As a child, my Portuguese identity was a significant part of my life. I grew up making wine with Avô in his basement, I spent time at the Holy Ghost Club making malasadas with my Avó’s friends, and, like any Portuguese child growing up, I was fed a lot of delicious food. And while I could understand Portuguese fairly well, I was never able to speak it. Instead, when spoken to in Portuguese, I would always respond in English. And while I would like to blame it on my surroundings (as I was never exposed to it in my Massachusetts elementary school, and my mother never forced me to speak it), I knew it was entirely my fault for not speaking the language. As I reached middle school, my parents gave me the option to take a Portuguese 101 class at my local community college and I decided to give it a go. After sitting through classes surrounded by people twice my age, I was finally able to spark the language within me, and pretty soon, I was speaking to everyone in my family in Portuguese (after being surrounded by it my whole life, it came to me fairly easily). I never used to consider the Portuguese an important aspect of my life, but when I was in high school, everything changed.

When it was time to choose a language to take, I decided on Latin – something that I wouldn’t need to speak, and overall an easy class. While this worked well for a few years, I quickly became bored and wanted another language to learn, so I turned to Spanish. In big part to the Portuguese I spoke with my family, I was able to become the fastest Spanish learner in my high school, and I skipped two levels throughout my high school years. After Spanish, I added French too, being one of only a handful of students in my high school’s history to take all 3 languages offered at the same time. It was during my time in high school when I realized I wanted to make this my career, and I started looking at colleges that offered degrees in Spanish, as Spanish was the most practical language to get a well paying job in.

After deciding on UMass as the college I would attend, I quickly found a whole group of students who not only spoke many different languages like me, but also who had a true passion for them. I lived in a RAP my freshman year in Thatcher where I lived with some of the kindest and most globally aware people I have ever met. I took some classes in Catalan, which opened my eyes to the beautiful world of Catalonia, while at the same time diversifying the Spanish classes I was taking. The Spanish classes I have taken have also helped me with my Portuguese, as a lot of the words are similar enough that my Portuguese family knows what I mean when I say a word in Spanish to them. Overall, growing up Portuguese has significantly helped me not only with deciding what career I will take, but also with the language learning process and the structure of romance languages.