Questions to Ask a Latina

The questions

Open any question to see why it works.

1. 1

   Where is your family from, and how do you usually answer that when people ask?

   The second half matters more than the first. Most Latinas have a short answer for strangers and a longer one for people they trust, and asking which one you are getting is a more respectful way in than demanding the long version straight away.

2. 2

   Do you say Latina, Hispanic, Latine, or just your country?

   These words are not interchangeable and people have real preferences between them, often tied to generation, region and politics. Using the word she uses is a small thing that saves a hundred small corrections later.

3. 3

   How does your family say your full name?

   Plenty of women have spent their whole working lives answering to a flattened version of their own name. Asking for the family pronunciation, and then using it, is one of the few gestures in this list that costs nothing and is noticed immediately.

4. 4

   What language do you speak at home, and which one do you count in?

   Counting, swearing and dreaming tend to stay in the first language even when everything else has moved. It is a more interesting question than are you fluent, and it does not turn into a test.

5. 5

   What is the dish that means home, and who makes it best?

   Every family has a version and an argument about whose is right. Ask who taught whom, whether she can make it, and what is impossible to get where she lives now.

6. 6

   Who came here first in your family, and what do you know about it?

   Ask this as an invitation, not a demand, and let a short answer stand. Some families tell this story constantly and some have never told it at all, and which one she grew up in shapes a great deal.

7. 7

   Which holidays does your family do properly, and what does properly mean?

   The interesting part is the specifics: who hosts, what has to be cooked, what time people actually arrive, and which relative controls the music. Answers here vary enormously between countries and between families in the same country.

8. 8

   Who do you call first when something happens?

   This maps the family more accurately than a list of relatives does. Ask who gets told immediately, who gets told a week later, and who never gets told, because that third category is where the real dynamics are.

9. 9

   What did your parents expect from you that your friends' parents did not?

   Answers often involve staying close to home, contributing money, translating, minding siblings, or a very short list of acceptable careers. Ask what she negotiated and what she simply complied with.

10. 10

    What music was on in the house when you were growing up?

    This gets a warmer and more specific answer than asking what music she likes now, because it is really a question about her parents. Ask what she was embarrassed by then and plays on purpose now.

11. 11

    Do you talk differently depending on who you are with?

    Code-switching is constant for a lot of bilingual people and rarely discussed with anyone outside it. Ask what changes: vocabulary, volume, accent, how much of the family she mentions at work.

12. 12

    What do people assume about you in the first thirty seconds?

    The assumptions vary wildly by how she looks, her name and her accent, and they are usually not the ones an outsider would guess. Let her list them without adding your own commentary.

13. 13

    What is the question you are tired of being asked?

    Asking this early enough saves you from asking it yourself later. The common answers are about where she is really from, immigration status, and whether she can teach someone Spanish over dinner.

14. 14

    Is there part of the culture or language you lost and want back?

    Second and third generation answers are often about Spanish specifically, and there is real grief in it that gets treated as a joke. Ask whether anyone in the family made a decision about it, and why.

15. 15

    What do people get wrong about your country in particular?

    This is the antidote to being treated as a representative of twenty countries at once. Expect corrections about food, accent, race, geography and which words mean something completely different where she is from.

16. 16

    What does your family do when someone brings a partner home?

    Ask what actually happens: who asks the questions, what gets cooked, whether the whole extended family appears, and what the person is being assessed on. This is practical information you will want long before you need it.

17. 17

    What was it like being the only one in the room?

    Most Latinas can name the classroom, the office or the town where this was true. Ask what she did with it rather than only how it felt, since the strategies are the part nobody hears about.

18. 18

    Where do you feel most like yourself?

    The answer might be a country, a kitchen, a language or a specific group of friends. It is a gentler way of asking about belonging than asking where home is, which for a lot of people is a genuinely painful question.

19. 19

    What do you want your children to keep, if you have them?

    This makes someone choose, and the choosing is revealing: the language, the food, the closeness to family, the religion, the Sunday habit. Ask what she would let go without regret, which is the harder half.

20. 20

    What do you wish people understood without you having to explain it?

    Explaining is exhausting and mostly invisible work. Asking directly hands the frame back to her, and whatever comes out is more useful than anything else on this list.