Accent

I’m halfway through reading Solito: A Memoir by Javier Zamora, and one of the things I find fascinating about the story is how young Javier has to constantly monitor his accent.

Zamora was born in El Salvador, and Solito recounts how he came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor to join his parents when he was nine. Traveling with a half dozen other migrants who are guided by a series of coyotes, young Javier and his companions are told to “speak Mexican” so authorities won’t suspect their Mexican paperwork is fake.

To non-Spanish speakers, all Spanish might sound the same, but Mexicans can tell by accent and vocabulary whether a person is a fellow resident or a migrant passing through from Central America. At one point, young Javier almost blows the group’s cover by using the wrong word to ask a taco vendor for a drinking straw. Given how far the group has traveled and how many hardships they have endured, it’s sobering to realize everything can be ruined by a simple slip of the tongue.

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In my first-year classes at both Framingham State and Babson, we start with five minutes of freewriting. Students are free to write about whatever they’d like, but I post three random words to give students a nudge if they have nothing else to write about.

Today’s post comes from yesterday’s five-minute entry in response to the word “Accent.”