Tag: El Salvador
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The Rules of Racism: You Can Only Speak One Language (and it damn well better be English)
In class, I teach how creative writing can rouse memory, strong emotions, sharp images, and that, if a student keeps writing, she will surprise herself with her words. Something will come out that she hadn’t planned, an insight, the true emotion over whatever it was she wrote down. She might cry. She might bang the […]
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Learning Spanish? Fear Not the Subjunctive!
When I threw myself into Central America, after having lived a monolingual childhood in Tennessee, I attacked the subjunctive. It’s the conjugation that twists up the English-speaking mind. You first learn that “I talk/you talk/she talks” is Yo hablo, tú hablas, ella habla. Simple enough pattern to memorize. Then along comes the subjunctive, takes the […]
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Escaping the Monolingual Cage of America
According to the above photo, I’d been out drinking the night before. I don’t know what my first Spanish word was, but I do recall an image, ever so slight, of me on the toilet, yelling, “Mamá, I just finished caca-ing!” My mother has assured me that I could say much more than caca, that […]
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Love, War, and Revolution, Central American-Style
Michelle and I moved to Central America in the mid eighties (that pic is of us in our first glory days of living in a Nicaraguan war zone). We were part of a small population of liberals who were protesting U.S. policy in the region. We moved to Nicaragua, to gather reports on atrocities that […]
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The Mission District, Google, and My Pissed-Off Salvadoran Blood
Sometimes I visit the Mission District of San Francisco, where I was born. It’s not the same, and it’s getting worse. Google moved into the neighborhood. On the east side of Valencia Street, it’s still Latino. I walk by and smell the tacos and pupusas, and hear Spanish conversations in the lilts of Mexico, El […]