How do I honor my first language when I've been told to assimilate?

Sor Juana knew something about living between worlds—about the pressure to fit into someone else's intellectual framework while your own mind speaks in another tongue. Honoring your first language isn't nostalgia or resistance for its own sake. It's recognizing that your first language holds your family's logic, your community's humor, the way you learned to think before anyone told you how you *should* think. Assimilation narratives are seductive because they promise belonging. But they often ask you to treat your first language like a childhood toy you've outgrown. What if instead you saw it as infrastructure? The ground you built on. Start small: speak it at home without apology. Read in it, even if slowly. Notice which thoughts feel clearer in your first language—those are clues about what that language knows. If you have children or younger relatives, pass it on. If you're isolated from speakers, find communities online. Learn about the literature, history, and writers in your language. Your first language isn't holding you back from success. The systems that make you feel you must choose between it and belonging—those are what need examining. You can move fluently between languages without abandoning the one that made you.