My Experience with the Spanish Major

As a freshman at UMass Amherst, I did not have plans of using Spanish as a big part of my life moving forward. I knew Spanish, with two grandparents from the Basque Country in the north of Spain and a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins still living there and keeping in touch, I had heard the language a lot growing up and had a sufficient enough grasp on it to take honors and AP classes throughout high school. It was a language that I like to pull out when around my friends, mostly white and middle class like me, to show off the fact that I was in some way more “cultured” than them, whatever that means. But my plans at UMass were not dependent on in, and certainly not my plans afterwards. I figured I could take classes, minor in it, and have it as a bonus on my resume, sure, but Political Science was really interested me, and whatever I could use that for later.

Sophomore year was when I actually switched my primary major to Spanish, and put Political Science as my secondary. Honestly, though, even at this point it wasn’t because I fully understood or appreciated the major for what it was, it was for reasons of convenience.  I had accidentally taken Spanish Junior Writing freshman year, and seeing as the Spanish major was not much more work than the Spanish minor, I figured I would make it my primary major so  that I wouldn’t have to take junior writing again. This was a decision made for different reasons, but it did ultimately change the course of my university career greatly. I learned over the years and through all of my courses, as did many other people judging on the blogs that I have already read, that it is not a major designed around learning the language. Although language is a very important part of the major, and it is what is greatly focused on the early classes, it is merely a part of a greater learning experience. I learned that language is just a tool to understanding cultures.

In my Spanish studies here at UMass, I learned more about people than about Spanish. As Professor Marentes says, if you want to learn Spanish, buy Rosetta Stone. What I have learned in my time here has been much more valuable than that. I have, in a way, started to shed some of my ignorance towards South and Central America as well as the large and wholly influential Latino population in the United States and even here in Massachusetts. What used to be one large homogeneous group to me before is now beginning to take shape as many rich and diverse populations of people who deserve the understanding that I am only starting to appreciate.

One thing I thought that O wanted to do later in my life was study law and maybe take the BAR and try my hand at it. I knew I would shy away from criminal law, and that left me wondering what I really wanted to do with my life. In 2013, I worked for some time at a law firm in South Boston that deals exclusively with Personal Injury and Workers Compensation law. The attorney that I was working for was married to a Mexican woman and had a daughter who was raised on Mexican tradition. Although he didn’t speak Spanish and wasn’t Latino in any way himself, he took it upon himself to try and be a voice for the lower class, often ignored Latino laborers in the city, often taking cases that many other attorneys would not take and even working at well below the price of other law firms just so that people could attain his services more easily.

It happens that in Workers Comp. specifically, many people who file are lower class and in many cases, are Latinos. This is because you are more likely to get hurt at work if your occupation is blue collar, than if you are in an office all day, and many of the blue collar laborers who cannot afford the more expensive attorney services are Latino, a lot of the times they are new to the country, and occasionally they are not even documented citizens. These are the people that companies and employers try to take advantage of.

It was in these law offices that I understood what I wanted to do; I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the attorney that I had been working for. It was my classes at UMass that gave me a greater appreciation and the beginning of an understanding of these communities living in Boston and the rest of the state. A combination of my major and my time employed with this particular attorney opened my eyes to a whole new (to me) population. This was very profound.

My Spanish major taught me Spanish, but it also taught me more than that, it taught me about the people that speak it. It taught me about different types of cultural interactions, about community learning and service learning and appreciating other cultures, even sometimes throughout my studies: non Spanish speaking cultures. It taught me about the people living in Mexico, in the Caribbean, in Central America, in South America, in Spain, and even in the US, in Boston, in Lawrence, in Holyoke. Spanish is a language, but language is a key, or just one part of a key, that unlocks cultural understanding and a whole new worldview.

I would like to go into law still; immigration law. I would like to complete and apply my Spanish major, not just the language, but the whole major, to whatever I do end up doing with my life. The fact that I didn’t even plan on majoring in it and now I plan on applying it to the rest of my life should speak to influence that it has had on me.