This first-person column is written by Melinda Maldonado, who lives in Toronto. For more information on CBC’s first-person stories, please visit the FAQ.

He may have been over 90, but my grandfather could still put me in my place.

“Nunca you’re going to lose your acento gringo“, he warned. You will never lose that gringo accent.

I was recording his Ecuadorian Andean Spanish for a sociolinguistics class. I had asked him about his native language pronunciation, which prompted him to point out the problems with mine.

My accent is far from the tourists who order a kway-sa-dill-ah with ja-LA-pen-nos, but it stings. As a child, I burned with humiliation when another Ecuadorian family struck up a conversation with a Hola, how are you? (hello, how are you?) and I didn’t understand what happened next. Que pena that I didn’t speak Spanish, people said (what a shame).

My father immigrated to Canada from Ecuador in the 1970s and my mother is a white Mennonite from the agricultural Waterloo County region of southern Ontario. I was born in Toronto and spent more time living with my mother. There is no reason for me to speak Spanish like a native speaker. But that didn’t protect me from shame.

Not speaking Spanish is a issue when you look like me. With my brunette of skin and short and stocky stature, I am the stereotypical Latin American with the natives and the conquistador mixed race blood (mixed). People expect me to speak Spanish.

Hungry for an identity, I picked up Spanish through college classes in Guelph, Ontario, a semester abroad in Ecuador, and a job in Guatemala. At first, I couldn’t keep up with college reading because relying on a dictionary slowed me down. When I worked in Guatemala, learning local business jargon and socializing in Spanish wore me out.

I persisted and discovered Latin America in Spanish bring life to life in 4K. Whether it’s a road trip through the Andes with cousins, to asking my yapita (free item) at a market stall, which is equivalent to getting Sephora samples to make a purchase, or hear about ghosts or mythical dwarves called duendes, my growing mastery has deepened my connections to my culture. Obtaining my Spanish-English interpreter certification consolidated my progress. I could monitor my relatives when English people infected their Spanish, telling them: “It’s albaçacanot basil.”

Mastery brought something surprising. Striving to sound like someone I’m not – a native speaker – was stifling.

Sometimes Spanish seemed tedious. CD player? Compact disc player. SpongeBob? Bob Esponja square pants. Silly! Why force purely Spanish terms when I had practical English ones that the listener understood?

Other rules constrained me. When I said, me cagged from the risa (I shit myself while laughing), my grandfather said that respectable ladies don’t “shit” while laughing. Instead, they should “die” laughing, which struck a chord in North America.

The final straw was when an uncle told me that I spoke better Spanish than “we Ecuadorians” who “massacre” the language. I felt like he was saying that I sounded like a robot following a manual and that he was questioning what defines authentic Spanish. If Spanish speakers in Latin America used English words, like Never for anything, why not? Protecting the purity of a language that arrived in Latin America via colonization opposed my policies and felt forced.

Then it hit me.

I could get rid of the stiff, academic sentences that are the hallmark of new language learners and move from choppy piano notes to gentle improvisation. Spanglish felt free. So I started playing by combining English and Spanish.

Sometimes Spanglish appears with just one word. I call my cousins primathe Spanish word for this relationship, even though the rest of our conversation was in English. Adage neighborhood fabulous for representing Latino street style like hoop earrings, red lipstick, and rhinestone-studded crosses that I wore when I wanted to announce my ethnicity at a salsa club. Specify if the plantain is maduro (wall)Green (Green) Or pinton (between), which is an important distinction for mastering Ecuadorian recipes.

Celebrating the comfortable hybrid of culture and language that makes me unique as a member of Canada’s Latin American community brings me joy. I mix it all up to sprinkle in an element of my identity that is not complete in either language alone.

And this recipe isn’t complete without Kichwa, the Ecuadorian dialect of the indigenous Quechua language. To my surprise, I recognized the language when I took Kichwa 101 while doing my semester abroad in Ecuador. Although I like the idea of ​​my DNA recognizing one’s ancestral language, it turns out I spent time with Kichwa speakers in Ecuador when I was a child.

I keeping my indigenous South American roots alive by use words deliberately as guagua For child, achachay when I’m cold, ñaño for brother and choco for corn, which reminds me of the giant grains of the Andes.

Today, the pressure to speak like a native speaker has lessened, but still haunts me.

In 2018, I was preparing for my first speech as president of a new Latino employee resource group to a Spanish-speaking audience. It was the organization’s first event, and I was afraid my accent or grammatical error would undermine my authenticity as a community leader. So I decided to be true to my background, telling the audience that I was using my real native language, Spanglish.

Spanglish seems inclusive, as English-dominant people with Latin American roots who cannot string together a Spanish sentence would likely understand a good days (Good morning) Or A cafécito (the diminutive of coffee).

I use Spanglish to tell my fellow diasporans that they belong, regardless of their mastery of their ancestral languages. And when I use Spanglish, I’m a little more Latina, and every time I use it, I keep my roots and my community alive.

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