I'm fluent in Spanish. But I deliberately speak Spanglish because it's truer to who I am

This First Person column is written by Melinda Maldonado, who lives in Toronto. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

He might have been over 90, but my grandfather could still put me in my place.

"Nunca vas a perder tu acento gringo," he warned. You'll never lose that gringo accent. 

I was recording his Andean Ecuadorian Spanish for a sociolinguistics class. I'd been asking about his native-speaker pronunciation, which prompted him to point out the problems with mine.

My accent is a far cry from tourists ordering a kway-sa-dill-ah with ja-LA-pen-nos, but it stung. As a kid, I burned with humiliation when another Ecuadorian family started a conversation with an hola, ¿cómo estás? (hello, how are you?) and I couldn't understand what came next. Qué pena that I didn't speak Spanish, people said (what a shame).

My dad immigrated from Ecuador to Canada in the 1970s and my mom is a white Mennonite from Waterloo Region farm county in southern Ontario. I was born in Toronto and spent more time living with my mom. There's no reason I should speak Spanish like a native speaker. But that didn't protect me from shame.

Not speaking Spanish is a problema when you look like me. With my morena skin and short-ish, stocky stature, I'm the stereotypical Latin American with Indigenous and conquistador mestiza (mixed) blood. People expect me to speak Spanish. 

Hungry for identity, I reclaimed Spanish through university classes in Guelph, Ont., a semester abroad in Ecuador and a job in Guatemala. At first, I couldn't keep up with university readings because relying on a dictionary slowed me down. When working in Guatemala, learning local business lingo and socializing in Spanish left me exhausted. 

I persisted, and experiencing Latin America en español burst life into 4K. Whether road-tripping through the Andes with cousins, asking for my yapita (free item) at a market stand, which is the produce equivalent of getting Sephora samples for making a purchase, or hearing about ghosts or mythical dwarves called duendes, my increasing fluency deepened my connections to my culture. Getting my Spanish-English interpreter certification cemented my progress. I could police relatives when English infected their Spanish, saying, "It's albahaca, not basil."  

Mastery brought something surprising. Striving to sound like someone I'm not — a native speaker — was suffocating. 

Sometimes Spanish felt cumbersome. CD player? Reproductor de discos compactos. SpongeBob SquarePants? Bob esponja pantalones cuadrados. Foolish! Why force pure Spanish terms when I had a handy English one the listener understood?

Other rules constrained me. When I said, me cagué de la risa (I shit myself laughing), my grandfather said respectable ladies don't "shit" laughing. Instead, they should "die" laughing, which struck a North American nerve.

The last straw was when an uncle told me I speak better Spanish than "us Ecuadorians" who "butcher" the language. I felt like he was saying I sounded like a robot following a textbook and questioned what defines authentic Spanish. If Spanish speakers in Latin America were using English words, like warever for whatever, why shouldn't I? Protecting the purity of a language that arrived in Latin America via colonization grated against my politics and felt forced. 

Then it hit me.