The air of judgment is one I’ve come to recognize: How dare this woman not speak English, how dare this other woman speak both English and Spanish. It was a small moment, but it speaks to how easy it would have been for the cashier to ignore a young Latina mother struggling to care for her child had there not been someone around to interpret. “I don’t understand,” she kept saying, though the mother’s gestures transcended language. I choose not to understand is what she really meant.

Those of us who grew up bilingual understand the complexities of holding onto and embracing either language. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said on Twitter, “Growing up, Spanish was my first language — but like many 1st generation Latinx Americans, I have to continuously work at it & improve. It’s not perfect.”

In the Spanish spoken by the children of immigrants, you’ll hear the echoes of cousins laughing at our accents when we visited them in Latin America. If you go back one generation, you’ll hear stories of people like my in-laws, whose teachers in Florida beat them for speaking in school the language they spoke at home. Go back yet another generation and you’ll hear of the state-sanctioned racial terror inflicted on residents of Mexican descent in Texas in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

On videos circulating on social media you’ll hear Americans harassing Spanish-speakers at supermarkets and restaurants. This language of xenophobia and white supremacy is spoken fluently by our own president, and is at the root of why generations of Latinx Americans’ relationship with Spanish is laced with pain.

Those whose parents tried to shield them from discrimination by not passing it on are often expected to be fluent in a language they never had the chance to forget. Those of us who managed to hold on to it, despite the pressures to assimilate, know that our imperfect Spanish is a privilege we are often shamed for both inside and outside of our communities. And those of us who speak only Spanish are too often dismissed and worse, targeted — by women pushing shopping carts, by ICE raids, by gunmen with anti-immigrant manifestoes. Their terror makes victims of us all.