I'm fluent in Spanish. But I deliberately speak Spanglish because it's truer to who I am

This First Person column is written by Melinda Maldonado, who lives in Toronto. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

He might have been over 90, but my grandfather could still put me in my place.

"Nunca vas a perder tu acento gringo," he warned. You'll never lose that gringo accent. 

I was recording his Andean Ecuadorian Spanish for a sociolinguistics class. I'd been asking about his native-speaker pronunciation, which prompted him to point out the problems with mine.

My accent is a far cry from tourists ordering a kway-sa-dill-ah with ja-LA-pen-nos, but it stung. As a kid, I burned with humiliation when another Ecuadorian family started a conversation with an hola, ¿cómo estás? (hello, how are you?) and I couldn't understand what came next. Qué pena that I didn't speak Spanish, people said (what a shame).

My dad immigrated from Ecuador to Canada in the 1970s and my mom is a white Mennonite from Waterloo Region farm county in southern Ontario. I was born in Toronto and spent more time living with my mom. There's no reason I should speak Spanish like a native speaker. But that didn't protect me from shame.

Not speaking Spanish is a problema when you look like me. With my morena skin and short-ish, stocky stature, I'm the stereotypical Latin American with Indigenous and conquistador mestiza (mixed) blood. People expect me to speak Spanish. 

Hungry for identity, I reclaimed Spanish through university classes in Guelph, Ont., a semester abroad in Ecuador and a job in Guatemala. At first, I couldn't keep up with university readings because relying on a dictionary slowed me down. When working in Guatemala, learning local business lingo and socializing in Spanish left me exhausted. 

I persisted, and experiencing Latin America en español burst life into 4K. Whether road-tripping through the Andes with cousins, asking for my yapita (free item) at a market stand, which is the produce equivalent of getting Sephora samples for making a purchase, or hearing about ghosts or mythical dwarves called duendes, my increasing fluency deepened my connections to my culture. Getting my Spanish-English interpreter certification cemented my progress. I could police relatives when English infected their Spanish, saying, "It's albahaca, not basil."  

Mastery brought something surprising. Striving to sound like someone I'm not — a native speaker — was suffocating. 

Sometimes Spanish felt cumbersome. CD player? Reproductor de discos compactos. SpongeBob SquarePants? Bob esponja pantalones cuadrados. Foolish! Why force pure Spanish terms when I had a handy English one the listener understood?

Other rules constrained me. When I said, me cagué de la risa (I shit myself laughing), my grandfather said respectable ladies don't "shit" laughing. Instead, they should "die" laughing, which struck a North American nerve.

The last straw was when an uncle told me I speak better Spanish than "us Ecuadorians" who "butcher" the language. I felt like he was saying I sounded like a robot following a textbook and questioned what defines authentic Spanish. If Spanish speakers in Latin America were using English words, like warever for whatever, why shouldn't I? Protecting the purity of a language that arrived in Latin America via colonization grated against my politics and felt forced. 

Then it hit me. 

I could shed the stiff, academic phrases that are the hallmark of new language learners and graduate from choppy piano notes to smooth improvisation. Spanglish felt free. So I started to play by combining English and Spanish. 

Sometimes Spanglish pops up with one word. Calling my female cousins prima, the Spanish word for that relationship, even if the rest of our conversation was in English. Saying barrio fab to represent the Latino street style like hoop earrings, red lipstick and rhinestone-studded crosses I wore when I wanted to announce my ethnicity at a salsa club. Specifying if plantain is maduro (ripe), verde (green) or pintón (in between), which is an important distinction to nail Ecuadorian recipes.  

Celebrating the comfortable hybrid of culture and language that makes me unique as a member of Canada's Latino community brings me joy. I'm mixing it up to sprinkle in an element of my identity that isn't complete in either language alone.

And that recipe isn't complete without Kichwa, Ecuador's dialect of the Indigenous language Quechua. To my surprise, I recognized the language when I took Kichwa 101 while doing my semester abroad in Ecuador. While I love the idea that my DNA recognized its ancestral language, it turns out I spent time with Kichwa speakers in Ecuador as a kid. 

I keep my South American Indigenous roots alive by deliberately using words like guagua for child, achachay when I'm cold, ñaño for brother and choclo for corn, which reminds me of giant Andean kernels. 

Today, the pressure to sound like a native speaker has weakened, but still haunts me. 

In 2018, I was getting ready for my first speech as the chair of a new Latino employee resource group in front of a Spanish-speaking audience. It was the organization's first event, and I was worried that my accent or a grammar slip would shatter my authenticity as a community leader. So I decided to be true to my journey, telling the audience I was using my actual native tongue, Spanglish. 

Spanglish feels inclusive, because English-dominant people with Latin American roots who can't string together a Spanish sentence would likely understand a buenos días (good morning) or a cafecito (the diminutive for coffee).

I use Spanglish to say to my fellow diaspora children that they belong regardless of their command of their ancestral languages. And when I use Spanglish, I'm a little more Latina, and every time I use it, I'm keeping my roots and community alive.

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