Una de los mejores regalos de mi vida es haber crecido en una isla que habla español: Puerto Rico, archipiélago de memorias, territorio marcado por la historia, pero jamás arrebatado de su voz y de su lengua.
In 1898, after the Treaty of Paris, troops, flags, and a foreign language arrived. English was imposed as discipline, but Spanish remained as a root that cannot be uprooted.
Yo crecí hablando español. Mis recuerdos más íntimos están en ese idioma: jugando en la calle, haciendo amistades, enamorándome. Spanish is the language of my soul.
Years later, after studying film and launching my production company LabH Media, I moved to Los Angeles: another bilingual city where English and Spanish and many other languages live side by side.
The duality of needing to actively be bilingual is more like:
Habitar en lo doble,
Two channels at once,
en la tierra y en los cielos,
between nostalgia and a present full of magical realism.
Being bilingual is not just about translation. It’s about perspective.
Sometimes I write in English.
Aveces pienso en inglés o español.
And sometimes, I let them dance together: movement is another language, along with many others. Because a language is not determined only by speech; there are so many languages we are able to inhabit: movement, symbolic, artistic, historic, political.
When I think about my audience (who am i talking to) it is not confined to “Spanish speakers” or “English speakers.” My audience is anyone who has ever lived in between. Those who carry inside them not just two vocabularies, but entire landscapes, memories, songs, silences, movements, and ways of belonging.
The richness of discovering there is always another way to say I love you, I remember, I am here.
This is the audience I imagine: not defined by geography, languages or grammar, but by the courage to carry more than one world inside their voice.
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