Me and my accent … sometimes it's good to sound different

Edgar Sandoval

By Edgar Sandoval
Summer 1999 Scholar

Posted: April 18, 2000

I was never in denial. I swear. At least, I didn't think I was. I always knew I was different, but I never knew just how different until I came to Los Angeles.

Yes, I have an accent. An obvious accent. So obvious that sometimes people joke about me becoming a TV reporter, and I say the only way that could happen is with subtitles.

I became painfully aware of how obvious my accent is when I visited my 26-year-old aunt here in Los Angeles. She was offered a position as a guest speaker at a local museum, she said. The pay and the hours were good. But she turned down the offer.

I hab en axen, she told me. I wuld fil embaraz.

Ever since that day, I have noticed that I hab en axen, too. Do I fil embaraz?

Sometimes. I notice that people notice. They react. Just about every time I say my name, people ask: "Where are you from?"

"Texas," I say.

"Yes, but where are you REALLY from?"

And then I have to explain my entire story: Born in L.A., raised in Mexico, back here now, accent in tow. Only, sometimes I make this story more dramatic: Poor me, I came to the States when I was a sophomore in high school and could not communicate with my classmates. Sometimes I wondered if they thought I was mute. By my last year in high school, I was much more fluent in English. But it wasn't easy, and I still ended up with an accent.

People with accents can be a rarity, depending on where you are. When I visit the busy, colorful streets of the east and south sides of Los Angeles, I look and talk like most people I see.

"Hi. Huw ere ya?" I ask my cousin.

"Gud, ya?"

And the conversations go on, in English, because, after all, we are in the United States, even though our elders sometimes glare at us with looks that say, "You're forgetting your culture!"

But at work, in the Los Angeles Times newsroom, I'm most certainly a rarity. The paper employs about 10 percent Latinos in its editorial department. Many are native English speakers. Maybe it's just me, but I feel that I occupy a lower level of literacy than they do. They know the language upside down. I just pretend I do.

And I do it with an accent.

Talk about diversity among the diverse.

For one thing, you just can't just go around talking freely without taking great care not to mix up words like "meeting" and "mating," "extra" and "extract" and "tongs" and "tongues."

And whether I actually am or not, I feel different. My Latino colleagues (and other co-workers of color as well) talk about Broadway musicals they memorized as children. They talk about growing up watching cartoons I never even heard of. They remember this strange tale about a nanny who flew with the help of an umbrella, Mary Poppins. American culture at its best.

Marry Pupinz?

No, Edgar: Mary Poppins. Never heard of her?

No. But, seriously, a bunch of kids watching a silly movie about a woman who sings all darn day, flying around with an umbrella? Poor kids, I say to myself. What happened to playing with marbles in the mud on the streets?

My colleagues look shocked.

It's not that I think any one of us is better or worse than the other. It's just that we are different from each other. They are Americans of color, in my eyes, as American as apple pie. I am an American immigrant (with an accent!), even though I have the papers that say I was born right here in the United States 24 years ago.

Actually, I tell them, I was born, really born, in the early 1990s when I moved back here.

Most of the time, my Hispanic colleagues and I converse in English, except for an occasional word in Spanish. When I tell my fellow Latino MetPro interns a joke in Spanish, often they don't see why it's so funny. For example: Si la foto se revela .. .es por que no quiere trabajar? (Revelar can mean to rebel or to develop, as in developing film. So this is a joke/trick question: If the film (gets developed /rebels) is it because it does not want to work anymore?)

Native Spanish speakers would get this joke, I insist.

By insisting, I have opened my mouth. And the fact that I sound different when I open my mouth reminds me of how different we are.

They are Americans. I am an American foreigner.

But, hey, it's good to be different in the workplace.

A little more mix of colors, culture, social classes and accents would make the newsroom a much more interesting place.

In the meantime, I enjoy metin' peuple diffarant than mi.

Edgar Sandoval was a Summer 1999 Scholar who interned at The Tennessean in Nashville. He was interning at the Los Angeles Times when he wrote this column. Reach him at EdJSandoval@aol.com.

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