Plantains and tigueraje

The other day my mom told me not to give the kid plantains too often because he could turn dumb. I laughed a lot. It has been a while since I heard a phrase like that one, I think I hadn't heard it since grade school, when we used to tease the kids that didn't know the answers by telling them they ate a lot of plantains.

That's precisely what came to my mind when I stumbled upon the blog of a Dominican television host who was complaining in his post, because somebody was criticizing his poor grammar skills. He pointed out in his critic, faults completely unrelated to the use of language, while at the same time, showered his paragraphs with a disgusting amount of stupid mistakes and careless disregard. Believe me, I tried to forget the topic, but I couldn't.

From what I have seen in each of my trips to the island (and to Upper Manhattan), a great chunk of the television content in my country is jam-packed with hosts that shamelessly abandon our language's delight. This negligence has spread in such a way that several websites, with an extremely high visitor rate, opt for the use of "tigueraje" a street slang saturated with intentional mistakes, that confuse that part of their readers who lack or have had limited education, and makes them believe that those words are correct; a phenomenon that is emulated in the content of certain television programs that only serve to perpetuate ignorance and hinder the chances of progress for the people.

I'm not saying that Dominicans need to change the way they talk. All countries have their own accents, but it's not the norm in other places, to mutilate the language like we have been doing for so long. That's the reason why I am saddened when I meet a Dominican in this city, that without knowing where I come from tries to speak his version of "correct Spanish" simply because he cannot identify my Dominican accent (which has been crippled by all the years in this country), and carries on, putting an "s" where it doesn't go and omitting it from its propper place, adding endings in words that don't have any, and making up a couple of verbs. And when I say that I come from the same land, he immediately changes course and forgets about the rules. "A pue', pero tu no parese dominicaaaaana."

Maybe I don't look Dominican, but it still bothers me. And it bothers me even more when I meet people from other countries that tell me the same thing, all because of the bad reputation created by the Dominicans in New York, simply because that "tigueraje" is in. The most annoying thing is that in the island, that's not the norm. In fact, as a kid, it was always stressed in school that there is a correct way of expressing yourself among strangers and adults. And in the streets, you wouldn't be surprised if someone was thought of as a plantain-eating-countryman if he didn't speak correctly.

However, even in the rural areas there was a respect for language. My grandfather always said, "I come from the countryside, but I'm not a countryman", this is an idea that we have been losing little by little, at least within most of the Dominican community in New York. I'm not against "tígueres" and their slang, they are very entertaining many times, but they shouldn't pass their vocabulary as our way of speaking, with cheap excuses like "that's the way Dominicans speak." Some of them even say it with pride, without realizing that, it is simply a reflection of their laziness when it comes to education; a proof that they accept themselves and like themselves as ignorant fools, forgetting the tradition and legacy of our great Dominican intellectuals. But, tigueraje is easier.

And yes, my kid and I will continue eating plenty of mangú.