We can care deeply about Spanish without appointing ourselves the inspector general of somebody else’s identity. Yet the little tests keep presenting themselves as concern: Say this. Explain that. How could you possibly be Latino if you don’t know this word? Apparently, the family gathering needed a customs desk.
The community I want this publication to serve includes people whose Spanish is fluent, hesitant, mixed with English or almost nonexistent. That is part of the work I’m building through LUCIR. Nobody should have to pass an oral exam before they get to join the conversation.
There is evidence behind this problem. Pew Research Center’s 2023 report found that 78% of U.S. Hispanic adults said speaking Spanish was unnecessary to be considered Hispanic. Among those who spoke little or no Spanish, 54% said another Hispanic person had made them feel bad about it. Those findings leave a question worth asking: what are we accomplishing when we make someone embarrassed to speak?
But the humiliation runs the other way, too. English-speaking Latinos can look down on people who speak little or no English, mistaking an accent or a missing word for a lack of intelligence. And the power is not evenly distributed. Someone with an English-language platform can explain the insult to an audience. Someone shut out of that platform may struggle to have the mistreatment acknowledged at all. Having less access does not mean having less to say.
I know something about that. In “How I Became Black,” published by OkayAfrica in 2016, I wrote about my bilingual class being bullied for being foreign and speaking Spanish. I also described the hierarchies among the children around us, including U.S.-born Latino peers who already spoke English. Language was tangled up with race, nationality and who could get away with mistreating whom. This was lived experience, not a vocabulary exercise.
In my 2015 Huffington Post essay, “How First- and Second-Generation Hispanics Can Help Each Other,” I argued for reciprocal help: people familiar with English and American institutions helping immigrants navigate them, and immigrants helping later generations sustain cultural confidence and connection. That essay was later included in The Bedford Guide for College Writers, 11th edition. The point still stands. Whatever access we have should make somebody else’s life easier. Why turn it into another reason to feel superior?
I want people to have more chances to learn Spanish. I want the books, films, conversations and family histories it makes available to remain accessible. A person reaching for a word is already doing something vulnerable. Correct them when they want help. Give them time to finish. Let the conversation be worth coming back to.
We should also be careful about whose experience becomes the standard. Latino communities cross countries, races and generations. Indigenous languages belong in this conversation. So do Portuguese, English and the combinations people actually use. A label broad enough to hold that much history requires some humility from whoever claims to be its bouncer.
Pew’s 2026 research on identity offers another useful reminder. U.S. Hispanics describe themselves through overlapping national, pan-ethnic and American identities. Someone can use several descriptions across a lifetime. A stranger’s preferred label tells us very little about which grandmother they understand or which stories they still want to recover.
I’ve been here before, too. In my 2020 essay on Latinx, published in Latino Rebels, I challenged the people treating language as their private jurisdiction. Loving Spanish does not give you authority over somebody else’s identity. You can defend a language without humiliating its learners, and you can choose your own label without confiscating somebody else’s. We have enough people trying to shrink our community from the outside. Why volunteer for the job?
For LUCIR, that principle has to show up in the work itself. If an interview moves between English and Spanish, help the reader follow it. Caption the video. Explain a reference when it needs explaining. A reader should leave knowing more, without having been made to feel small for what they did not know.
And when somebody wants to reconnect, let them begin where they are. Recommend a song. Share a book. Invite them into an ordinary conversation without turning every sentence into a performance review. We can take the language seriously and still be generous with the people trying to reach it.
That is the kind of community I want to help build. If Spanish matters to us, let’s give people reasons to keep speaking it. The corrections will survive. So should the conversation.