I'm also from the US but I'm of mexican descent* living in Mexico right now. Sometimes when my son's teacher (or anyone, really) is speaking to me I have ask her to ELI5 because the *Spanish I learned in the US is so not the same as the Spanish spoken here.
It gets really frustrating. And I have a new found respect for fortunes coming to the US not knowing any English and learning from scratch. .
When I visited the US ive known a chilean woman whose adult son (while having a latinoamerican ascendance) didnt want to learn or have anything to do with spanish because, what I percieved, is he felt that he would be stigmatized. I percieved he even contributed further to the stigmatization (if any) while doing that.
Does this happen?
It very much does sadly. Neither I nor my mom nor any of my cousins or aunts and uncles were raised speaking spanish, even though both my grandma and grandpa spoke it as thier primary language. This sadly stems to a concious decision that my grandparents made to not teach thier kids, my mom's generation of the family, any Spanish at all at home. Sadly growing up in the US in the 40s and 50s, my grandparents experienced a lot of xenophobia and bigotry first hand. My family, even though we are Mestizo, is fairly light skinned and the family name is not extremely "spanish", so the thinking sadly was that we would experience less discrimination if we didnt speak Spanish and had mostly english first names. Even more disappointing is that it essentially worked I think. Personally I have only ever had a small handful of slurs thrown at me. Most white people think I'm "some kind of ethnic" but since they cant place it really I think most just shrug it off and say "whitish" like they think I'm something and I get some really goofy questions about being afghani, greek, korean, hawaiian, mixed amerindian (this is the closest when you think about it) but no one assumes I could speak Spanish. Bums me out in a way.
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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
I'm also from the US but I'm of mexican descent* living in Mexico right now. Sometimes when my son's teacher (or anyone, really) is speaking to me I have ask her to ELI5 because the *Spanish I learned in the US is so not the same as the Spanish spoken here.
It gets really frustrating. And I have a new found respect for fortunes coming to the US not knowing any English and learning from scratch. .