English vs. Spanish: A case for bilingualism/biculturalism.
by Charlie Vázquez
I write this upon the closing of Festival de la Palabra, Puerto Rico’s leading literary festival, which puts Latin-American and Latino writers in the spotlight. Tracing the symbolic Boricua migratory route from San Juan to Nueva York, it’s also the only festival of its kind that begins in one city and ends in another. I was asked last year to help coordinate its first ever landing in The Big Apple and took the project on.
(For the record: I grew up in a bilingual household and was educated in English in the New York City public school system. My earliest years were bilingual, but English eventually took over, and it was in junior high school that I made the decision to reclaim Spanish as a foreign language—what irony.)
I participated in a panel with the Nuyorican musician/poet extraordinaire Bonafide Rojas and Karen Jaime, who hosted the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday Night Slam for many years. We are New Yorkers and bilingual in varying degrees. The program before us featured writers from Latin America and was conducted in Spanish.