Son Como Las Piedras

A bilingual environmental educator on reclaiming the language he almost lost

When I was a kid, I was jealous of my cousins.

My godmother, Graciella, was from Guadalajara. When she and my aunt and my cousins were together, the room filled with Spanish — fast, warm, completely foreign to me, and something I wanted in on so badly I could feel it. Then, by the time my cousin Jessica turned five, it stopped. My aunt had heard that raising a bilingual child could hurt her reading, slow her English, put her behind. So the Spanish went quiet.

I didn't understand any of that as a kid. I just knew something I wanted had disappeared from that house. So eventually I went and found it myself — sailing around the world at sixteen, studying in Costa Rica and Spain, building a relationship with a language that wasn't handed to me but that I refused to let go of.

Sergio Corona-Munoz grew up the opposite way, and it cost him something just as real.

Spanish was Sergio's first language. His parents immigrated to California from Mexico before he was born, and at home, Spanish was simply what they spoke. But somewhere along the way — not through any single rule, but through years of institutions quietly signaling that English was the language that got you taken seriously — Sergio built a wall in his own head. Spanish at home. English everywhere else. Two versions of himself, kept carefully apart.

He told me about the moment that wall went up for good. Middle school, P.E. class, a group of kids he thought of as cool, sitting on the grass instead of doing the mile run, speaking Spanish to each other. They invited him in. He answered. They laughed at his accent.

"I will never speak Spanish again," he remembers thinking. "Because I never want to be embarrassed again."

He mostly kept that promise to himself for over a decade.

What changed wasn't a single decision. It was an institution finally asking him to use the thing he'd buried.

A few years into his career, working at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Sergio was asked to take over the aquarium's Spanish-language education programming — YouTube videos teaching marine science to bilingual families. He almost said no. "I hope they never call that out," he remembers thinking about the Spanish fluency listed on his resume. He said yes anyway.

"It was really scary," he told me. "I definitely messed up. I cringe at my accent, my mispronunciations. But it was also deeply freeing. You only get better by being bad sometimes."

Here's the moment that stopped me, the one I haven't been able to shake since we talked.

Visiting home after recording one of those programs, Sergio was telling his mother — in Spanish — about a video he'd just made on coral reefs.

"Son como las piedras," she said. They're like rocks, right?

"No," he told her. "Son animales." They're actually alive.

He explained the biology to her, right there, in the language she raised him in. She asked questions back. And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, Sergio realized something had never happened before in his entire life: he was talking to his mother about the thing he loved, in the language that was supposed to make that impossible.

"I love animals. I love education. I love this work. I love my mom," he said. "And it's happening because I took the opportunity to learn how to say coral reef in Spanish."

Sergio now works as a bilingual education specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, leading programs for families across the Central Coast — many of them, like Sergio's own family, farm labor and agricultural worker households living minutes from the ocean and never having been to the beach.

He told me what happens in a room when a kid hears marine science explained in Spanish for the first time, maybe ever.

"Their own wall goes down," he said. "They don't have to be an English speaker. They don't have to be proficient at this or that. They're just excited, asking questions about sharks and megalodons. We're just two kids, basically."

That's the whole point of bilingual programming, and it's so much bigger than translation. Translation gets the words right. What Sergio is building gets a kid home, able to tell their mother what they learned, in the language that makes that conversation possible at all.

I asked Sergio what he'd tell someone listening to this who wants to build a relationship with the natural world but doesn't know where to start.

His answer surprised me. Don't go outside right away, he said. Start with what you already love — your favorite book, your favorite show, the worlds you already can't stop thinking about. Figure out what you love about that setting. Then go find your version of it, out in the real world.

For Sergio, that's been a long road from a desert town where STEM never felt available to him, to a marine science career he didn't think he was allowed to want, to a kitchen table conversation about coral with his mother in the language she gave him.

I don't know yet what your version is. But it's out there.

Listen to this week's episode of Hopeful by Nature wherever you get your podcasts.

— Scott

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at wildwardinstitute.net.

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