Medicina de Social Justice

By Petra vega

I actually wasn’t sure how to start this blog post. 

To get the writing juices flowing, I thought: What would help me get in the mood to think about my relationship to bilingualism? And I immediately thought about Medicina de Amor by Raulín Rodríguez. 

Why? Because this was the music that instantly made me think about my childhood living in Puerto Rico until second grade and about my Mami who still has this genre of music on in the background when there’s nothing on TV. It takes me back to our Sunday ritual of cleaning until the late afternoons. I love my Mami but I hated that routine. That’s the best way I can describe my relationship being a Spanish-speaker, love-hate. 

Relationship status: It’s complicated.

As a second generation kid who was raised by their grandparents, I learned Spanish at home and English in school. As the most fluent English-speaking person in my family, I was responsible for lots of adulting things that I still don’t enjoy doing today. In that way, being bilingual allowed my family and I greater access to services and opportunities that helped us meet our basic needs. 

At the same time, my Spanish fluency felt severely lacking once I became politicized in college. This is where I began to learn the names of systems of power, privilege and all other kinds of fuckery going on. I did a lot of reflecting back then (and to this day) especially since this newfound language sparked a revolution in me.

Because of what I was learning, I felt compelled to consider the ways that oppression played out within my home language, as well. Until that point, I had not considered how Spanish came to be spoken in Boriken (the Taino word for Puerto Rico) or what colonization was or what the natives experienced as their indigenous language was forcibly replaced. Apart from language, one of the largest focuses around my politicized identity included gender.

It didn’t take me too long to come up with all the ways I was breaking the patriarchy’s rules of what a woman ‘should’ be. For example, I heard Calladita te ves mas bonita / You look prettier when your mouth is shut every time my curiosity or opinion was unwelcome. I can attribute this kind of enforcement to my struggle in speaking out against injustice, in real time. I wasn’t just battling against wrong doing but also decades of ageist conditioning.

As a light-skinned, Black Puerto Rican, I experienced my own form of anti-Black racism through the shaming of my racial phenotype. While my people didn’t necessarily have fucked up intentions, the impact of their words were still felt. To give you a lil taste, I grew up hearing how Bembua / Big lipped I was. I was always questioned about when I was going to do something about my hair when I decided to go natural. During college, I stopped believing that I had Pelo malo / Bad hair like I was led to believe since I was relaxing my hair by the age of 7.

“It didn’t take me too long to come up with all the ways I was breaking the patriarchy’s rules of what a woman ‘should’ be. For example, I heard Calladita te ves mas bonita / You look prettier when your mouth is shut every time my curiosity or opinion was unwelcome.”

As you can tell, the more I learned, the more I reflected about what I was taught or told directly and indirectly. It was within this learning that I gained the courage and conviction to tell Mami about another core piece of who I am today, my Queerness.  When I told Mami that I was Queer, she broke down for a second realizing her dreams of whatever (hetero) life she wanted for me would not actualize. She added that I was No Mujer de Hombre. I’m still not sure how to translate that one but that too felt like a jab. 

All in all, as my Social Justice vocabulary expanded in English, the more I felt ostracized by the Spanish language and the unique ways that those particular words scarred me at the time. 

I am able to share these tidbits of my life now because I’ve brought my younger self with me to the other side of adulthood. The way I have done that is by healing some of this past. For me that looks like acknowledging those harms, understanding the roots and function of those words, recognizing that some of the things I thought were truths were actually lies and making space for more, real truths. When you’re ready, sharing stories like this in a dignified and authentic way also adds to the healing process.

Today I can say that while Spanish has been wielded against my people and me personally, it has also allowed me to connect with people and the planet in a way I don’t know that English alone could have. In most of my career, I have been engaged in communities of Black and Brown, bilingual adults, parents and youth as a community organizer and radical social worker.  

Early on in my career, I remember one of my co-facilitators telling me that Cada cabeza es un mundo / Every mind is a world after a prep session. I think about that each time I have a conversation with a new person and imagine that they are sharing a little bit of their city, state, country, universe with me with each new thing they share. I am grateful for that imagery.

In my last job, I remember calling to check-in on one of the Señoras / Ladies that we served during the beginning of the personal pan pizza* who told me that la tiera esta descansando / The land is resting. And I thought daaammmnnn, you right. We need to stay inside as long as possible. I thanked this Señora for that reminder that we all needed (and still need) a break from business as usual. I know as a people, we really struggle with that idea but what if we understood it as giving the planet a break to rest. I wonder if we would we be more flexible?

Finally, because of the work of language activists, I now get to learn beyond the binary of Spanish. When I was learning to use Spanish in my activism, we would commonly use words ending in -a or -o or this way as well: a/o. After college, I learned about folks using Latin@ to symbolize more inclusion. Here we were, as a people, pushing the boundaries of what was common or normative.

Most recently, we’re bouncing between Latinx and Latine to describe a group of people. While we may not agree on what word to elevate or use commonly. I know this to be true: I’m someone who is obsessed with how change happens, knowing and being able to be alive at a time where we can push, stretch, change, expand how we communicate, and therefore how we imagine the world to be, that shit is so exciting!

I’m grateful I get to share what I learn with Mami so that I can teach her how to love me as I am and I get to practice using this language to create a safer space for my non-binary beloved when we go to visit. 

All of these moments put together have been their own kind of medicine. 

Medicina de Social Justice.

*I’m talking about the pandemic here, just having a little fun with language. Maybe in your corner of the world you called the pandemic, a panini or or a pandora or a panarama or maybe not.

About the author