Max Lazzara,
Minneapolis, MN.
Bilingual when I learned to talk, raised among my father’s Floridian family of Spaniards, Italians, and Cubans, I was just as Hispanic as I was white; but moved by divorce, I joined my mother’s German-Polish Minnesotan family. The message quickly became clear: don’t speak Spanish to white relatives. In a fully English-speaking home in a majority-white town, I had nowhere to speak it anymore. It wasn’t until age fourteen that I began to relearn Spanish, and I was not fluent until age seventeen.
