My name is Carmen Zapata. I am eleven years old. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, with mi familia, which consists of mi madre y padre, mi hermanas Cecelia and Carina, and mi hermano Antonio, who are all younger than me.

If you were to come to my house (mi casa), you'd think you were in Mexico City, Mexico, instead of in Nashville, Tennessee, because Spanish is the main language spoken in our house. You see, my mother, Yolanda, doesn't speak any English. Now, papi and my brother and sisters all speak English (I do too), but mami doesn't understand it at all (let alone, speak it). She feels more comfortable conversing in her native Spanish.

Now, this causes major problems because mami can't get a better-paying job, and she gets a lot of rude stares from people whenever we are in public and they hear us speaking en espanol instead of in English. I can't tell you how many times people have told us to go back to Mexico or learn English. Such accusations make me cry.

Whenever I go to the store or to the doctor's office, I often have to act as an interpretor for my mother, or I ask if they have the form in Spanish. Somtimes I wonder if I am the grown up because my mother feels embarrassed about her lack of English skills. When she gets embarrassed, she calls herself "el stuoida" and says she wishes she'd never left Mexico to come to America. Sometimes she gets so upset she'll cry, and then I feel horrible to see her so triste.

Sometimes kids at mi  escuela (my school) will pick on me because of my mom, plus the fact that I am Mexicana. That hurts, too. Mami left Mexico for America because the economy there is so bad, and there are many more opportunities for women here. In Mexico, you are either filthy, stinking rich, or eles you are dirt-poor: there is no happy in-between. If you don't have a decent education, the odds are even less. Enter mi madre. She left school in the fifth grade to take care of her family: she is one of twenty-five! With that many mouths to feed, you don't have good odds of surviving in a huge city like Mexico City.

We came to Tennessee last year after living a few years in Texas, in Dallas. I like it better here (the weather is much nicer, for one thing), but I hope people will learn to accept us. It's not my fault my mom won't learn English. It's her choice to learn it or not. She chooses not to because as I said earlier in this story, English es muy deficil for her. She feels ashamed, and she doesn't want pepole to laugh at her. Yet people do, and they also say mean, terrible things about her being from Mexico, which, in turn, makes me feel ashamed of my Latina heritage.

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