Jessica Quizhpilema

Professor Hoehne

Fairy Tales and Rewritings

8 September 2019

                                                             The Color Pink

            Growing up in a Spanish speaking household while living in an English speaking country was always going to be a roadblock for me. There always is this switch in your head that just clicks and tells you ‘speak Spanish’ ‘speak English’. But at a young age do you really know how to switch it on and off, is there a way just yet for you to know to switch? Does your brain have the vocabulary to be able to switch automatically? I didn’t. 

           My original perception of language originated when I was around five or six years old during my first trip to Ecuador – my first time being in a Spanish speaking country. It was a new experience for me having to conform to this temporary norm of no English, although I was able to speak Spanish and hold a conversation. However, some phrases and words I was not too keen on how they were said. There is a clear difference between English and Spanish, such as the ‘r’ rolls, the double ll’s’ that must be pronounced like a y. Although I sometimes was able to do it without even knowing if I was correct or not. 

I was oblivious to simple words like colors, animals, and even utensils at times. One day my grandma decided to take me out for alone time with her. She took me to this small shop. It was at the top of the hill on the corner of the street, it had wooden aged double doors that were wide open and just inviting us in. I had been saying that I wanted yogurt and so she said okay. 

We entered the store and she hollered “a vender” (“to sell”) and the vendor of the store had come from inside her home and greeted us. She asked what we liked to buy and my grandma just asked for me to choose. I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted this strawberry flavored yogurt, that was a light pink color. It had this cereal portion at the top where you could dump it into the yogurt. So I made up my mind and told her “Yo quiero el pink”- “I want the pink”- she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I just kept repeating ‘I want the pink, the strawberry’ thinking it would help her in any way, it didn’t. Not even pointing helped, since everything was clustered together she didn’t know what I was pointing at. My grandma gave up on trying to figure out what I was talking about and asked the seller if I could go behind the counter and pick up what I wanted. The seller allowed me and I got my yogurt. 

My grandmother that same night had called my mother and told her about what I had said at the store. She kept going on and on saying that she did not understand what I was trying to say, what was this pink? My mom, being that she has heard my siblings and I ask her some things in English knew what I was talking about. She explained to her that I wanted ‘el yogur rosado’-the pink yogurt. My grandmother had a slight understanding, although she was lost when it came to English she tried her best to understand me. 

As I grew older, I began to realize the language barrier that existed between my Spanish speaking family and I. Also as the years passed I tried to minimize the barrier, making it easier on them since they couldn’t really learn English in the way I did. The purpose of language is construed when two or more languages are intertwined and unrecognizable to each other. We write to be heard, to be understood. We speak because we know someone will understand and sometimes it takes a lot to understand but one can do it. 

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.