Immigrant Case

As an immigrant that was born in Mexico and was brought to the United States when I was very young, my first taught language was Spanish. I was raised in a Spanish-speaking family. My mother only spoke Spanish when we came into the United States.

I was born in a small city in Mexico called Torreon. I couldn't really tell you much about it because I was too small to remember. According to my mom, it was a small city with local ranchers. Everyone was poor and struggled to make ends meet. Children would walk the streets barefoot, because their families could not afford shoes. Paleteros, or ice-cream men would walk the dirt streets trying to sell ice-cream to be able to provide for their families.

I don't remember when I came into the United States, but according to my mom "solo tenia quatro meses" I was only four months old. My mom and dad divorced when I was young. My mother wanted to purse the American dream. You know the two story house with a two car garage, a green lawn, and a white picket fence. So she made the journey and made it into the Land of the Free, and the home of the brave.

As I got older, I started elementary school. By that age I had already picked up English pretty well. I went into kindergarten knowing English, but still talked with an accent. Some kids would make fun of me because of the way I spoke. I mean what did they expect? I was Mexican, and my mom only knew Spanish. As years went by, I started picking up English more and more. My accent went away and I knew English perfectly. All my friends only spoke English. My brother also learned English. By the time you knew it we were speaking English at home more and more.

Soon after coming to the United States, my mom met my step dad. He was from Lubbock, Texas and spoke both English and Spanish. A couple years later they ended up getting married and having my little brother and little sister. When I reached fifth grade, I would rarely speak Spanish, even to my parents. Spanish were my mom and dad. All of us kids only spoke I remember sitting around the dinner table and my mom asking me, " Como estuvo tu dia?" In English that meant how was your day. I replied to her in English. Going on about how my day went good and letting her know I got a good grade on my test. Throughout passing years English was my primary language. The English was dominant in my life. Believe it or not I actually started to forget how to speak Spanish I hardly spoke it, and I did not know how to write it, I am guessing like everything else, if u don't use it you lose it.

One day my grandma had visited from Mexico. She heard all of us kids talking in English to each other and when my mom would ask us a question or talk to us, we would reply in English. She could not stand the fact that we had lost our fluency in Spanish. She told me bersides the fact that Spanish was my native tongue, "El que habla dos idiomas vale por dos," a saying in Spanish that means a person who speaks two languages is worth two. She also told me that because