The essay paged out below was the culmination of hundreds of scattered thoughts and memories over my language and literacy, which were eventually organized and analyzed until they could all portray a larger theme, that of the importance language plays on the self-struggle of identity. It was a theme I had often heard about and occasionally studied in classical literature in novels such as Ralph Ellison’s infamous Invisible Man, which is where the inspiration for my title comes from, as well as being a play on Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue. Despite the familiarity, I never once reflected on my own language and literacies, up until this assignment, which has been a much-needed awakening in self-discovery, which I have been appreciative and grateful for. Onto more of the rhetoric and functionality of my paper, I tailored the rhetoric of this narrative to a specific audience. Yet, I feel the themes of identity I covered are universal. The language used throughout this paper is both heavily academic and somewhat poetic, with the use of both complex sentence structure and figurative devices, this type of language is directed towards a pensive educated crowd that can understand and appreciates the literary techniques and the academic thought put into the paper. Note that this type of language was used not to alienate readers, but to speak to the intended audience in a way that is familiar and comfortable to both the author and writer. I have been writing academic papers my entire life and thus this formal and sometimes poetic style of writing feels most comfortable to me. The rhetoric used throughout this paper also includes cultural language that from an outside perspective could only be understood in the context of the narrative. This type of cultural language is featured in an attempt to target audiences that would understand or have a background in the cultural language used, so they can further relate and feel connected to my story. More on the subject of rhetoric, the concept has been monumental in not only understanding the works of others but also in improving my own writing. Understanding how different languages and their literacies are perceived and spoken by others helps me articulate and reflect on my own expressions that I have used and will continue to use throughout my life. Rhetoric has been a useful asset in deconstructing the languages that surround me, and in conjunction with understanding the importance and effects of writing to an audience, rhetoric has the power to connect the writer and the reader on a far deeper level. As stated in the beginning the course of this assignment was traversed with great difficulty, the final narrative only came about after numerous revisions and edits were made over the course of weeks, and the most important aspect was rereading aloud each time a new draft was made, and asking myself if I was fulfilling the goals that not only the assignment had set, but the goals I had set for being confident in a finished narrative. The task of editing would have been next to impossible if it were not for the many people who had taken the time to read and speak constructively about my narrative to me. Through their help, there is no doubt I have embodied the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. Even though this is not an academy award speech, I would like to thank those who helped me along the way in creating this paper, including my parents. 

Invisible Tongue 

There is no greater coming-of-age novel than the story of my tongue; an epic of loss, acceptance, and eventually triumph in a language that I could never grasp, and a literacy that will never be perfect. The lack of ethnic diversity throughout my life led to the loss of my cultural language, and the pursuit of excellence in the literacies of others. My conception of this world began in the now-gentrified inner city of Denver, Colorado, which has for my whole life felt like home. The shimmering skyline would stand guard behind my neighborhood, pulling me back home when my priorities would stretch me across the city. My life as a kid existed in two worlds, that of the Mexican and that of the American, although with each passing year as I slowly lost my connection to Spanish and excelled at English I began to wonder who I really was. Looking back my parents were never the golden example of cultural preservation: they rarely spoke Spanish to me other than to scream or curse, we skipped church every Sunday going only for the English sermons on Easter, and to top it off we would forgo the Spanish radio for the smooth melodies of R&B and black soul. My neighborhood complimented my parents as I remember all the Mejicanos like me, running around trying to be like the white boys on tv as the old Chicanos on the corner would yell, “we were all coming from la Raza ”, and it was our right to preserve what we had and what we did for our kids. 

Years later the words of those old mean would haunt me as I enrolled in a private school deep in the suburbs near Golden, Colorado. The birthplace of the Coors beer family, it was a place of traditional western values, where the men from my corner would not only be misunderstood but looked down upon. The first thing I noticed was how weird everyone sounded, the expressions that came out of their mouths were like nothing I had ever heard before. Vast, complex, and devoid of any familiarity they would strike my ear but fall flat of ever reaching into my mind. There was a steep difficulty curve at the beginning of school that seemed to separate me from everyone else. Each time someone at the school spoke to me I would take long chunks of time trying desperately to decipher their words before I could even react to what they were saying. The same was true when I spoke to them, as each time I would try to begin a conversation, saying something like “¿Qué onda, güey?”, or “what’s up dude” I would get the same confused expression, as their eyes revealed just how foreign and alien I was in their mind. The tone, inflection, and dialect each of us used during a conversation were completely different, and slowly the talking would fade as neither of us could relate to the other. Past just classmates teachers were another group where I could find no common ground as they would bleed over my writing, their ink would mark almost every sentence and I would constantly be told that my sentence structure was flawed, or that my language was wrong and not academic in any slight. Even though I could never fully speak Spanish, the words and phrases of my neighborhood were stuck in my mind, and would always slip into my speech no matter how hard I tried to replace them with the words and inflections of my classmates. It was the end of the fall semester of my freshman year in high school when I fell even further into disillusionment with my identity as I realized how my problems with both Spanish and English were affecting my perception of myself.

Above is a photo of me at lunch at the beginning of my tenth year, and I feel it encapsulates so perfectly how much culturally isolated I was in high school. I had been surrounded by the white suburban crowd for so long that I neither speak nor even relate to the Mexicano people that bore the same dark native features that stared back at me every day in the mirror. At the same time my English was still so confused that I struggled to talk and converse with the students and faculty I went to school with every day. It was at this moment I felt like the two words I existed in both collapsed on each other and that I did not exist at all, I was neither a part of my home nor my school, I was invisible. My parents would only shrug at my issues at school and would tell me that academic and social circles outside of their neighborhoods never came easy for them either, but that the worst thing I could do for my language is to give up. At that moment I knew that since Spanish was nowhere close to what I envisioned in my future of higher education, I knew I had to master English, a type of English that was fluid in that I could change and bend it to the type of person I was talking to. As my knowledge of the vocabulary of all English words improved, so did my skills in replicating their style of talking, from the inflection of their speech to the rigid and professional tone that so often flooded my ears with directions. It was not completely alien to me as growing up, I watched my parents change to this style of speech every so often, in an action I would later identify as code-switching. For brief moments their fast-paced, short word sentences mixed with Spanish would cease, and the elaborate firm tone of my teacher’s language would replicate itself in every syllable, gesture, and expression of their being. This change in language would always silently surprise me, but I would never come to realize their importance until my awakening in 9th grade. This type of English I began to pick up started influencing what I considered to be correct English and proper grammar. The ideas of literacy and standard began to blend and mix together as my tongue became a jack of all trades. This literacy I developed would eventually become a default for me depending on the audience and situation in which my language was used. The events that developed my literacy and language allowed me to use my learnings in any universal setting. It gave me an upper hand in society, while also being able to keep my original learnings from my early stages of development with language and literacy. The more I allowed this complex English literacy to become my default the more it would serve as a triumph rather than an impossible struggle.