"Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it"
About this Quote
A writer admitting she can’t “master” Spanish because she’s “too much a student of English” is really naming the quiet violence of linguistic inheritance. Cisneros isn’t confessing laziness; she’s describing how a dominant language colonizes the mind so thoroughly that even desire and intimacy get routed through it. “Student of English” lands with a double edge: English is her craft, her tool, her livelihood, but also the institution she’s been trained by. The line carries the ache of realizing that fluency isn’t just vocabulary, it’s a kind of belonging.
The phrasing “written and spoken Spanish” matters. Spoken Spanish is the language of family, jokes, reprimands, the everyday. Written Spanish is something else: literacy, authority, the right to narrate. Cisneros is pointing to the bilingual mismatch many U.S. Latinos recognize - you can live a language without ever being allowed to claim it fully on the page.
“I would need another lifetime” dramatizes the asymmetry of the task. English, for many immigrants and their children, arrives with infrastructure: schools, books, tests, prestige. Spanish arrives in fragments: at home, in memory, in moments that don’t come with diplomas. The subtext is not just personal frustration but cultural accounting: assimilation doesn’t merely add a language; it often subtracts one, then charges you shame for the loss.
Coming from Cisneros, whose work turns borderlands into literature, the admission also doubles as an artistic manifesto. She writes from the fracture, making the gap itself a source of voice.
The phrasing “written and spoken Spanish” matters. Spoken Spanish is the language of family, jokes, reprimands, the everyday. Written Spanish is something else: literacy, authority, the right to narrate. Cisneros is pointing to the bilingual mismatch many U.S. Latinos recognize - you can live a language without ever being allowed to claim it fully on the page.
“I would need another lifetime” dramatizes the asymmetry of the task. English, for many immigrants and their children, arrives with infrastructure: schools, books, tests, prestige. Spanish arrives in fragments: at home, in memory, in moments that don’t come with diplomas. The subtext is not just personal frustration but cultural accounting: assimilation doesn’t merely add a language; it often subtracts one, then charges you shame for the loss.
Coming from Cisneros, whose work turns borderlands into literature, the admission also doubles as an artistic manifesto. She writes from the fracture, making the gap itself a source of voice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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