The Language of Children

"I waved my hands in the air, gesticulating, giving them instructions in this new language that I was certain they could understand but that they almost certainly couldn't," writes Marcelo Hernadez Castillo, on page 214 of his memoir, Children of the Land. "They laughed and I laughed with them because we were children and that was what children did."

Language centers heavily in Castillo's memoir for both obvious and subtle reasons. As a child who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border with his parents at a young age, he had to quickly become bilingual to fit in at his new kindergarten. He writes of how he didn't understand the language he heard his teacher or the musician who visited his class speaking, how he assumed that any sound he made that wasn't natural to him must be English because English was the "other" that anything new or foreign consisted of. His mother, he tells us, doesn't know any English even after raising all of her children in America, and his father understands some but doesn't know how to speak it.

More subtle moments center on love, abuse, and apology. Castillo also tells us about how apologies can be turned into expressions of gratitude, shifting the emotions we feel with the language we use. We see other moments like this, when Castillo both is and isn't guarded about how he writes of the relationship he has with his father, one that we learn is built on both love and fear due to the abuse he faced as a child. But more than just being a vehicle to understand Castillo's journey throughout the memoir, language serves as a bridge between the borders of time in the text. We see how his bilingualism changed him as an adult, and how it was, when it first started to come into existence, a moment of joy for him as a child, as he became more able to understand the new world around him.

That he so "quickly" became bilingual, as opposed to his parents' struggle with English, is no surprise, as children learn languages with greater ease than adults do. When he writes about his impromptu speech to the children outside his apartment, Castillo is writing about his own language acquisition. But this moment is also where we can see Castillo, in retrospect, starting to move away from his parents and the culture that they grew up with. It's a moment of separation, where one bridge starts to form as another begins to collapse.

Discussion Questions:
1. Given what we know about Castillo's father and mother, how do you think Castillo's bilingualism affected with his relationships with his parents as it further developed?
2. How do you think the text would change if Castillo had written it in a style similar to Anzaldua's "How to Tame a Wild Tongue", with Spanish and English intermixed?