Yesenia, one of the staff at Casa Familiar, moved to the US from Mexico right after her junior year of high school. She chokingly admitted one of the biggest hardships coming was the process of learning English. The switch of being able to articulate her competency and passions within her own language unto an English-speaking environment put her in a state of muteness and isolation. This piece seeks to highlight the internal struggle and loneliness of Yesenia’s mind as well as challenging the misconceptions of society. Exposing her inability to truly communicate and the emotional exhaustion during this English-learning process. While all around her, the lips, people speak without patience or desire to reach her but instead quickly dismiss her as ‘slow,’ ‘unintelligent’ or ‘unwilling’. The symbols of the back show the division of the left and right brain, the logic and creativity, like all humankind. Nevertheless, her brain, her true intelligence, displays a beautifully brilliant and imaginative individual. One of the popular myths of language is the assumption that intelligence and language are positively correlated. When in reality, neither are dependent on each other. Language is a system using symbols in a regular way to create meaning, it gives us the ability to communicate our intelligence to others. Simply reflecting, rather than determining our thinking.
