Isana Santiz

As a child I felt like my home was an embassy. Outside of our house, I went to American public schools, everything was English, my friends, surrounding culture was 90s / Y2K / early 2000 economy, but as soon as I stepped through the threshold it was all Spanish: food, subtitled tv, family together all the time. And yes, that chaotic sentence you just read, was really how it felt to flip flop between my two worlds.
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Learning to speak two languages at a time was mis-mash of confusion as I struggled in early school to even learn to read / write. There wasn't a clear categorization of "Spanish" and "English" it was all one language to me. Unfortunately, no one accepted Spanglish and to complicate it more, I found out I was neurodivergent in a manner that made traditional learning an effort. Instead of being left behind, my teachers were amazing and worked with my parents to ensure that I could learn. I was taught to read and then write by using Read Along Books (audiobooks with physical books that would ding every time you needed to turn the next page).
 
My teachers figured if I knew what a word sounded and looked like in a sentence I could then mimic and use it to write. Think if you had to learn to read hieroglyphics, this is how it felt, picturing a word as a symbol and learning what it meant. During that time something unexpected happened and I began to love reading. I would spend every minute I could in the library, discovering worlds that were as diverse as my own and characters who learned how to flow between worlds (some quite literally)!
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Though I was never perfect in school and sometimes still say things backwards or Spanglish, I will never forget that first time I actually read and understood that Silly Sally really did like walking backwards upside-down y rápido corren los carros, los carros del ferrocaril.
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My love of stories will always keep me going and as my mom likes to point out, "Te comes los libros" (poorly translated: You eat books). I will consume books and let my stories flow onto pages, for you dear reader, may you experience something that will inspire your daydreams as other authors have inspired mine.
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