In my 22 years in Mexico, I’ve happened upon a familiar scene several times. It involves a family with one Mexican parent and one foreign parent. There are children, or perhaps just one.
The scenario, as you might have implied from the title, involves trying to teach your child English. And though the foreign parent, usually English-speaking, may speak to me in English, it’s Spanish with their kids. “Oh, they understand English, they just won’t speak it.
” Oh, dear. How does this happen? Most of the times I’ve witnessed this dynamic, the father is the foreigner, and the mother, Mexican. Obviously, I’ve got a theory — for my generation of immigrants and older, at least.
The profile of young men who would come to Mexico before it was cool tended toward counter-culture hippie types. And if they stayed, they typically wound up with one of two types of women. The first, shy, sweet and unassuming; the second, also counterculture hippies.
And to be a counter-culture hippie in Mexico often means to reject, loudly, imperialism from the north. One easy way to do that is to actively resist the imposition of their language and culture. As an added bonus, avoiding the hard work of learning a language gets rebranded as activism.
But like humans everywhere, we’re charming, and sometimes even get people to fall in love with and marry us. Foreign men especially get huge returns on at least attempting to speak the language. People may be impressed by foreign women who learn Sp.
