Anzaldua Blog Response

2. Write about a time when you felt that someone in authority tried to silence you or criticize the way you spoke.

My cousin Kevin and I were both born in the United States and all my other older cousins were born in the Philippines. Kevin and I were the only one’s living with our parents and other aunts and uncles at the time because everyone else kids including our older siblings were still in the process of coming to America. I grew up in a house filled with four of my mom’s sisters and two of her brothers, my dad’s sister, and maybe five other people who came from the Philippines that my family took in, so it was rather crowded. I learned the way they spoke and our true dialect but I was still deeply influenced with the workings of Sesame Street, Barney, and Banana’s in Pajamas educating me on how to truly speak English, but my English was still not proper enough, it would have been considered “broken.” The summer before hitting third grade our family headed back to the Philippines for my grandparents’ 50th anniversary. We spent three months there, my cousins there were shy to communicate with Kevin and me because they didn’t want to sound dumb attempting to speak English or they had no clue. Kevin and I decided to adjust for them and speak what we still knew of our dialect, but they laughed at us or made fun of us because our Filipino accent was replaced by this “stiff” American tongue. My grandmother get irritated with us when we would speak to her and mispronounce a word, she would impersonate us and have all our older cousins tease us about how we’re not considered Filipino anymore; that we misplaced our culture somewhere drowned in those stars and stripes; feeling misplaced, unidentified by my own culture and family! By the end of the three months our tongues loosened up adjusting to our native language when getting back to school we realized that kids would comment on the way we spoke. One of the girls in my class told me I talked funny and sounded out words like how her grandmother would have done it. Frustrated not knowing where I stood. Questioning myself should I adjust again to the “proper” English I can relearn, or would that mean my family was right that I was replacing my native tongue, betraying my family’s culture…