Latinx, Hispanic creatives explain how being bilingual is a ‘superpower’ at In The Know by Yahoo’s annual event
In The Know by Yahoo hosted its third annual Latinx and Hispanic Changemakers event on Sept. 26 in New York City with a panel of creative professionals. Victor’s Cafe, a family-owned-and-operated restaurant founded by two Cuban immigrants in 1963, was the setting for the night.
Moderating the panel this year was actress and drag performer Chiquitita, who has used the stage to help amplify LGBTQ voices since she was crowned Miss Bushwig in 2018. Chiquitita welcomed Kayla Maria G, an Afro-Latina dancer and model with a limb difference, actor and comedian Gadiel Del Orbe and mixed-media artist Bianca Romero to join her in conversation surrounding cultural identity and pursuing their careers.
All four creatives grew up in bilingual households, which Del Orbe called “a superpower.”
“Language is what creates us as human beings, right? And we are separated always by these groups of languages,” he continued. “I think in the United States, they always tell us to assimilate and tone ourselves down, right? And I hated that growing up.”
Kayla agreed with the sentiment and said she is in a unique position within her own family since she is the only one in her generation who can speak Spanish. But more importantly, her being bilingual has opened up the type of students she can accept into her classes.
“It’s hard to come into a country where you don’t know the language, so it can be a little terrifying walking into a new space and not knowing how to connect with people,” she said. “I love being able to just kind of speak to people in their language who just want to express themselves and dance and be able to share.”
Romero, who is a first-generation American and part Korean, part Spanish, called back to Del Orbe’s point about assimilating. For her, growing up, she didn’t learn either language her parents spoke, and her parents, who spoke different native languages, used English as common ground.
“We were all kind of like a melting pot of learning English together [when I was a] kid,” she said of her upbringing. “I am feeling that empowerment in working on being trilingual now … it does feel like I’m gaining kind of like my heritage back.”
Feeling like she’s part of three cultures, Romero also brought up never feeling like she fit into a box.
“The minute I stepped outside my house, people would always be like, ‘Are you this or are you this or are you this or are you this?’ Or constantly telling me I have to pick one thing,” she said. “There was no ‘other’ or ‘mixed race’ [option] until more recently, and I had no clue what to fill out for my SATs.”
Romero credits that for why, in her artwork, she always portrays people of color but never paints skin tones.
“I really try to encapsulate spirit and things, more so than skin tone,” she said.
Kayla, who is Afro-Latina, agreed with Romero about other people trying to define her by one thing. During the Black Lives Matter movement, Kayla said, she felt like she was being told she couldn’t “relate” to it.
“I felt like a lot of the situations that were occurring [in 2020] really resonated with me, and I realized that a lot of those situations, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to relate to them, even though I’ve been in similar situations as those,” she told the crowd. “You can tell me no, but at the end of the day, that’s what I am, you — I’m Peruvian, I’m Dominican, I’m Puerto Rican.”
Kayla channels that defiance into her dance too. She competes in all forms of dance despite the fact that, as an Afro-Latina performer with a limb difference, she knows people don’t immediately see she’s a dancer when they look at her.
“I love being able to create a space where people can discover who they are without society telling them to do that,” she concluded. “I’m proud of who I am and no one can really tell me otherwise.”
As a fellow performer, Chiquitita also felt audiences looked at her and expected something specific from her, depending on how they defined her.
“I’m forced to explain myself in any space that I enter because it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re this, you’re that, you’re this, you’re that,'” she said. “That can be either like through gender identity or even through identity politics when it comes to like, where you’re from. I think we can all in this room kind of relate to that, where we’ve been in spaces before where we tell people, ‘Well, what do I have to do to prove it to you?'”
“I feel like there’s a misconception of finding purpose,” Del Orbe responded. “I found my purpose within my people in everything that I do and everybody in every culture, whether you’re Black, white, Latino, whatever, we’re always trying to figure out what is our purpose. But we choose it in the moment when we figure out that we can choose it.”
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