By Daniel Barrios

“"The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes." by Sebastián-Dario

When I applied for an MFA in creative writing, I was living in the projects. I didn’t think about student diversity, I didn’t research faculty, and I wasn’t reading. I was living in my grandparent’s two-bedroom apartment with my six-month pregnant wife.

What I did think about was getting out, about not taking up too much space on the twin mattress my wife and I slept on. Some nights I slept on the floor to keep us all comfortable. Keeping the crumbs off abuela’s counter and stalking Zillow’s web listings for studios under one thousand on Staten Island.

With those things in mind, I mindlessly applied to only one MFA program.

That was it.

When I received an acceptance letter, I realized my son wouldn’t have to grow up in the projects like me.

Today’s much better. We live in a one-bedroom basement of our own and our boy is swirling across the kitchen tiles. We’re still in the same neighborhood, but we’re happy. I’ve been reading a lot and winter residency’s workshops kicked my ass.

Having to gently remove my son’s hand from my fingers, I checked my phone and saw the peer workshop list. I didn’t think much of the names and got to reviewing their work in between bottle feeds and diaper changes. One of my mentors once told me “the game needs more of us!” and I didn’t know what he meant until I was the only brown person in my workshop. Including the workshop facilitator, everyone in the workshop was white.

I wouldn’t have cared but the piece I submitted for the workshop was spelled with Spanish. And up until my third residency, I didn’t think much about how language affected the text. I wrote what I knew. Many expressed how they had to look things up. Que bueno, I thought.

The overall consensus was that my characters didn’t need to speak as much Spanish, or instead of speaking the Puerto Rican dialogue, just write in exposition. Others thought the Spanish worked well. Mitad y mitad.

Okay, I almost said, but remembered I had to stay quiet the entire workshop.

So my Hispanic characters aren’t allowed to speak? I said to myself as I bit down on my tongue. I felt silenced.

Around the same time as my manuscript was being probed, I was reading Hemingway. Specifically, The Old Man and the Sea. Cool, I thought. A Spaniard protagonist named Santiago who lives in Cuba and fishes. A white man writing about Hispanic culture. As I kept reading, I found Spanish. If I weren’t a native speaker, I would have needed to look up every Spanish term that Hemingway employed. As it stands, I looked up one.

On the first paragraph of the first page, “Salao, which is the worst form of unlucky,” is used to characterize Santiago. We understand that Santiago’s Cuban culture will be utilized to give him his identity. Outside of the Cuban context, this word translates to “salty.”

As the plot advances, we are in an epic shark scene with Santiago: “Ay,’ the old man said. “Galanos. Come on galanos,” Galanos are mentioned three times on this page. The repetition is indicative that this language is essential to the character. This is his world.

On the final page, after Santiago has returned to shore, a tourist asks about the remnants of his catch. “Tiburon,’ the waiter said. ‘Shark,”. Hemingway makes it clear that people in the environment use Spanish just as the protagonist does.

This novella won Hemingway the Pulitzer for fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954. If a white man from Illinois was allowed to use Spanish to develop his characters and the Cuban Gulf Stream, I think a brown kid from New York should be allowed to use as much Spanish as his characters’ lives demand. Another mentor once told me to “know my audience.”

I’m stilling wondering who makes up that audience, exactly. If you do read my words, I appreciate you. What I do know are my characters, the worlds they inhabit and the lives they live. I know that Spanish is part of their being, and without it, they would not be human. To this effect, my stories reflect a humanization that is often ignored or overlooked. Latinx people, as Hemingway was rewarded for recognizing, are worthy of writing as fully human.

Daniel Barrios is a writer from Staten Island, NY. He’s currently studying fiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program.