Storying the Aesthetics of Nuestras Linguistic Borderlands: A Tapestry de Solidarity

Abstract

As bilingual marriage and family therapists (MFTs), here we attempt to describe our aesthetic linguistic borderlands as a new place where we exist at the juncture of our English and Spanish. We tell our stories of untranslatability; woven in a narrative tapestry of threads made of our experiences of migrating back and forth across the linguistic, geo-socio-political, and historical borders of English and Español. We share experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and racism against our accents and Spanglish borderland languages. We intend to summon the English-configured MFT field to meet us at the border of their monolingual wall and see past it, into a different world of existence, through syntax, imagery, evocation, and metaphor. We challenge Eurocentric foundations that situate English as the dominant way to language the world and therapy. Intentionally – and ironically – we write about our experiences in English, but without entirely leaving the aesthetics of our Spanish behind.

We want to give special recognition to our colleagues Marissa Barajas, Shinyung Oh, Kimberly Ayres, Candea Mosley, Brittney Romine, and David Epston for their very important contributions to this chapter. Their threads are also woven into this tapestry.