Interpretations of a Bilingual Life

"If you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language." -Gloria Anzaldua

About The Blog

Back in 2007 I wrote the following:

My intentions in creating a blog stems from my interest in pursuing a doctoral degree in the next few years! This blog shall serve as a vehicle that will allow my thoughts about bilingual/bicultural education to flourish and develop to what eventually will be my dissertation! I hope that I can create honest and intellectual conversations with fellow bloggers who might have an interest in what I am posting.

Now that it is 2020:

What an incredible multilingual journey this blog has been! I went from blogging about my interest in being bilingual, raising a bilingual child and another multilingual child, completing a doctorate in bilingual and bicultural education to starting a tenure-track job focused on bilingual education and bilingualism. I would do it all over again! I intend on continuing to write about MY interpretations of a bilingual life. Specifically, how language intersects with class and race in places like the Central Coast of California where Mexico is a ~seven hour drive away. I am exploring other venues to share about bilingualism which includes local and national media, podcasts, guest posts, and consulting opportunities. If you are interested, please feel free to contact me at suzanne@mateus.com.

*Opinions are my own.

7 responses to “About The Blog”

Tracy Chou

May 22, 2010 at 9:01 pm

Hi Suzanne,

I am a sophomore majoring in Teaching Chinese as A Foreign Language in Mainland China. I happened to find your blog when I was collecting resources for my term paper writing. Your article about ‘surface culture’is truly enligntenning! Thanks.:)

Tracy

Reply
1. Marie Nubia-Feliciano
  
  August 4, 2016 at 5:05 pm
  
  Love your blog. I too value multilingualism and fight to maintain it in my children’s lives. It is truly the only 21st century skill that matters. As I tell my students, all knowledge does not arrive in English.
  
  Reply
Diana

May 22, 2012 at 3:41 pm

hi Suzanne,
i am so so excited to have found your blog– thanks to Spanglish baby. I too am raising (attempting to?) a trilingual (Spanish, French, English) baby! the number one most pressing concern of mine when i was pregnant wasn’t “am i going to breastfeed?” it was “my baby has to learn, and be fluent in Spanish!– how can i do that if i think, dream, and speak mostly English all day long?”
i am thinking of starting a blog to share my passion for the importance of children learning Spanish but also to share tips and stories about this important journey… am still pondering the idea… maybe reading your blog will inspire me to get on it!
im happy to say, My son is now almost 14 months and I’m proud to say his first word was AGUA =)

Reply
1. suzannemateus
  
  May 22, 2012 at 9:34 pm
  
  Hi Diana,
  
  Thanks for your comment and interest in my blog! I totally understand planning on teaching your baby another language while pregnant. I have been thinking about this for years before having a baby. It was a sealed deal for me too.
  
  It can be so hard to only speak Spanish…not in the sense that I forget words or have to look some up, but because in the other aspects of my life I am functioning in English. I have noticed, or maybe its just me, that the older Sabrina gets the weirder it seems for other people that WE are communicating in Spanish.
  
  We should keep in touch!
  
  Reply
  1. Grace Ruiz
    
    July 14, 2019 at 2:48 am
    
    well, you guys know what I am in the other end of your pain. I live in Ecuador and I am Ecuadorian but lived in the US for ten years speak a native-like English and here well it is important that someone speaks English because a person would have more opportunities in general to be successful in life. So, since I speak the language and teach it as well. Now, I want to pass it on to her, I have always thought that she needs to learn but didn´t know how to do it. So when she was a baby I would talk to her in English and will play disney movies for her in English. My family started to tell me you are confusing her, she doesn´t even speak spanish and you want her to speak English so I kind of stopped talking to her in English. Now, I am doing a masters in TEFL and doing some research myself and I am looking into exploring FLP ( family language policy). I have found tons of research on this topic but from the standpoint of an Englsih-speaking context. Not my case, I would like to look into it but from the standpoint of a single English-speaking parent in a Spanish-speaking context.
Claudia

June 7, 2012 at 10:19 am

Hi Suzzane,
I am so glad I have found your blog. I have a little girl (1 month 3 weeks). I speak Spanish and my husband speaks Swedish. However, my husband and I speak English. In addition, we live in Sweden.
By now, I speak with my little girl spanish. My husband tries to speak with her in Swedish. My husband thinks that I should continue to speak Spanish but he says that he should switch to English because she will learn Swedish anyway. Any advice?

Reply
1. suzannemateus
  
  June 13, 2012 at 8:22 pm
  
  Thats a tough one, Claudia. If you know that you will be in Sweden for quite a while then yea I would switch to English, unless your children will go to an English school.
  
  We dont speak English to Sabrina, because like your husband, we know she will learn it. Now if we were to move to a Spanish speaking country and knew that we would only be there a short while, and by short I mean even 2-3 years, I would still use Spanish at home because I want her to keep speaking Spanish once we were to move back to the US.
  
  Suerte—Suzanne
  
  Reply