Cajita:

The archival material chosen by the interviewee, my older sister, is the electronic dictionary. The electronic dictionary is an old device that has a keypad and screen specifically meant to look up English words for their definition. This oral history project deliberately honors my sister’s struggle with her language barrier back when she was an immigrant before naturalization, her gratitude for our grandma for this act of kindness, and her own strength and individuality to overcome her language barrier to assimilate to America by learning English. The interview is intentionally in English, so her full experience can be significantly understood with nothing lost in translation. In addition, my sister preferred to display that her English abilities are indeed fluent as a result of her growth and development in fluency and literacy in English. I used the guiding questions that were the most engaging to establish a path for the interview that my sister could be able to tell and elaborate on. It is not very typical in our family dynamic to have deep and emotionally driven conversations, so this conversation was very mind-opening of her experience with language and acculturation in the US; which holds similarity to the experience of other first generation Americans that came here as immigrants. I myself was born an American citizen, so English was very easy for me to adopt as a language compared to my older sister. I became more aware of the hardships of having a language barrier and adjusting to US society that I did not experience. This intimate interview was felt slightly out of place for me, but me and my sister were able to get over that hurdle, despite that a conversation like this would not have come naturally. I really understood every nuance and difficulty that my older sister had to go through in order to pave the way for herself and my family simultaneously. I was not surprised at the amount of mental baggage she had and how dissonant it is from my life. Still, I had an interest in her life because it is different from mine. I want people to be able to understand this bilingual experience and I hope I represented the experience of bilingual people well in this conversation because I think the difficulties of the bilingual experience aren’t seen.