America Doesn’t Need an Official Language

I was 3 years old the first time I mixed up Spanish and English. It would not be the last.

It was 1975, and my family had recently migrated from Peru to Northern California. Shortly after our arrival, according to Lozada lore, I asked my parents and older sisters, “¿Vamos a tener todo lo sinisario?,” meaning, “Will we have everything we need?”

Except I garbled the word “necesario,” coming up with the nonsense word “sinisario.” Everyone chuckled, so I tried to defend myself. “Es que yo no sé inglés,” I said. (“It’s that I don’t know English.”) That made everyone laugh harder, because, of course, my mistake had been in Spanish.