George Gimbel
This story begins, as could probably be expected of a George centric story, at a Model United Nations conference. WAIT I HAVE A POINT. While I and a random guy representing Louisiana were trying to sell each other on how to best pretend to solve public school lunch prices, he used a phrase in Spanish. This struck my interest as someone who had been desperately clawing for a Spanish 5.5 and so I asked him if he spoke the language. He explained that his family were immigrants from El Salvador, and asked if I spoke Spanish as well. In response to his question, I told him my grandmother and grandaunt came from Cuba. As the two of us chatted, though, I noticed more and more distinctly that we weren’t speaking Spanish, despite that being what you’d expect from the premise of a “Salvadoran American and a Cuban American walk into a meeting”. Due to this, I brought up one phrase that had hung at the back of my mind since I’d learned it in class a few weeks prior. “¿Eres no sabo?” I asked him.
Now, for those of you who don’t speak Spanish, you’re probably confused. And, somehow, to those of you who do, you’re probably even more confused. Because that’s not proper grammar. That phrase, eres no sabo, is what would politely be called broken Spanish. It’s intentionally a failed attempt to conjugate the verb “to know”, but the real content of the question is “Are you someone from a Spanish speaking family who can’t speak it yourself?” He was. But unlike me, he seemed to know much more about his family’s culture., and it was at that moment that I realized that we were in shockingly similar situations. The key difference though, was that he had a far better grip on what his family’s history was than I did. I knew that I’d always called my grandma my “Abuela,” that my mom and grand-aunt danced to songs in a language I didn’t understand, and that I’d heard bits and pieces of some tall tales of an escape from distant lands that had been shared with me. But I couldn’t speak about much else. I realized that although I loved my Abuela a ton, literally since I was born, I didn’t fully understand her life story. And in turn, I didn’t fully understand how it played into my own. I realized that to an extent, I felt shame when I didn’t understand what my Abuela said when she invited my tia abuela (grandaunt) over. There was an uncomfortable disconnect between me and the family that’s everything to me. To try to bridge that gap, I started with my usual first option: researching the hell out of the issue. I learned more about the rise and fall of Spain’s control of the island, the origins of Cuban salsa and son music styles, why there were Cubalaya roosters in a surprising number of art pieces and cultural touchstones for seemingly no reason. I finally started taking my Duolingo seriously and am now 319 days in. I locked into my Spanish classes. All of these things though, actually couldn’t tell me more about my family or what it should or does mean to me. Researching just wasn’t working and not even Wikipedia or ChatGPT had the answers that I was looking for. In the knowledge that everything that I’d been able to find were just parts of other people’s stories, the only story that I’d neglected to learn was my family’s. So over my breaks in the past year, I’ve visited my Abuela and asked questions, as well as getting to spend some quality time with her. I’ve heard more and more of the stories tied to who I was as well as hearing more from my mom. I’ve heard how happy she is that I try to learn Spanish, and how horrible it is to be called a slur for just speaking it in public – true story by the way so you will never catch me using it in a grocery store. In turn, that same grocery store based horribleness stopped my abuela from teaching it to my mom, who in turn, could not teach it to me.
I love my abuela, but the truth is, no sabo español. And I probably never will perfectly. However that doesn’t mean that I can’t try to treat the part of me shaped by everything tied to that language well. The culture that has influenced me isn’t one that I inherited fully intact, but I love what I do have, and I will be conjugating my verbs correctly.
