My dad was one of fourteen.
My Mama Minga—his mother—was widowed when he was just four.
For my dad, poverty meant begging for change; eating not-yet-ripe mangoes or plantains to quiet the growl in his stomach; or sucking on raw caña because the sugar gave him a boost of empty-calorie energy.
It also meant having one pair of shoes shared between the three youngest boys. Like a relay, the shoes were passed between them: whoever had the shoes went to school that day; the other two went out to beg for money.
So my dad made it through third grade—barely—only attending every third day.
Spanish was his mother tongue. Yes, it is the language of the colonizer, and if the international rise of Bad Bunny has taught the world anything, it’s this: we don’t speak Spanish in Puerto Rico. We speak Boricua.
The accent. The slang. The Taíno words—some of which made it into Spanish and English vocabulary, and are words you use today: bar-b-que, manatee, hurricane, hammock. You’re welcome.
Boricua is the language my dad dreamed in—the one that held his feelings and the way he understood the world. Despite leaving behind his beloved island and community at 17, Boricua kept him close to his mother and the land that grew him.
And even though my sisters and I were born in the U.S., my dad wanted to connect us to his world—to our heritage—through language.
I can still see the little “school” he set up in our garage in Detroit: a chalkboard, a piece of chalk, and my dad teaching my older sister and me the words and phrases he recalled from his own sporadic school lessons.
Despite his limited literacy, my dad shared all that he knew and held precious with us.
And I wanted no part of it.
I rejected Boricua.
By five, I’d already internalized that English is the language of power. I’d already understood that assimilation looked like safety.
That’s how language loss begins for so many of us—not with forgetting, but with being trained to devalue and reject. Language oppression teaches us that some languages are “better than” others.
The result?
Every 14 days, the world loses a language.
Not a vocabulary list. Not a set of sounds.
An entire language.
That combination of sounds and tones that holds the knowledge of a people—often representing hundreds, if not thousands, of years of knowing, being, and understanding—is slowly reduced until one last surviving native speaker simply has no one else to speak with. And the language just stops being spoken.
What do we lose?
A way a people calls and remembers itself.
A way of naming rain.
A way of calling a child home.
A way of speaking to the ancestors, to the plants, to the body, to children, to the land.
It can’t be fully measured or understood, but I’m going to ask you to try to imagine. Imagine you have no one else to speak with in your language. Imagine what would disappear from the planet. Imagine what would disappear from you.
Language loss is never neutral. It’s tied to colonization, displacement, and genocide. It’s intertwined with policies that punished children for speaking the words of their grandparents—strategies meant to sever people from land, memory, ceremony, and one another.
When a language dies, more than words disappear:
- memory gets interrupted
- local knowledge becomes harder to pass on
- people can lose the language they heard in their mother’s womb
- whole communities are forced to survive in the language of those who harmed them
Indigenous Peoples make up less than 6% of the global population, yet Indigenous languages account for more than 4,000 of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages spoken today.
Which means: when we talk about language loss, we’re talking about primarily the disappearance of Indigenous languages. If current trends continue, much of that loss will be replaced by three imperial languages: Mandarin, Spanish, and English.
I think about languages, mostly indigenous, that were spoken in my own family: the ones spoken fluently, the ones half-remembered, the ones we heard at the stove, in prayer, in scolding, in laughter.
All except English remain. And Spanish…is the one being reclaimed. 😭
I think about how language recovery begins:
A word.
A song.
A child learning what their grandmother was told to hide.
A community refusing to let the dominant culture be the only one that gets to name the world.
That refusal is sacred.
Fortified with 7 years of the best Spanish I could learn in US public schools and university, I went to live and study in my dad’s homeland at 21. For six months, I was immersed not only in Boricua, but in family and community—and all the ways that language opens connection, to others and to myself.
I returned to live on that island in the years that followed, sometimes for as little as 6 weeks, once for as long as 9 months. My patterns of assimilation were disrupted and, through my family and my growing confidence with Boricua (despite my many errors and missteps), I found my way back to cultural celebrations, ecological and medicinal knowledge, stories of weather and migration, and ways of understanding grief, belonging, reciprocity, and joy.
Little did I know at that time: when my papi transitioned to ancestor in December 2013, he would return to his mother tongue.
What a sacred gift—to be with him in what had become a language we both now shared.
In his final hours, when the pain of his aggressive cancer urged him to call out to his mother for relief, he did so in Boricua. I was able to offer him solace and comfort in Boricua, and his body visibly relaxed.
When we protect indigenous languages, we protect relationship.
We protect memory.
We protect the possibility of a future that doesn’t require forgetting.
This is the work of social transformation too: listening deeply enough to hear beyond what dominant culture trained us to miss, and standing alongside the people, languages, and lineages the world tried to erase.