I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. A place where Spanish and English are supposed to be the two official languages. Although in reality I never met a Puerto Rican who spoke fluent and clear English, at least what I would consider fluent and clear English. For most of us, English was just another subject at school that we had to pass.

At the age of sixteen my grandma and I moved here to Lowell, Massachusetts. The majority of my family lived here already. My great grandparents were the first ones to move here. Out of the thirteen sons and daughters my great grandma had, my grandmother was the only one who went back to Puerto Rico. Therefore my mom and I were born on the Island. When I was younger I used to come to Lowell on vacation all the time, to visit my family, and I always liked it. So when my grandma asked me if I wanted to come with her I didn’t think about it twice and said yes. At first, my biggest struggle was getting used to the language. I’d be afraid of speaking in front of native English speakers, and I would never order food by myself. Getting used to the city lifestyle was not as hard as I thought it would be. For some reason I liked the change, from the mountains of Puerto Rico to a big city. But school was one of the hardest things to get used to. Here is where I saw so many ethnicities all in one place for the first time. I also started noticing how people divided themselves either by color or by ethnicities. This was new to me. And without noticing it, I was dividing my- self too. I would only be friends with kids that were either Puerto Rican, Spanish speakers, Brazilian or English Language Learners because I felt like we had something in common, I felt like we both had the same struggle. I still remember how great it felt being in ELL classes, where everyone either spoke broken English or had an accent. It united us, whether we realized it or not.

But I can also remember how I’d feel right after I got out of those classes filled with students speaking different tongues. I’d feel like I was on my own, like I wasn’t protected anymore. When I started taking classes where English Language Learners were a minority that fear of speaking came back. That fear of being judged by my accent. And for the first time I started feel- ing different. It really got to me, and it started affecting both my grades and my social life. I would not make friends that were born here, because I was just insecure about my accent and nervous that it would come out and I would be judged by it.

But being with all these kids that come from different backgrounds and speak all these different languages that I hadn’t even heard of made me so curious. This opened a whole new world for me, and before I realized it I was trying to learn as many languages as I could. Every day in English I would be speaking to the Brazilians and asking them how to say this or that. A few months after getting here I was relatively fluent in Portuguese. And that is when I started noticing that I was actually good at learning languages, that it seemed to come to me naturally. I started learning Swahili, Italian, French, Arabic, and trying to make a connection with these kids in their native language.

I have found that there is something powerful about speaking to people in their native language, or trying to learn their language from them; that feel- ing of making a genuine connection with people through a language they feel comfortable in. It is through learning languages that I have learned to better understand and connect with my new community.

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