



As a child of immigrants and a supposed anchor baby, I assimilated as fast as I could. I stopped responding to my parents in Spanish and tried to ignore how it broke their hearts. I would tell them that I didn’t want to go to the “ghetto” Spanish food market, that I didn’t want a quinceañera because it was “old-fashioned, like everything else in Latino culture.” I was working hard to feel like I belonged, because that’s what I thought surviving meant.

While assimilating is a matter of survival, being forced to assimilate is oppressive. Assimilation has a shiny badge, laughs when you pronounce something wrong and threatens you when you’re a little too loud. Assimilation makes you stand up straight and recite the Star-Spangled Banner, forcing you to do push-ups when you can’t stop rolling your Rs. Assimilation won’t stop until you learn to stay silent and police yourself.

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Donald Trump says immigrants should learn English and assimilate. English will help you “become successful and do great.” If you can’t put a little effort and hard work to fit in, you should take your anchor babies and get out. But Latinos have been paying the price of assimilation for years. We look at the brochures for the invisible School of Etiquette and know that we have to work three jobs to afford it. We know all about the white-fence expectations of this country.

I remember watching commercials for Ingles Sin Barreros, an expensive videotape series advertised during Sábado Gigante. My mom was always so close to making the call and the five easy payments for my grandmother, or abuelita, who had never learned English after 20 years of living here. Instead, my abuelita would always groan and wave the phone away. In the film Spanglish, Flor, a Mexican housekeeper, purchases these tapes after years of not learning English. In the voiceover, her relieved daughter Christina says: “The price of assimilation was expensive, but it was worth every penny.”

But is it?

Forced assimilation through tactics like policing language keeps white supremacist ideology alive. It says that there is only one right, good way to speak and it is the way white people do. Language is always about access to power. When someone makes Latinos alter the way we communicate with the world in order to sound “more American,” they are silencing us. When viewers tell Vanessa Ruiz to get rid of her accent, that is an attempt to take away her identity and thus, her agency. It is a way of putting a white hand over her mouth, telling her her voice does not matter.

That’s why every “mistake” we preserve, every accent we keep, is an act of rebellion. It is an act of proving that we are alive and that our identities rightfully exist in this land.

Maybe that’s why my abuelita has still never learned English. She can say a few phrases like “very beautiful” and “thank you so much,” but she cannot write or read in English, or Spanish. The day she became a citizen, she walked outside of City Hall and released big, beautiful tears, made the sign of the cross and pointed up at the sky. My abuelita took care of my sisters and me while my parents were off working one of their many jobs to keep us all afloat. She cooked for us, made sure we were doing our homework and taught us about the meaning of hard work. To her, hard work didn’t mean making yourself as “American” as possible. It meant having enough food on the table. It meant proving everyone wrong.

Now, she lives in a low-income apartment building for the elderly and collects food stamps. This probably makes some people furious. Let them be. Every day, she makes collect calls to Guatemala with fingers calloused from years of labor. She leaves water outside for the birds because she believes in compassion. Every day, she packs up her supply of platanos and takes three buses to come see my sisters and me.

My abuelita couldn’t care less about assimilation. She pretends she can’t hear the bus driver when he tells her she doesn’t have enough on her Charlie Pass. She knows and she doesn’t care because she’s got somewhere to be. She sings old mariachi songs to herself at the top of her lungs in public spaces. She’ll talk to everyone in Spanish: the bus driver, the store clerk, the people at city hall, the doctor.

When I tell her that they don’t understand what she’s saying, she responds, as always, in her native tongue. “Mija, don’t they know by now? Everyone speaks Spanish here.”

Donald Trump can hear our loud, wagging Latino tongues in every corner of this country. He knows the power we hold in our language and it scares him. It scares him how fiercely we prove our existence.