The Language Behind the Door

María Benedetti and the Long Road Back to an Identity That Had Always Been There

During María Benedetti's childhood, Puerto Rico was a twenty-block walk away. From their home in Jackson Heights, Queens, the family would walk to Elmhurst to visit her grandmother, María Cristina. Those family gatherings had food, long conversations around the table, music, and that affectionate chaos of families who talk, sing, and argue almost at the same time. There was a bar in the basement, and when the parties got going, salsa brava (old-school salsa) filled the room.

María, from six years old, would dance nonstop while her uncles cheered every turn.

Puerto Rico was there in Tito Puente and La Lupe, in arroz con gandules, in the musical clappings after meals, and in the game of passing an orange from neck to neck without using their hands. PR was there in the closeness, the musicality, and the family drama.

But something remained beyond her reach: the language.

At home, Spanish was not spoken in front of the children. Her mother and her uncles saved it for conversations with their grandmother about adult matters, sometimes risqué, that the children could not o understand. Spanish was a door closing in the middle of a conversation, a wall separating her from her identity and her origins.

"Me gusta lo prohibido" ("' like what's forbidden"), María remembers with a laugh.

That became a "burning desire" to become bilingual, to master the forbidden language and make it her own. It did not begin with a grammar lesson, but with curiosity about what was happening whenever the adults switched languages. Learning Spanish meant finally being able to enter the whole conversation.

Music was one of her first teachers, a teacher that began revealing a world that belonged to her but that she had not been able to fully enter. Johnny Pacheco, Tito Rodríguez, Tito Puente, and La Lupe were part of the soundtrack of the home. The first 45 rpm record she bought was

Todopoderoso, by Héctor Lavoe. She was not bilingual yet, but the rhythm showed her a part of her that words could not reach.

At college, she began to feel that the English-speaking academic world was not her true territory. The students were simply not her people.

During her third year, she left for Seville with a personal mission: to come back speaking Spanish. She lived there for a year, walked everywhere imaginable, danced flamenco, sand in the University chorus and immersed herself in Sevillian life. In her second language, she discovered a different way of inhabiting the world.

When she returned to the United States, she found a Puerto Rican community at her university. A friend gave her a biography of Don Pedro Albizu Campos, she learned to dance salsa, and she began debating with her grandmother; now in Spanish; mostly about women's rights and Puerto Rican nationalism. Later, at Hunter College, she immersed herself in the island's history, literature, folklore, and culture. At El Museo del Barrio she studied latin percussion, and on Sundays she never missed a Cuban rumba in Central Park. She was not simply accumulating information: she was gathering the scattered pieces of an inheritance.

In 1987, after 10 years of herbal studies with Susun S. Weed, she came to Puerto Rico for the first time to interview people known by their neighbors for their experience with medicinal plants and traditional healing practices. She arrived academically prepared, but Spanish also knows how to set traps.

On one occasion, she needed something from a pharmacy and asked for a drogueria (ok in Colombian, but PR sounds like an illegal hangout for drug addicts. On another, whenever a man helped her, she would approach his wife and tell her how much she "gustaba" her husband (friendly in Colombia, but in PR, she was "hot for him." It did not go well with the neighbor ladies.

The words were correct. The cultural translation was not.

During her field interviews, deeper difficulties emerged. María spoke a Spanish shaped by her Castilian education and years with her Colombian boyfriend. The people she interviewed spoke with the cadence, vocabulary, and slang of the Puerto Rican countryside, with that particular way of speaking that makes us unique. The women she interviewed; understood her and sometimes laughed affectionately at her particular way of speaking, but Maria could not always follow them.

To transcribe those precious recordings, she used a machine controlled with her feet: one pedal moved the cassette tape forward and the other rewound it. She listened to each phrase again and again, sometimes spending hours working on a single page. Beside her, she kept pressed plants inside a book. Whenever someone mentioned a species, she opened the plant press so she could see and smell what plant they were talking about.

Between 1987 and 1989, she returned to Puerto Rico 3 times to read the transcriptions back to the people she had interviewed. They added details, corrected mistakes, and laughed with her all over again. Maria gladly accepted every correction because she understood that "oral history is not my story; it belongs to the people who lived it, and have carried this knowledge through generations." From that process would emerge her first book about our ethnobotanical traditions, Earth and Spirit: Medicinal Plants and Healing Lore from Puerto Rico.

Her discipline with the language became radical. During her first ten years living in Puerto Rico, she avoided reading in English except when it was necessary for translation work. She cultivated friendships with people who spoke only Spanish and celebrated how a language does not enter only through the intellect.

It enters through affection

María remembers old expressions she had heard many times without retaining them. But when her mother said "me patina el coco" (literally, "my coconut is skidding," a fun way of lamenting a mental lapse or "para comer y rascar, solo falta empezar" (literally, "to eat and to scratch, all you need is to start"; a saying about how once you begin, you want to keep going), the words stayed with her. The difference was the emotional connection. Without it, language could pass right in front of you without ever finding a place to settle.

Today, after almost four decades in Puerto Rico, Maria considers bilingualism her greatest achievement. She continues learning with the same curiosity she had as a child listening to adults switch languages. On Sundays, she attentively listens to boleros and studies the vocabulary, the turns of phrase, and "the tenderness that macho men so surprisingly express" through this genre. Music, she says, was her doorway, and it still is her school.

Her search was never simply about speaking correctly. She wanted to belong and to contribute to the culture her family had been forced to leave behind for economic and political reasons.

"Amo la locura de aqui" ("I love our particular craziness,") she says when talking about Puerto Rico: the drama, the musicality, the sense of humor, and the connections she has cultivated with farmers, students, and other friends. Everything she treasured about her family in New York, she found alive on the island.

María Benedetti spent much of her life searching for a language she had heard since childhood without ever being able to fully enter it. By learning it, she did not recover an untouched past, nor did she resolve the contradictions of living between cultures. She found something more human: a way to draw closer, make mistakes, listen, and try again.

Perhaps recovering an origin does not mean returning to the exact place where our story began. Perhaps it means recognizing its music when it begins to play again and, this time, knowing how to join in.

Contact Maria Benedetti:

www.botanicultura.com |botanicultura@gmail.com |+1-939-255-2235