I remember that there were a few Spanish speakers in high school, and they were from Puerto Rico and Peru, but other than that, I never heard Spanish as a child growing up in the 70s and 80s in Columbus, Ohio. I was not a big Sesame Street child but I do remember hearing a Spanish word every once in a while on that show. There were a few Latino characters on TV too, but I had almost no exposure to the Spanish language as a child. It was my freshmen year at high school in 1984 when I first studied the language, but even then, I never heard it outside of the classroom. Immigrants and immigrant issues to me were for people from New York or Los Angeles, but not the very white suburbs of Columbus. So I was in for a big surprise in 1994 when I moved to Chicago.

     Wow!! Chicago is different than Columbus. There were signs that welcomed one to “Puerto Rico” There were Mexican flags draped over hoods of cars. There were as many tamale stands as there were beef stands and hot dog vendors. There were billboards in Spanish. There were entire Spanish TV stations with news, sports and entertainment. It was all over the radio as well. Mariachi music was new to me and it could be heard everywhere. They even had Chicago Cubs baseball games broadcast in Spanish over the radio. It was like there was another world existing within a world or even better, two worlds that overlapped each other. One thing that I noticed quickly was that the people who spoke Spanish spoke English, but not the other way around. At that time, I do not remember people complaining about the presence of another language.  But it was not just Spanish. There was Polish, Russian and a slew of other languages spoken and visible everywhere.  But Spanish was dominant as a language and a cultural presence. One could literally see it, hear it, and smell it!

     I was young and naïve and assumed all these people were Mexican. Many were, but that was wrong to just assume that.  We don’t celebrate Nicaraguan or Honduran holidays here, but they exist. They are totally a different culture than Mexico, but I had them grouped all together. Dominicans have little in common with Mexicans other than language and Puerto Ricans couldn’t be more different than Argentineans. Like in the Morales reading, they have Spanglish in common with each other, but the cultures remain separate. One funny story that always comes to mind when I try to explain Chicago was when I was in line at a Chinese restaurant and a Mexican women was trying to order Chinese from a Chinese woman. They were both speaking English, but neither could understand each other. I worked at a restaurant with Mexicans, Colombians, a man from El Salvador, Italians, Polish, Ukrainians, and a couple of Americans. There was a unique brand of English being spoken there, but everybody spoke a little Spanish. That was where I first began to understand the language. I still study Spanish to this day and attribute that to my experiences in Chicago. There was so much laughter about confusion between languages.  It had a profound effect on me.