Proud to be a Remix, Part 3: What good is a second tongue?

Before continuing this series, I ask that you make sure that you have read or listened to this essay: Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century French Colonial Policy by Dr. Saliha Belmessous. This will allow you to put the following discussion of my background and identity in historical context. I thank her profusely for her work, which is of enormous personal significance to me, and I am sure to many others. I included an audio version in Part 1: Assimilation was no Simulation. This essay will be reflections on the relationship between my early life experiences, identity formation, and the mother tongue. I am making the larger argument that, just as bilingualism brings with it insights across languages and into language, biculturalism brings lessons across the divide as well.

In the Turkish language, the classic example of the morphophonemic, or meaning-sound structure, possibilities’ space is the two-word sentence, “Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan mısınız?” This sentence means, “Are you - one of the ones we were not able to Europeanize?” I first learned this when I was starting down my journey of several years of formal coursework, a semester abroad in Ankara, and working as a Turkish→English translator for one of UC Berkeley’s libraries. In my case, the answer to this query is “yes.”  I am one of the ones they were not able to Europeanize.

I get comments like this from time to time, reflecting unexamined ignorance and racial thinking of the commenter, which demands and presumes separateness of the ‘races’ despite centuries of intermarriage and cohabitation.  The comment reads:

End of comment.

Somehow! Science may never know. I have never amended my statements. I have corrected their mistaken inferences. Since part of cultural Whiteness is a belief that one already understands other cultures - the idea being that they’re just like hegemon culture, except accented, with bonus holidays, and a relative incompleteness due to a non-reciprocated lack of White American culture - having a mistaken inference corrected feels to them as some admission of error on my part. I am in the marked caste and therefore am expected to compensate them for the fact that I am present. If they are confused, it is my fault. If they feel stupid, I must have tricked them.

Can the subaltern speak, Spivak? There is simply no way they were wrong or ignorant. They’re hegemon gender! The lesser Native mixed, we lowest of the low, ought to be ashamed to have a history that surprises them. Just as trans like to cosplay, my existence actually does challenge their belief structure in a way that I cannot accommodate without ceasing to exist as a mixed person with a consciousness of Native identity. It is the don’t ask-don’t tell of racism. It disgusts them to contemplate race-mixing, and it angers them that I do not feel disgusted at myself and that I claim both because I am both. We are one people who share one blood.

I take it as inalienable right not to keep the races separate within me.  I remember giving a presentation on being French-Native in elementary school. I compared and contrasted our cultural practices with those of the tribes local to the area. My elementary school was literally called White Point. There were peahens and peacocks everywhere. Did you know they can fly slightly? It gave me PTSD - Peacock Traumatic Stress Disorder - because the peacocks would sometimes try to intimidate our Honda by “come at me, bro!”ing our windshield. I knew if one day he grabbed the wipers with his feet and fanned his tail, we’d crash. I just hoped he didn’t like me enough to perform. This went on for 4 years. I did not ban just the peacocks from my life, but everything in that category. And I do not mean just birds.

Peacocks are a symbol of grief in Greek mythology, as the goddess Hera placed the eyes of her slain manservant, Argus, killed by Hermes on order of Zeus (Hera’s husband/brother) onto the peacock, so he could continue to watch over her. I had quite a lot to grieve in elementary school. When my fiance died, I was in my 20s, and I took the black funeral dress and covered it with hundreds of their feathers. I did not know what else to do. Now it hangs in my room, watching over me, a reminder that I, too, am different now than I was before.

I grew up in southern California, with the uncommon experience of spending my summers running for cover from wild buffalo on the opposite of their natural habitat - a small island in the Pacific called Santa Catalina.  This is not photoshopped.

These buffalo are the descendants of a specific herd which was taken from its native great plains habitat, the flatlands of the central United States, where it had spent the previous decades being utterly decimated by White people shooting them from trains and covered wagons in a deliberate and successful effort to starve and impoverish Native communities to make way for “manifest destiny.” This herd was then transported in the 1920s to this very small island, with an isthmus of only half a mile wide, to film a movie, The Vanishing American.  They were subsequently left on the island with no natural means of returning whence they came. Since then, 2,000 individuals have been exported from Catalina.

Due to the lack of regular cows on the island - lolcows notwithstanding - the herd on Catalina island stayed genetically purer than most mainland counterparts, and therefore these buffalo individuals are closer to the original species than the European-Native mixed buffalo that now predominate in North America. Once, one of these majestic beasts became lost in my camp. The creature could not find its way out of our row of tents on raised platforms, and was losing its mind from its perception of confinement. This was in spite of the fact that they have come to terms with being trapped on an island, based on reading their blogs (or buffalo-logs). Sometimes, we find ourselves in unexpected places for historically contingent reasons.

To return to the commenter, this pursuit to re-separate the “races,” to demand I pick a team, is an attempt to figure out which sisters and brothers belong only to the mother and which belong to the father. This determination is based either on how they look (surely your sister belongs more to your mother) or what percentage of each they are (your brother is, gene for gene, more his mother’s son, as the Y chromosome he got from his father only has a few dozen genes on it, compared to over 1400 on the X). We are all a mixture of two very different, mutually exclusive manifestations of humans, which reproduce into two distinct kinds regardless of lineage.

Racialist thinkers take for granted the social and sexual segregation of all European immigrants - the current conceptualization of the “White race” - vis-a-vis the locals. This belief is ahistorical. We are mixed and we refuse to be unmixed because we recognize that we are one people who share one blood and one history.  The theory of races of humans was concocted to undermine our foremothers’, specifically, contributions, by suggesting there was some biological and not intellectual origin of their ideas - that the obvious correctness of the ideas, alone, somehow does not account for their persistence.

This seeks to undercut their legitimacy as ideas, and devalue Native people as idea-havers, as wise women, as truth-tellers, as well as to discourage White people - including the mixed people claimed as White by the unmixed, as well as the self-rejecting mixed - from thinking racially inappropriate thoughts.  This thereby sidesteps the uncomfortable possibility that at least some Native cultural beliefs, attitudes, and practices, may in fact be self-evidently and irreconcilably superior to those advanced by the self-proclaimed Whites.  I am not allowed to say perhaps the windmill of patriarchy never existed, even though all your male ancestors of record have tilted at it like it was their source.

There is an expectation that if you were born in this country, you will speak differently from your non-”standard English” speaking parents - regardless of where your parents were born. Residential schools took this a step further and barred children from using their mother’s tongue. There is alleged to be a cultural magnetism of whiteness and Americanness buoyed by the superior technology and values which are themselves merely higher on a natural grade of ascendance to which all cultures should aspire. Do you become further or closer to other climbers as you ascend a mountain?  Eventually, everyone is in the same place, and therefore, a line forms, and all can see who is closer and further from the natural peak. So goes the theory.

Let’s consider a working definition for what it means to be métis. Métis is the French equivalent to the Spanish term my California compadres are likely to know: mestiza. Both words translate to mixed and in the lower case, refer to the Native-European mixed descendants of colonization of the Americas. Both mestiza and métis people are expected by Whites to continue to aspire to become further assimilated. Both are the children of several centuries of cohabitation, consensual intermarriage, and rape. Native women have been targeted by European/White men for centuries. These predators are practiced at targeting and ridiculing their mixed descendants. Please take a moment to further research the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis.

Pocahontas (Matoaka) was one of the earliest Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). Please consider that Disney could have made basically the same movie, but about a Native princess who consensually married a French trapper and voluntarily converted to Christianity. Yet they chose to make it about a woman who was kidnapped by the British and held for ransom, then paraded around Europe as an example of a “civilized savage.” And they presented it as if she did not like her husband, Kocoum, and was not already married to him with a child at the time she was kidnapped. This is why many Natives are angry about “Pocahontas” to this day. It is anti-Native, anti-historical propaganda. They do not want us to know the true history of intermarriage because that would light a fire of consciousness of Native identity, which could have uncomfortable political implications for Whites.

I am not mestiza because I have no Spanish ancestry nor am I descended from Natives residing in the part of the country where I was born - the southwest.  I do have significant southwest/Mexican Native and mestiza cultural influence due to early life circumstances. One result of this for me is simultaneous bilingualism in Latino Spanish, a dialect with significant contributions from indigenous languages such as Nahuatl. I have written previously about my folk etymology attempt to explain the similarity in form of avocado and abogado (lawyer i.e. advocate), despite dissimilarity of content. A similar but inverse phenomenon explains the grass widow-agunah merger that’s apparently existed in Yiddish for some time.

Contrary to what comes up on google when you search “simultaneous bilingual,” a typical bilingual person will have more and less dominant languages.  It is common for a simultaneous bilingual person to only be able to understand and not speak (“passive speaker”), or to only be able to talk about certain subjects in the language of instruction at school.   There is no magic “now you can say you are bilingual” threshold - no vocabulary list that’s the minimum threshold for being able to say you are an active or passive speaker of the language, other than at least one word.

Yes, this means that if you know any Spanish word or phrase at all, even if you’re Peggy Hill saying “poor fayvor,” you can accurately assert yourself as a bilingual. But as a practical matter, calling yourself bilingual invites other people’s assumptions and expectations, which you may not meet, and this may bring judgment. I do not refer to myself as bilingual in Zulu, for instance, even though I took it for a semester, passed, and can still say “ngicela ubisi” intelligibly. Just be glad you never got colonized by the Zulu, gender atheists, because I have never met more genders. At the time, of course, I was ecstatic.

I am primarily a passive speaker of Latino Spanish due to hearing Spanish only for several hours a day for the first five years of my life, after about 7 months old. After the age of 5, my daily conversation-partner exposure became annually, until an unexpected separation at the border, when I was 13, left me linguistically isolated. My mother received the call, and we went down to Tijuana because she’d been stopped on her way to surprise us with her new baby, who did not have a green card due to being an infant. She had a green card, and h ad come back to stay with us for about a month at a time every year since she’d moved back to central Mexico.  So she learned she would not be able to come back to the US until her baby was old enough to be left alone, or until my government gave him papers.  It would not give him papers at the border, so like Mary, she was told she had to return to her village and apply there. To my knowledge, this either did not happen, or was never granted.

I had only the feel of her words in my mouth to chew on as we drove home from Tijuana, not knowing if I would see my othermother again. It ended up being another lifetime before I saw her, and then some; 15 years. When we finally reunited - for a few short hours when I was 28, which was the year prior to my fiance’s death - it broke open something within me that had been walled off since I had walked through the turnstyle to San Diego. This essay has been quite difficult to edit, because each time I settle my mind’s eye on that day, I have to stop, and attend to my complicated grief. It is an open wound on my soul that has neither scabbed nor scarred (Anzaldua). I am still waiting for her to come back. And until then, I keep it tightly wrapped and under pressure.

I knew then that I needed to be able to speak my other native language to be whole, and I have since returned to my linguistic roots as often as possible. This remains one of the few very experiences I cannot speak about while remaining calm, yet I resist the curtain of exulansis. It has been over 20 years now since I said goodbye to her and her child, my replacement that would now keep her from me, by the bull ride I was not allowed to try for fear of injury. La frontera es una cicatriz. The border is a scar. And the circuitry of emotions and speech is the same.

I am okay with this de minimis bilingualism threshhold, because if ever we needed to get the milk from a Zulu-speaker using that one phrase I learned that one time, and no one else in the group has ever even heard of Zulu, I’m meaningfully, categorically different from the group. The word for that difference in English is “bilingual.”  We have words for differences, like the difference between men and women - a sex difference. And I have so many words for my two tongues. Yes, the jokes continue to just roll off both ends like so many erres.

Due to this early exposure, when listening to Latino Spanish, I knew what was meant before I had learned to repeat it or write it down, on a level I have never approached in any other second language I have formally studied as an adult. I attribute my vocabulary in part to the fact that fancy English words are normal Spanish words.  When I was living abroad, I achieved a far superior level of expressive proficiency in Turkish than I had yet developed in Spanish by that point in my life, but I could not feel what people said in my feet. Receptive and expressive language functions, as well as speech, must be viewed as independent and severable. I have been told I have minimal accent regardless of the language proficiency though, another facet of me that I attribute in part to simultaneous bilinguality. Even fluency is not all-or-nothing. A person may be fluent in conversational speech surrounding specific topics, but have no competence in academic language, or vice versa.

A child does not need to speak the language to benefit from hearing it on a daily basis from someone speaking it to them about topics relevant to babies, including songs and stories that they have heard in English. A child does not need to keep being exposed to the language to continue to be a simultaneous bilingual person as an adult. At no point did I have bilingual school education (and it sadly shows). A comparison of the Europeo and Latino versions of Spanish dubs of English movies can provide insight into how different these dialects are today. “Oh, it’s all the words I know!” I remember thinking. I have skills, insights, and verbal capacities that set me apart. The idea that my extended and early Latino Spanish exposure had no influence on me is devaluation of the non-dominant language and by extension non-White influences.

Who needs a second tongue, anyway?

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