July 2017

9. Ed de La Torre Doesn’t Speak Spanish

2017-12-05T19:59:57-05:00By |Episodes|

Ed de La Torre Doesn't Speak Spanish “Wow, it’s a good thing you’re studying Spanish,” a fellow told me the other day “because Spanish is taking over the country!” It’s easy to see why it seems so. We see Spanish signs when we shop at Walmart and Home Depot, and on our cocktail napkins on JetBlue. When we phone Bank of America we hear “marque dos para español.” But here’s a fact you don’t hear talked about much: 25 percent of American Latinos don’t speak Spanish — because they can’t. While today’s immigrants are sometimes accused [...]

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February 2017

4. Mother Tongue

2017-12-05T19:24:32-05:00By |Episodes|

Mother Tongue We hear it before we are born. Before the first air rushes into our tiny lungs, before the first light refracts into our blinking, baby eyes, our mother tongue is already resident, dreamlike in our waiting minds. In America, the mother tongue for most of us is English. But for millions of us baby Americans, those comforting vibrations our mothers pour over us have other names, like Spanish or Portuguese or Mandarin. Bilingual mothers have a choice to make. Sometimes they chose their own mother tongue to speak to their babies. Other times they [...]

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