We Speak English Here: From Erasure to Revolution

The revolution began in a hallway.

My mother, a little Puerto Rican girl in a Chicago public school, spoke Spanish with her friend when a teacher stopped them. "We speak English here," the teacher said, her voice carrying the weight of authority, assimilation, of erasure. My mother, young and eager to please, swallowed her native tongue and carried that silence home. It stayed with her. It shaped her. In conversation with her decades later, she emphasized something along the lines of, "I knew in that moment, I had to learn English fast, well, and even excel as quickly as I could." By the time I came into existence, much of our rich language, history, and cultural brilliance was both dimmed and dangerously erased. Eventually, the impact it had on me would ripple across my heart, my work, my motherhood y mi espiritu.

I grew up in the in-between—where Spanish was understood but not always spoken, where Puerto Rican and Mexican roots were celebrated in food, music, and family parties but not always in language. The echoes of "We speak English here" stretched beyond my mother’s childhood; they live in our classrooms, our workplaces, in the way my name was misspelled with "ph" instead of an "f", in the way bilingualism was seen as a burden rather than a gift. Being called a "Spic" on the playground in 5th grade still sears my consciousness. I did not question it—until I did. I backed out the way, until I pushed back. Now, as a grown ass Latina woman with a voice and a snatchback, say something to me. I wish you would.

The fire came later. It came in the form of books that told me what my teachers never celebrated: that Spanish had been deliberately stripped from generations, that linguistic oppression was a tool and weapon of colonization, that my story was not an isolated one. It came in the form of students—Brown, brilliant, and battling the same forces of assimilation that had once silenced my mother. It came in the realization that I had a choice: to continue the silence or to break it.

I chose revolution. I chose, and am choosing, to break the cycle of erasure and reclaim it through my search backwards and inwards to both discover and UNEARTH my cultural brilliance, history, language, and collection of stories...starting with mine.

Now, as an educator, a speaker, and an activist, I stand in the hallway where my mother once shrank and take up space. I teach students that their languages are superpowers, not liabilities. I remind them that "We speak English here" is not a rule—it’s a message of the past that we are dismantling. In my classroom, in my keynotes, in my work, I amplify what was once silenced.

Without apology, I inspire myself to take the journey towards understanding, studying, announcing, and leaning into the Spanish language myself as an adult. I sometimes stutter as I string together linguistic phrases in Spanish in hopes it will capture my thoughts, sentiments, and conversation intentions. Everytime, I build courage and muscle to try again, to search deeper, to advocate for support, to admit that I don't know as much as my soul-woman would like to about my people, my cultural inheritance, the pain and passion of my ancestors, my mother tongue that I long to have slip through my lips with ease, poetry & proclamation.

I teach my children, I cook the foods, we touch ground on our native soil, we crank up the music that carries the traces of our angst, our deseos, our memorias, and our vibrations sweet and sensual.

The passion, the color, the allure, the nostalgia----I'm reclaiming it all.

Because when they told my mother to speak English, they weren’t just asking her to translate her words; they were asking her to translate herself—to fit, to shrink, to comply. But she raised a daughter who will not comply. She raised a daughter who would undo the words, reclaim the culture, and set the world on fire with it.

This right here is why I'm so adamant about the elevation of our cultural lineage in our classrooms, on our conference stages, in podcast mics, on blog post pages. As a second-generation, this was snatched like the shirt off my back and replaced with an "either/or" suggestion. It's never been about either/or for me, but about and/both.

The revolution began in a hallway, and it will continue with me---- I refuse to be erased.