Learning Spanish in the Age of Uncertainty

I hardly know where to begin, not in English, not in Spanish, not in fountain pens, not on keyboards, not in the heart, not in the mind. The world seems like a daunting labyrinth these days, all the flickering lights strung with cobwebs. I keep chugging away at my Spanish.

A few days ago, I got to go shopping for stickers and washi tape for my Spanish bullet journal. Admittedly, I wanted to do a miniature photoshoot with it, put it up on this blog with some excited babbling about how far I am coming. But studying Spanish in this very dismal era requires a lot courage — I think about how ICE targets people who look like my father — and I’m still coiling around myself in an attempt to spring towards that courage. Because we are living in times where we have to decide what is right, and for myself, that means writing about Durango (Mexico and Colorado), it means scooping El amor en los tiempos del colera from my tiny bookcase and reading it to the best of my abilities, thinking about the altar I’m going to build next Day of the Dead. Because no matter what, we cannot lose our grip on the basic things that make us human and a part of a bigger society that we belong to. We belong.

You see, when the tower of hope that we’ve built as a generation, my generation, has been assailed and torn down with bulging rocks, when we are left at the bottom of the garden again with all our timbers and walls around us, we start over. We refuse to give into the despair of the current political climate because, in the end, I feel that what is right and just and peaceful and loving will prevail. I believe that humankind is good, and that, while some will seethe and hiss and work for greed, people will be all right in the end because we have each other, the languages that weave our sopping lungs into one breath.

I don’t want to be sad. I want to learn my heritage language enough to read Cervantes and Allende and many more. I want to plant flowers and run around in the rain (though we never get any in New Mexico). I want to send more queries, even though they break my heart. I want to take pride in loving the same telenovela as my abuelita. If you wish to see the human spirit broken by avarice, you will fail. But if you wish to see the beauty in everyone who is celebrating their birthday or happy to be browsing the bookshelves at Barnes and Noble or finding joy in simple pleasures, if you wish to love strangers, you will find that you are never really alone with yourself after all. Maybe I should have been an artist in another life, one who can draw more than the scrawny stick figure; then I could paint all the colors that I think of when I see people happy. We are so good, humanity.

It’s going to be a long time until I fill up the Spanish bullet journal. As I said, I’m no artist, so I think mine will fall short of the aesthetic majesty of those that I see online. That’s fine. The goal is to flesh it out with, hopefully, some traveling (I still need to go to Salamanca for Project Guernica). My lopsided doodles may have character, you know. I have stickers with suitcases on them that give me a satisfaction that there’s so much out there to see, and Spanish will get me there.

I’ve never understood people who fear language, who want to control it. I’m not just talking loosely about prescriptivists, though they’re low-hanging fruit. I’m talking about people who see something jarring when they witness a mouth working around words in a tongue that they cannot understand. How beautiful is it that we can learn any language we want and have access to thoughts as though they were cloned and shared in sweet hope with another human being. How beautiful is it that there are languages out there like Spanish, Eyak, Zuni, French, Nahuatl. How could someone hear a language being spoken and not wish it were anything less than a miracle?

This is why I love language: It is a machine that runs on air. It is a ghost in the bunker of a human heart. It is sometimes funny. It is like having your breath fog before you on a cold winter day as you wait at the bus stop. It is the same thing your ancestors in Mexico did when they, too, contemplated their ancestors. It fashions us as human animals. It is the secret to our wildest thoughts turned into ideas. It is dignity and a right and a source of enjoyment and I wish it upon everyone.

So in this era of frightening news and manufactured paranoia, I will plunk down some washi tape in a journal and say what I think needs to be said in my blobless Spanish: That it’s good to keep going.