If you know me, chances are you know that I am Polish. I flaunt my heritage so that people are forced to assume that I am proud of it. Walk past my apartment, and you’ll hear patriotic Polish ballads blasting as I study under my Polish map of the world, wearing my Polish soccer scarf. Yeah, I am that Polish.

Yet, this confidence in the culture of my family’s motherland has just recently become a defining trait of mine. As a child, I was paralyzingly embarrassed by the foreignness of my family. English is not my first language; I was a monolingual Polish speaker until age five upon integration into the American school system. I grew up with this absorbing focus on communication with people – more so with my frustration with my own inability to do so as well as my classmates. However, hearing and seeing my friends from the Latin@ community of my hometown speak to their families in Spanish changed my outlook on my own bilingualism, and my own dual-identity. I had always considered it as a disability of mine, and the structure of American school systems enforced that view. I was forced to skip ‘regular kid’ classes to go to a language therapist, and there was little support offered for cultural integration. I was terrified of making new friends, because I was not able to joke with classmates since I didn’t have the cultural background to understand the joke. Luckily, I did befriend some classmates, and a few of them came from Puerto Rican families. Upon seeing that other kids had a secret language like mine, I finally understood that being part of multiple cultures made me unique.

This realization did not immediately change my personality. I took more and more Spanish classes coming into high school and even in college, and this chance to regularly see the world from a different perspective affected me profoundly. So much of public school education teaches classes from a “white American” point of view, without focusing on the minority groups in the country, and often disregarding the existence of other (non-European) countries. I was tired of being taught to see Anglo-countries as the hero in the history of the world, when the history I had been learning from my Polish-immigrant parents differed enormously. The angrier at the state of America that I became, the more confident I became in flaunting my Polish heritage. Largely thanks to the Spanish and Honors courses I have taken at UMass, I have arrived at the understanding that my entitlement to two nationalities (American and Polish) can be a strength if only I choose to believe that it is. Specifically, I had the opportunity to analyze the nature of immigration and cultural assimilation of American immigrants, in both the Honors class called “Idea that Changed the World” and in an Honors writing course. The combination of researching current American policy towards immigration and a literary analysis of the distortion of identity experienced by all multi-cultural people produced my realization that a global identity should be a point of pride. By immersing myself in such literature and reading material in the Spanish Written and Oral Expression class, I finally appreciated that my own struggles with feeling lesser because I did not fit into an American English majority were mirrored by the experiences of many in the Latin@ community.

Despite the minority status of Latin@s in America, the unity of the people and drive to change the institutionalized biases of this country is inspiring to me. Moreover, my own encounters with the skew of the system towards monolingual English speakers has driven my career choice. Communication -and language- is a cornerstone to our understanding of being human. The loss of this ability is heartbreaking, and the Speech-Language Pathology field is dedicated to the help of regaining it. Unfortunately, there is a huge lack of research and lack of bilingual professionals able to help the population of people with speech-language disorders. I am dual majoring in Communication Disorders and Spanish so that I can help rectify this deficiency in America. But while my studies of Speech Pathology have taught me valuable treatment skills, my journey thus far as a Spanish major has been truly invaluable, both to my self-perception and to my view of the world at large. I am awfully excited to be studying abroad in Spain next year, which I expect will bring its own set of cultural upsets and triumphs. Furthermore, I hope to participate in an Integrative Experience too during my last year at UMass.

Majoring in Spanish is more than learning the language, and more than learning about cultures. Language is a key to understanding humanity, as it innervates every aspect of being human: from self-identity to perception of the world at large. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to acquire Spanish and with it a better understanding of the forces that drive cultural landscape.