There’s a specific dread that comes from not knowing if the words in your head are the right ones in that language.
I lived inside that fear, not of a school test, but of speaking in class and having the wrong language come out, or the right one come out wrong.
I was born in the Dominican Republic. My parents divorced when I was 1, and left for the US, independent of each other, while I stayed behind in my maternal grandparents’ care. At 6, my mother came back for me, remarried, with a new baby, and my legal documents. She’d divorce again, and with her third husband, she started a clothing manufacturing business that brought us back to the Dominican Republic, where I lived from 11 to 16.
Two high schools in Spanish in the Dominican Republic, for the freshman and sophomore years. Then two in English, junior and senior year, first in New Jersey, then in New York City.
I grew up learning how to switch between Spanish and English, and having to prove myself in both languages.
I was put in ESL classes
When I moved to the US, I was placed straight into an ESL class. Nobody tested me or heard me speak; they just saw a Spanish-speaking country on a piece of paper and decided who I was.
I hated that I had to prove myself every time I went to a new school. I had to perform on command for someone to believe that I could speak the language. I raised my hand when I didn’t have to. I corrected a teacher’s grammar once, in front of the class, just to watch her catch herself. I answered faster and sharper than I needed to.
Once, I wrote an essay on the Civil War and got called into the principal’s office like I’d done something wrong. They said it was informative, precise, well written, remarkably so, for an immigrant. They accused me of plagiarism. My mother was called in. She didn’t flinch. She’d watched me write it at our kitchen table and said so, plainly. The principal sat me alone with a blank page and a new topic: what the American flag stood for. I wasn’t going to let him win this one either. I wrote about Betsy Ross bent over a needle and thread, stitching a symbol together before anyone knew what it would represent, and about pledging allegiance to that flag in a tongue I hadn’t been born speaking. There was nothing left to accuse me of. I passed, and I made sure he knew he’d been wrong.
I wanted to get better
At my new school in New York, I asked a teacher how to get better. She said, “Read all the newspapers.” So I did, every day, without missing one. That daily habit is the actual reason I can write at all. Nobody handed me that ability. A teacher trusted me with one honest sentence, and I built the rest myself, out of spite as much as anything else.
Looking back as an adult, I can see what it built in me. I wasn’t just switching languages four times.
I learned to read a room quickly, having been misjudged in so many of them. I moved between the directness that English classrooms rewarded and the deference that Dominican classrooms expected, and I could use both as weapons when I needed to. I became fluent in both because people kept deciding who I was before I said a word, and my defense was to prove them wrong, until they stopped testing me. I wasn’t behind, and I wasn’t lucky. I was proving, one room at a time, that I was more than what anyone assumed on sight, and I am still doing it.
The mishmash didn’t break me. It built me. I don’t fear the blank page anymore, and I was never afraid of being doubted, because I always answered back with proof.
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