It Took Me Three Generations, but I Learned to Love Spanish

Our native language was disappearing from my family, but circumstance—and luck—brought it back

My dad, Juan Pablo, and me attending a San Antonio Spurs game together. Photos courtesy of the author.

When my father turned six, Mercedes, Texas was a small town. Now, 60 years later, it’s still a small town — Mexico border to its south, outlet mall to its north. And during an ordinary car ride, my father tells me an extraordinary story.

As I steer us toward his post-cataract surgery appointment at a VA clinic, he explains how he started first grade not knowing any English at all. He holds up a hand and mimes a flashcard. “Apple,” he says. Then he rotates his hand around. “Manzana,” he says, offering the Spanish translation. I try to imagine my father in a classroom around 1960, a skinny little kid with jet-black hair sitting at a wooden desk, absorbing a new language that he will speak the rest of his life.

“That’s how you learned English?” I ask incredulously. I can’t imagine the time it must have taken to build the necessary vocabulary, one piece of cardstock at a time, in a class full of students.

“And TV,” he adds. “I learned a lot of English from watching TV.”

Spanish has always been an uneasy conversation in my family, loaded with expectation, disappointment, and if I’m honest, some resentment.

I think about cracking a joke about some TV-influenced thing he says all the time, something about English by way of Leave It to Beaver, but the line won’t come. I’m more flabbergasted than anything else. My dad has such a good grasp of English, had such a long career in the U.S. Air Force using the communications skills he honed as a recruiter and advertiser for the military, that I often forget it wasn’t his native language.

“Was it hard?” I ask.

“Yeaaaahhh!” my dad exclaims, the way he does when he’s being dramatic and making a point, which is about 90% of the time. He tells me more things I’d never thought to ask about before. That he never went to kindergarten. That he skipped second grade — not because he was a brilliant scholar, but to catch up in age to the other students. He struggled in third…