“That’s so weird.” That was the reaction of a five-year-old boy in Brunswick, Maine, when Margaret Boyle, an associate professor of Romance languages at nearby Bowdoin College, was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a group of kindergarteners. It wasn’t the caterpillar’s feasting on junk food that perplexed the little boy; it was the fact that Margaret was reading the Eric Carle classic in Spanish. The youngster’s pronouncement took her by surprise. “Growing up in Los Angeles in a Mexican-American family, being close to Hispanic cultures was normal for me,” says Margaret, who is also Bowdoin’s director [...]

Mary Cardenas and Steve Leveen are huddled—as much as one can huddle on Zoom—over the short questionnaire that Mary wants to prepare for her small business. A trained chef, she plans to prepare and deliver healthy meals to people in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives. Steve, the cofounder and former CEO of a national retail venture, is giving her pointers. “Right now the form says Mary’s Kitchen,” Steve tells her. “I thought it was going to be Mary’s Healthy Kitchen. That’s distinctive.” Mary quickly agrees. After all, she’s  been able to lower her [...]

To a casual observer, the headdresses that Priscilla Colón and her husband, Ely, are wearing are in this photo are simply colorful and eye-catching. But what the cofounders of Casa Areyto have on their heads are, in many ways, their personal profiles as Taíno. If you’ve listened to Episode 58 of our podcast, you’ll appreciate just how remarkable this is, given the Taíno’s precarious history as Native Americans in the Caribbean after 1492. The Taíno people were long considered lost, together with their language—but never by Priscilla, whose own tested DNA proves otherwise. She is among [...]

Most writers will tell you that it's challenging enough to write well in their native language, let alone attempting it in another. Yet a number of well-known authors have done just that, in many cases writing not only well but brilliantly, in a language that was not their first. There's a name for these writers: exophonic. The word derives from Greek–exo in Greek means "outside"; phonic means "voice." The University of Warwick in the United Kingdom even offers a course on it, called "Exophony, or Writing Beyond the Mother Tongue." One for the Russian road Vladimir Nabokov [...]