Spanglish

You've got to learn a little bit of Spanish no matter what, because we are bilingual here, setting aside the politics issues.

We speak what my professor used to call Spanglish.

He had to import his mother to come and stay with his children when they were little.

He said when his little boy wandered in and said, yo, flyo, and made the...

Maybe it might help with like, you know, identity and whatnot.

But when people, when people talk to me here in the States about like, oh, well, what language does Barbados speak? I'm like, Spanglish.

You know, I like, we have our, I, but I don't, I don't say like we speak broken English.

I say we have our own like Creole, you know, like we have words and we have words that exist primarily in Barbados or in like the region.

Matias, Antonio, Augusto, Carlos.

Even though you lapse into Spanglish, I can pronounce all of your names.

That makes them different than these other names.

Well, because you're a skilled broadcaster of great renown.

Yeah, I'm from Minnesota, so it probably didn't come off as smooth as I'd hoped.

I'm sorry, I only have Spanglish, dude.

I can't speak Spanish either, so.

Oh, man, I love it.

You speak Spanish to the forwards.

I mean, how often in the middle of a game do you find that you're actually speaking like Spanglish or Sprench or some combination because you can't

remember which one you're supposed to be yelling? Actually, it didn't happen yet.

Weirdly, it didn't happen by mixed languages.

from the early 80s.

And we thought about sort of Spanglish.

Rico Suave was something we're like, okay.

And then of course, modern, it's K-pop, right? Like they effortlessly switch between English and Korean lyrics.

And then the second step is to help our community come to voice, to give them speech, to give them access, a platform to have a voice as a political phenomenon, as a political act.

I think particularly as well when I was chatting with Nathalia and with her book of course being I think it was the first Spanglish novel ever published in Australia language particularly when she kind of dissects the colonial elements within there is such a major part of it and I love that idea of that act of moving from silence to speech that is such a key part of the sweatshop literacy movement.

And I also want to say, I appreciate in a lot of all your work, you have focused very, very heavily on Western Sydney, because there are so many conceptions about Western Sydney.

You know, people make comments and assumptions about such a large place that often, let's call it a spade a spade, can be rooted in derogatory or outdated assumptions about the West.