Maybe It's Just Me But...

There was always something amiss about the families I saw on television as a child. I’m talking about shows like Growing Pains, Family Ties, The Wonder Years, even the Cosby Show. These were all loving families who often found themselves in humorous situations that got resolved over the span of a half an hour with the occasional very special episode that went for an hour. I had no problem with the premise of any of these shows. Nor was it the way no one ever really seemed to go to work- (Mrs. Huxtable has to have been the worst lawyer I’ve ever seen; I mean, did she ever work?) or hold a grudge. No, the one that threw me off as a child was that on the occasion that someone’s grandparents showed up, they showed up speaking English. I’m fairly certain that this seemed odd to me until I was at least 12 or 13 years old.

Growing up it was my grandmother who would pick me up from school and make sure I didn’t get into trouble until my parents got off of work. My grandparents did not speak much English and never really spoke it at home. My parents spoke both around the house but as my world extended beyond the home and into school my communication with others became dominantly English. My classmates were not predominantly Caucasian by any means, in fact more than half probably spoke Spanish at home as well, but class was taught in English, TV shows were in English, everything we read was in English… that’s just the way it went. Still, I knew that if I wanted a snack, a flour tortilla with butter or a burrito, and I was at grandma’s house, I asked in Spanish. The only other older people I knew at the time were distant relatives like other aunts and uncles, great-grandparents, or siblings of my grandparents. So you can understand my confusion when Kevin Arnold’s grandfather showed up speaking English- it was like nothing I had experienced in real life.

Maybe that’s part of the reason I have such an affinity for I Love Lucy- most of the time when Ricky’s relatives showed up they spoke little to no English. Maybe it seemed a bit more realistic to me.

When I was just a few years old my aunt married a white guy. Of course as a child you don’t think in terms of race or ethnicity- you can barely grasp the concept of boys and girls and even then all you’re sure of is that one wears dresses and the other does not. Decades later and I can’t say I’ve learned much more, but that’s a different story. Anyway, my tia married a nice man who didn’t speak Spanish around the house. Eventually his parents came around too, as did his sister and her family. They didn’t speak any Spanish either. His parents were the first older people I remember encountering who did not speak Spanish- or at least I didn’t have to speak Spanish to communicate with them. Not only that, but their English sounded different from the way everyone else I knew. Now, no one in my family speaks English with any type of discernable Mexican accent but it certainly does not sound like the English native of the suburbs, calm and lilting with ease of pace and tone that you will not find in the spoken English as a result of growing up in an urban setting. It was just something different and at the time I had no idea how to explain the difference I perceived. I can’t even say that I understood the difference or knew anything about it; I just knew that it was there.

Time went on and I spoke more and more English and less and less Spanish. In High School I took French and in college I took Italian. I had heard of others who had grown up speaking Spanish in the home only to struggle terribly in Spanish classes at school. I suppose this is the same reason students struggle with English- people just develop incorrect habits of speech no matter what the language. I can tell you that studying these other Latin based languages actually gave me a better understanding of both English and Spanish. Looking back I do wish I maintained a higher level of Spanish comprehension. It would be nice to have conversations with my elders that aren’t so limited by our lack of mutual understanding. In the mean time, I’ve still got I Love Lucy.