Picza por plis! English or Spanish…or Both?

As I was growing up, my parents taught me many lessons and values. One of these was the importance of keeping Spanish and English separate. In other words, speak one or the other, but never “Spanglish.” They considered this hybrid language improper because they felt it would deteriorate our skills in both languages and encourage bad grammar and spelling.

My parents, who had grown up in Aguascalientes and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s (a couple years before I was born) strongly wanted me to preserve my native language. The first language I learned to read and write in was Spanish. We had moved back to Mexico in the early 1980s, where I attended kindergarten, but we returned to the U.S. several years later for economic reasons.

Read the rest of the original article published in LatinoMetro.