“Around the World with Narratives” by Grecia Catalan was the literary narrative that captivated me the most because Spanish is also my first language. I grew up in the Dominican Republic where I was taught Spanish and was learning French in school. My father was very passionate about Romance languages and therefore he made sure that my brother and I read Spanish literature at a young age. I remember my father giving me Lazarillo de Tormes, a difficult Spanish novella written by an anonymous author. He made a great emphasis in that we needed to learn and understand Spanish. The people think that Spanish is easy but it is a difficult language with myriad rules, particularly, when learning Cervantes. My father always said, “observe where the author adds the commas and closely look at the vocabulary words.” I mention this because Spanish is different than English and as Catalan states, people are illiterate when learning another language. When I was learning English I felt illiterate because of my familiarity with Spanish and French, which both of my parents speak. For whatever reason, I always think in Spanish and when I have to I think in English. This reminds me of the narrative “Always Living in Spanish” by Agosin were she mentions that Spanish to her is home whereas English is foreign. I feel the exact same way because of my familiarity with Spanish and because it represents my home.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.