“How did Spanish go from being a sporadic seasoning to the very salt of my life?” Marcela T. Garcés ponders in her new graphic memoir, Me llamo Marcela: My Story as a Heritage Speaker. In the memoir, Garcés (now a professor of Spanish at Siena College) reflects on her coming of age as a second-generation Colombian American alongside her experiences as a Spanish heritage speaker. Artist Andrés E. Garcés (also Marcela Garcés’ brother) accompanies these reflections with solid black and white illustrations, weaving visual clarity into the fragments and snapshots that construct Marcela’s journey into language fluency. At times frustrating, always rewarding, the process of learning Spanish provides the young Marcela with deeper connections to her Colombian roots as well as opportunities to travel and expand her world view.
Me llamo Marcela begins in Spanish class, where an adolescent Marcela is in awe of her teacher, Doña Maribel. However, Marcela soon finds that her natural exposure to Spanish at home does not result in good grades in the classroom. Her mixed experience is relatable here; just as native English speakers might struggle in English class, students who learn Spanish informally (at home from their parents, for example) can struggle with the different linguistic rules and expectations in the Spanish classroom.
Interestingly enough, while the young Marcela is inspired by the worldliness of Doña Maribel and is eager to request additional tutoring from her, Marcela also recalls frustrations with her Spanish being corrected by her family, leading to her responding solely in English at home. It takes a setting outside of the home space for Marcela to dare make mistakes and begin her journey as a committed language learner, and in retrospect, help her develop a greater appreciation for and desire to connect with her half-Colombian, half-American heritage. Later as a young adult, Marcela even retraces her American mother’s footsteps by traveling to Spain and immersing herself in Spanish language and culture.
“What is identity, anyways?” Marcela muses halfway through the memoir. “... being a heritage speaker means I inhabit different cultural spaces and am always negotiating in-betweenness.” It is during these moments of self-reflection that the art style really shines; Andrés Garcés’ use of simple, black and white lines and patterns adds a heavy, grounded aesthetic to the narrative as Marcela shifts from past to present, interiority to exteriority, one setting to another.
Readers of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis will find a lot of artistic and storytelling similarities with Me llamo Marcela; there is a cozy, tight knit feel to Marcela’s world as presented in black and white, even when dealing heavy topics like death in the family and micro-aggressions at home and abroad. I did find myself feeling, to an extent, overwhelmed with the amount of temporal and spatial shifts in Marcela’s narration. It can be jarring to have middle school Marcela in one moment, then adult Marcela in another, then back to even younger Marcela without her braces.
Me llamo Marcela is, at its heart, a celebration of the hard work, persistence, and personal growth that language acquisition entails. There is joy to be found in the process of learning another language, along with various points of entry into communities, foods, stories, and cultures beyond our comfortable social bubbles in our mother tongue. However, this memoir also asks us to consider language as more than a tool for communication or a marker of cultural identification.
As young Marcela comes to realize, the willingness to make mistakes—and subsequently, the willingness to try again—makes the process of language learning a matter of personal growth, constantly enriching our lives at the most fundamental level. And as adult Marcela concludes, “the negotiating and situating never ends… Siempre mirando y buscando, always in motion.”
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