On a maleta – Natalia Sylvester in NYT (April 2024):

‘My earliest relationship with language was defined by rules. As an immigrant who came to this country from Peru at age 4, I spent half of my days in kindergarten occupied with learning the rules of the English language. There was the tricky inconsistency of pronunciation to navigate and, once I learned to speak it, the challenge of translating what I’d learned into reading skills.
At home, my mom would often create games to help my sister and me preserve our Spanish and improve our grammar. Driving around our neighborhood in Miami, she’d point at a traffic light, hold up four fingers and say, “Se-ma-fo-ro — on which syllable do you put the accent?” Each language had its defined space: English in school, Spanish at home. But as my parents became more fluent (and my sister and I more dominant) in English, the boundaries became blurred. Being bilingual empowered us to break barriers beyond the rules and definitions attached to words. Some things were simply untranslatable, because they spoke to this new space we were living in — within, between and around language. We were making a new home here, same as so many immigrants who end up shaping language as much as it shapes us.’

(…)

‘Some ideas are so embedded in Latin American and Spanish cultures that they exist implicitly. Of course “ganas” can be something you feel but also give, and be at once more tame yet more powerful than “desire.” (If you know, you know.)’

(…)

‘Take the Spanish word “maleta,” or “suitcase” in English. This year, I was at a writing conference and met up with two Mexican American authors, one of whom brought her suitcase to the venue because she had already checked out of the hotel. We walked the halls and offered to help with her maleta, making several jokes and references to it, but never once using the word “suitcase,” despite speaking mainly in English.
This was an entirely natural and unspoken decision. There are some words that simply feel truer in Spanish than they do in English.’

(..)

‘A suitcase is for clothes and possessions when someone travels, but to me, a maleta meant family had arrived from Peru, carrying flavors, textures and memories of my birthplace.’

(…)
‘We, in turn, didn’t so much break the rules as we simply played with them, swirling bits of English and Spanish together until it resembled something new yet familiar, our fingerprints proudly planted in its mess.’

Read the article here.

I guess most children of immigrants will know between the often secret and somehow forbidden language spoken or sometimes spoken at home and the official language used in the outside world.

It must be a loss if you never had this experience, at least it’s a setback, you must discover all the ambiguities of language yourself.

One of the more famous examples of this combination is the phrase: ‘I’m happy, but glücklich bin ich nicht.’