Earlier this week in Paris, at Dior’s fashion show, a stunning group of actresses were seated together like Latina Avengers: Anya Taylor-Joy, Jenna Ortega, Rachel Zegler, and Rosalía. Yet within hours, they were at the center of a heated debate on social media.
A 12-second clip from the evening shows Taylor-Joy introducing her husband to Rosalía and Ortega in Spanish. Ortega, who is not a Spanish-speaker, kindly greets him in English. That was all it took: Before long, Taylor-Joy’s fluency and Ortega’s monolingualism had sparked a discourse about what truly defines Latinx identity.
Onlookers quickly drew their lines in the sand: Some declared that as the only person fluent in Spanish between herself, Ortega, and Zegler, Taylor-Joy—who was born in Miami but spent part of her childhood in Buenos Aires (her father is Argentine)—was also the only true Latina. Others fiercely defended the California-born Ortega, arguing that language does not dictate a person’s heritage or connection to it. (Poor Zegler, who is seen chatting with Jennifer Lawrence throughout the encounter, was dragged into the fracas by association: Raised in New Jersey, she doesn’t speak Spanish either.)
The Dior fiasco came up last night at my dinner club, as I spoke to two Latina members. Amid an array of rotisserie chicken, cheese cubes, and popcorn (the theme was girl dinner), one shared that the controversy brought back trauma from her childhood, as a Colombian-American woman who identifies deeply with her Latina heritage but does not speak Spanish. The other Latina, who is Mexican-American, told a story about her grandma, who wondered if continuing to speak Spanish in the United States would only court racism. My own parents did not teach me Spanish because a teacher had told them, wildly, that bilingualism negatively affects cognitive learning. (This is not true.) For all three of us proud Latinas, the Dior thing struck a chord. We had been dealing with this stuff our whole lives.
Native Spanish speakers have indeed faced discrimination in this country for using their language, or speaking in accented English, especially since Trump was in office. On the other hand, Latinx folks with bilingual parents or grandparents have little control over whether Spanish is passed down to them or not. It’s a tricky, sensitive subject.