when I was a kid. I grew up in San Diego, on the border with Tijuana, with a Mexican dad and a Puerto Rican mom. Spanish was my first language. But I… - Jean Guerrero
" "when I was a kid. I grew up in San Diego, on the border with Tijuana, with a Mexican dad and a Puerto Rican mom. Spanish was my first language. But I went to a private Episcopalian elementary school, where it was against the rules to speak Spanish. You know, the teachers referred to me as Jean Guerrero. And if we were caught speaking Spanish, we had to stay in detention and we had to write, I will not speak Spanish, I will not speak Spanish a hundred times. This was during a period of intense anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant hate in California. And, you know, I wanted to please the teachers. I knew how much my mom was sacrificing for me to go to that school. She - at that point, my parents had split up. And she was a single mom. There was a struggle for her. And I just - I wanted to do well in school. And so I internalized, you know, the teacher's disdain for Spanish. I internalized this idea of my language, my parents' language as being delinquent. And I mostly renounced Spanish. And I adopted that identity as Jean Guerrero.
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About Jean Guerrero
Jean Carolyn Guerrero (born March 31, 1988) is an investigative journalist, author, essayist, columnist and former foreign correspondent. She is the author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir and Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Her essay "My Father Says He's a 'Targeted Individual.' Maybe We All Are" was selected for The Best American Essays anthology of 2019.
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Jean Carolyn Guerrero
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Additional quotes by Jean Guerrero
I’ve been following one family that, a father had his one year-old baby taken away from him months ago and just [a week ago] he was reunited finally, after eight months in detention. So I followed that story. We put out the story of their reunification but it’s like the struggle for the family is nowhere near over. The little boy is severely traumatized because he was kept in a tender age facility that has since closed for more than a thousand abuses ranging from inappropriate sexual contact between staff and the children to harsh punishment. It’s incredible, so I’ve been following the reunification of families, in particular this one family that has been so traumatized. I don’t know if you saw the question about “where are the girls,” because the government was conducting tours of child migrant shelters but nowhere were the girls visible. So I found one the girls’ shelter in San Diego and I put out a story on that and now I’m finding another one and it’s just never ending. It’s just crazy.
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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.
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