There's many valid and powerful ways to show pride in our cultures and where we come from. - Jean Guerrero

I had received some hatred before, but it was nothing compared to what came after my book was - my book about Stephen Miller was published, where people were sending me racial slurs, telling me that I should be deported to Mexico, you know, very much attacking my family and, like, who - where I come from. And so that is what made me all of a sudden want to say my name correctly here in the United States.

she came from Puerto Rico, where they also have, you know, this English language supremacy, like, decades of U.S. colonial policies that cast English as a superior language. You know, this was a school where a majority of the kids were Mexican American or children of immigrants. And they, you know, the mostly white teachers, they wanted us to learn English as quickly as possible. So the parents at the time thought that this was a good thing, that it would result in us, you know, being bilingual and knowing English faster. But what happened is, like, this ended up in many cases supplanting our native language.

This internalized English language supremacy, like, what it did was like it created, like, a real - I don't know - like, this almost, like, self-hatred, where I didn't understand what had happened until many years later, when I was reading the Mexican author Reyna Granda, who writes about subtractive bilingualism and how, you know, this practice of forcing children to stop speaking their native language and to see it as something bad also causes children to internalize this disdain, you know, the dominant white culture's disdain for their own culture and their own selves. And for me, what that did is it created a lot of self-destructive behavior where I was, you know, cutting my wrists as a teenager. I was, you know, binge drinking, drug abuse, a lot of self-destructive behavior. And then also, my mother, when she would make mistakes in English, you know, I would correct her. And I would say really, you know, monstrous things like learn English. And this is something that, you know, I look back on with, like, an immense amount of pain. And it wasn't something that I was able to fully confront until I saw Reyna Grande talking about this - internalizing this disdain for her mother.