade)

I was five when I met my extended family for the first time. It was March of 2014 and I

was glad to miss a day of Kindergarten if it meant flying in a plane, sucking on hard candy, and

peering out windows over the clouds I had only ever been under. When I told my teachers I

would be on the “other side of the world,” they dismissed the excitement with a laugh and sent

me off to play, which for me, consisted of drawing circles in the sand and waiting for recess to be

over.

It was the first family trip I remember taking. My brother Kyle was 14 and fresh in high

school, while my sister Kate was finishing elementary school. My mother had just turned 42, and

my father was creeping up on 53. My mother’s hair back then was much shorter than it is today,

it was waved and curled at the back with tres leches layers, and her grays were not so visible that

she needed to dye them. She worked at an insurance company that paid well, but not well enough

to afford more than the necessities per week. My father worked nights doing customer service

over the phone for DIRECTV. I usually didn’t see him until late in the evening when he would

emerge for a glass of water and plop down on the couch, watching the latest soccer games and

falling asleep in front of the television while doing so. I didn’t have a bedtime, but when it was

time for me to sleep, I procrastinated with Hannah Montana and my sister, who frequently

battled the dread of going to school the next day.

. The day of the flight, we hustled all our luggage. Kate and I brought our matching

zebra-striped and pink-handled Victoria’s Secret bags while Kyle packed his film camera and a

singular backpack he managed to store a week's worth of clothing in. My parents brought just

one dull gray suitcase they shared. At the airport, we walked through PBI’s terracotta tiled floors,

getting our passports stamped and finding the nearest water fountains where we could fill up our

bottles. My passport portrait, a small 2x1 snapshot of a toddler with puffy eyes and a green and

pink knitted sweater, has not been updated to this day.

Kyle had been filming a series he decided to make about me, entitled EMILISM. A film

student and comedian at heart, he followed me around the house with a camera, prompting me

lines about how I was going to save the world with “magic powers” I gained from a book and

how the dogs we were fostering were secret FBI agents looking to put away the evil in the world.

EMILISM was the embodiment of a docuseries that should have never gotten a renewal but

somehow managed to get the green light. The three-season series documented my life as a

toddler who could barely push out her r’s and was obsessed with fashion jewelry. However, this

time we were filming the movie instead of the typical episode, where we would be flying to the

other side of the world for an adventure and reunion with a family that, for months prior, I did

not even know existed. He filmed all the nuances in the airport, like the strangers reading the

newspaper or the pilots boarding their plane. The footage from that day has been lost, but the

final cut that made it into EMILISM: the movie featured Coldplay’s viral hit Viva La Vida.

Church bells rung, and living life as a family, tracing their roots became an aesthetic, a drive for

identity, and proof that I come from something other than lonely days and empty nights.

For my mother, particularly, it was following the continuous tug on her ankle that

reminded her she left her family in a country like Venezuela, where the electricity is turned off at

eight and the poorest of the poor are thankful they are dead. She’ll never reveal if this is how she

truly feels, or if the part of her that married the el-salvayorker who never quite embraced the idea

of cultural roots, who made pasta instead of empanadas,--if this part of her that she once found

fulfilling is looking for something more, something familial and connected through DNA.

For my father, this trip symbolized returning to the place where he rescued my mother. A

place where he worked hours at a dentist equipment insurance company, all because a coworker

back in the city told him there was opportunity--an opportunity away from the city allegedly

filled with those--to make a lifestyle. His concepts of family are more contemporary; you choose

who you associate yourself with, and you reject anyone who barely acknowledges your

existence, even if they are responsible for it. And while we did not know it at the time, this

polarizing definition of family would tear ours apart, leaving each of my siblings and me to find

our own interpretation of the six-letter word.

For Kyle, Kate, and me, traveling to another country was a neutral experience. We

couldn’t complain about being put on a plane and traveling outside the land of red, white, and

blue patriots. We also wouldn’t complain because our mother had instilled in us that this was our

family--and that our blood is the reason we throw our arms around one another, even if we didn’t

know their names.

We arrived at night. It was dark. I was tired and hanging on my dad’s hip. We walked

through the smooth airport floors with little outside noise besides our feet and the wheels of our

suitcases. Baggage claim is a one-way belt monitored by just one guard on his fifth cup of coffee

for the night. He didn’t say much but nodded his head as we collected our bags.

The occasional fluorescent light hung over our heads as we made our way to the parking

lot. There are fewer lights in Venezuela. Aside from the airplane lights and lit “Exit” signs, the

common areas were dark. Once we stepped foot through the last stretch before the parking lot,

we were bombarded by loud shrieks, yells, and claps for our appearance. Men, women, and small

children all gathered in two separate lines as we walked down the lanes.

To this day, I have no idea who those people were. I do not know if they were affiliated

with our arrival--though it would be peculiar for strangers to welcome other strangers with such

open arms. We take a bus to a local hotel, except these hotels are not in buildings and isolated

buildings, but are disguised as conventional homes with a simple wooden door for entry

The hotel room was small. Everything was white: The tiles (with the exception of the

black grout between them), the bedsheets, the sink, and even the furniture glistened like they

were straight out of Spongebob’s SB-129 episode, where Spongebob had traveled to the future

and everything that once had color was replaced with a reflective surface. There was a large

mirror that bordered the room, large enough that the entirety of the other half of the room was

displayed in one viewing. The shower, a 3 x 7 column, allowed my mother and me to wash our

hair. As we slept, cold, wet puddles formed down our backs.

When we arrived in Caracas, we located the home my mother grew up in-- la casa de

Castellano. A small, eggshell white block that looks like a hybrid of a home and a convenience

store. The front door was mesh and didn’t need to be unlocked to enter. To my surprise, the home

was a convenience store. The family living inside--my family living inside--sold coffee, milk, ice

pops, and other grocery items during the day.

Upon entering the home, we were greeted by my mother’s mother, my grandmother, who

embraced my mother in a tight hug.

“Hola, hija.”

She had my mother’s bright yellow eyes, the ones that failed to be passed down to my

siblings and me. Her hair was grayed like the coat of dust that covered the floors, and sometimes

when I look at my mother today, I am reminded that age is inevitable and cannot be run from.

The two-bedroom, one bathroom home housed my great-grandmother, a slender, frail woman

who wore long, thin gowns and walked about the house. Her face was sunken into her

cheekbones, and would occasionally stop to look at the walls or peer out the backyard, a

dirt-patch with chickens, five dogs, and ducks that yelled for food every chance they got.

As my great-grandmother continued to walk the halls, I stood idle in the common area.

The floor was cement and scratched with what I can imagine to be a combination of overgrown

dog nails and rearranged plastic furniture.

She had entered the room and looked at me with her dark, brown eyes. Her mouth

mumbled words that the wires in my head could not decipher. I signaled to her to repeat with

raised and confounded eyebrows, maybe I could hear a “donde” or “mama” in her words but

there was nothing.

I outstretched my hand, all five of my chubby fingers raised in the air.

“Wait here.”

I left the room and never came back. That was the first and last time I spoke to her.

She died two years later.

My mother had a difficult time processing the grief. She sat at our dining table, holding

her head in her hands while she scrambled to call her sisters. This was the first time I had

experienced a family member dying, but I did not grieve. I felt guilty for this, guilty that I was

not crying like my mother, and that the one conversation I could establish a premise for grief, I

left waiting in a room.

When my mother immigrated to the United States in 1997, she was introduced to

American assimilation. “El Sueño de Americano,” except now the American dream was just

apartment units in Ft. Lauderdale and pillows wrapped in plastic, and another layer of plastic

underneath that one for travel and storage. Her dreams of “one nation under god” and “liberty

and justice for all” replaced the ones of her cooking arepas with her mother by her side or feeling

the waves of the river comb through her hair with her sisters. The opportunities may have been

scarce, but she was home, and that was all that she wanted. At this point, she had no other

choice; in the United States, she had to learn to dream in English.

If it were not for working in the same insurance building, my father would not have spent

days, nights, weekends, and weekdays helping her learn the language after they got married. He

enrolled her in night classes with grammar sheets as her homework, and landing a job as her final

exam.

My mother is good with numbers. Not much of a calculus woman--understandably--but

she found reading between statistics and numbers interesting.

“They tell a story.” She would tell me.

I wondered what story they told? Were they once part of a family and added to another’s? Did

they move far away from their home on the number line, and you wonder about their journey on

the way? Do they tell an admirable adventure that both you and your coworker can understand

because there’s no translation for numbers?

My mother never spoke to us in Spanish after Kyle was born. I was left defenseless

against my extended family when they raised their eyebrows and shot looks at my dad for not

teaching us the language--for intentionally severing any ties of communication.

The only family member I had the opportunity to connect with was my cousin, Mario--a

23-year-old with dark brown slicked-back hair, a banged guitar, and a dream to teach English. In

December of 2024, we briefly got in contact again after he requested to follow me on Instagram.

He sent voice notes, and as I replied through text, he asked me the dreaded question.

“No entiendes Espanol?”

I knew enough to understand his message, but not enough to respond. With the help of

Spanish Dictionary, I put together a string of words that would spare me the embarrassment of

not learning the language ten years after experiencing the initial humiliation in 2014.

My communication with my extended family never reached more than just eye locks and

smiles. In the city of Palm Beach, where you find bundles of Hispanics on El Calle Ocho or at El

Bodegon, I am given the expectation of speaking a language because my tan skin, dark hair, and

brown eyes say I should. I am treated as such by white people at flower shops, who come up to

me with a scared look in their eye and greet me with “hola” and a “do you work here?”, only to

be met with a complete American accent and an articulation that some would call

“white-washed.” And they are not wrong. Five years of public school Spanish classes and hours

of Duolingo cannot replace slang and idioms that only make sense in Spanish.

I have not spoken to my family in Venezuela since that trip, nor do I know the names of

the children who have been born since. My mom’s phone often buzzes with notifications from

WhatsApp, and she encourages me to download it and talk with my cousins. The current political

state of the country has prevented my mother from visiting her family, and had there been

political stability, the divisions between my father’s definition of family and my mother’s are

contentious enough to keep all of us from contact. We send packages filled with pasta, soaps,

sauce, and hygiene products every other month, and my aunts tend to ask for items that my father

deems materialistic, such as heels, perfume, and makeup.

My father has abandoned his Hispanic identity. However, there are moments when he

speaks the language, and I am given a reason to learn it. Translating for a pregnant woman at

Publix while she ordered a sub, he navigated communicating with the employee and the woman,

swiftly changing languages and ordering his own sub while he was at it.

It is moments like these that I search for a way to organically learn and train myself to

pursue learning the language because of the connections, relationships, and bonds it will grant

me. Envisioning myself somewhere in Spain or Latin America on a side quest, I would hope to

be taught by locals and force myself to learn conjugations, slang, inside jokes, and how to

communicate. I hope that if I see my family again, this time I will not run or hang my head in

shame, but I will be able to speak our language.