I've been thinking a lot about this touching Food & Wine article by Juan Paul Brammer,
"Discovering Chicano Identity Through Tortillas de Harina", because even though it only just touches on the issue of heritage languages and what they mean to those of us who have lost them--or perhapsmore appropriately, had them taken from us--within recent generations, it speaks a lot about that often inarticulable wound that comes with the loss of one's culture and language, and with it, identity. All of this of course borders on political issues, and I know this forum makes a stern frownie face about that (ironic, though, since all language is in its essence political, as it inherently identifies and signifies to which people and to which place we belong, and thus which values and worldview has been passed onto us through our language), so I won't delve too much into that, nor am I inviting a discussion about it here (there are other outlets for that).
But the whole sphere of Chicano and Mexican-American identity and language politics is deeply relevant to me and my own language journey because it is the world I have always lived in. I was born in the Southwest US, in a city with a Spanish name, in a state with a Spanish name, and except for a couple of years in the US state of Hell (colloquially known as "Missouri") as a very young, horrified child, I've lived my life alongside recent Mexican immigrants, people descended from Mexican immigrants and people whose ancestors were here when this region was still Mexico, if not even before then. And while I grew up in a very white-dominant culture that aggressively discouraged me from being conscious of the Chicano and Mexican-American communities and families that lived around me, they have had a very deep influence on me in how I think about the relationship between heritage languages and identity.
My own relationship with my heritage languages is not stained with memories of racism aimed at me personally, like Juan Paul's, but there were plenty of cues in the US culture I grew up in that discouraged me from really embracing them. Irish was "bad" because of the Troubles (which were still ongoing when I was born), which Americans condescendingly scuffed at as if the Irish were just being hopelessly belligerent about nothing important, and from the way my dad would avoid talking about my grandmother left me feeling that there most be something very shameful about the language and culture my grandmother inherited from her Ireland-born father. French was either mercilessly mocked as foppish and pretentious or elevated to a cultural stratosphere beyond anything that I could relate it to within the more down-to-earth world that my New England francophone grandfather, descended from a long line of woodworkers and shipwrights, had lived in, and that left me feeling alienated from the heritage language I had come closest to having passed down to me, had things in my father's own life been different. As for German, my half-Alsatian grandmother spoke some, probably a strongly Alemannic variety, but I never heard anyone in my mom's family ever talk about German as anything more than a relic of a bygone time, when recently immigrated German settlers still spoke it among themselves, but no one did that anymore because we had all "assimilated" like good Americans. It's no surprise that even though I had worked hard at learning German and really enjoyed it, once I left grad school, and thus school altogether, I stopped using it, thinking it was time to just focus on what skills were relevant for my adult life.
Scottish Gaelic was a slightly different story. It had been lost in my family tree so far back that no one alive in my lifetime has been certain when the last speaker died or why people in my very proudly Scottish side of the family stopped using it. I estimate the last speaker in my family probably died about 100 years before I started learning it, in the least. This strangely made Gaelic the most foreign yet most approachable for me, of all my heritage languages, because it was just so
unknown. I had always been very curious about it, since I was very young. But no one in my family knew anything about it, and before good Internet resources for it existed, I had no idea how to even go about learning it. I had tried a couple time working through the old
TY Gaelic text and would give up about as quickly as I started.
What ended up motivating me to take another shot it, 10 or so years ago, was really seeing how the Mexican-American community where I presently live has been dealing with the issue of language and cultural loss, and with the hostility toward them that so often uses Spanish vs English as a point of aggressive contention, which helped me begin to understand how language is core to identity and belonging and how it is our human right to inherit and use the languages of our parents, grandparents and ancestors. And it helped me begin to understand my own feelings about my heritage languages that I never really examined because US culture doesn't encourage us to do that. Yeah, sure, Americans are OK with you wearing a "Póg Mo Thóin" t-shirt on St Paddy's or learning how to make some French recipes because your last name is French, but don't go crazy. And definitely don't take it to the point where you start asking tough questions about history, culture, and identity, for yourself or for others. But the problem with that, for me personally, is as I said--this is where I was born and where I have lived my life, surrounded by people who have been here much longer than I have yet other Americans, like Tom Brokaw did recently, continue to smugly accuse of not "assimilating." Something about all that has rubbed off on me after a few decades. For me to casually study my heritage languages like the way my dad used to do crossword puzzles in the evening, to just pass the time, would require me to pretend I don't live in the world I do, where the people in my community right now are facing similar processes of culture and language loss to the ones to cheated me out of my own heritage languages. It's not always comfortable to be aware of these kinds of thing---for me, I find it requires a much broader mind and a much broader heart than the dominant US culture deems tactful--but the alternative seems hardly worth the effort.
***
The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : - Day 33 (Feb. 2) -- Welsh: I did a few review sessions for my Duolingo Welsh tree, while taking notes in my notebook. But I am a bit of a klutz at time and manages tospill my cup of water all over my open notebook, effectively ruining it for future use. Fortunately, I write my notes in pencil, so the notes didn't smear. If anyone of you who are old enough to remember high school or college before everything was digital, you probably remember those annoying nerds who'd happily copy their own notes for other students who missed class or did't bother to take notes, going "Oh, copying my own notes helps me study anyways, so win-win!" Yeah, I was one of those nerds. So while I as annoyed about ruining a partially filled notebook, I just used it as an opportunity to study my notes via copying them into a fresh, new notebook.