Veronica's Story
Sadie (voiceover): Before we begin, we just wanted to let you know about some of the ways you can support Accentricity. Keeping Accentricity online and available for free costs a little bit of money every month, so from time to time we need to think about how we fund it. To help with this, we’ve teamed up with artist Cat Ingall and asked her to design our first Accentricity t-shirts. You can go and have a look at them by following the link in the episode description or by going to the Accentricity website. If you’re up for it, we’d love for you to send us a photo of you in your t-shirt so we can share it on the website and on social media. Just email it to accentricity.podcast@gmail.com.
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Sadie (voiceover): This is Accentricity Series Two: The Moving Project. Stories about migration, language, and identity from around the world.
In February 2020, I moved from Glasgow to Manchester. In terms of geography, language, and culture, that’s not a very big move but to me it felt significant. It was a move away from my friends and family to a place where I knew nobody. I thought it’s fine, I’ll just visit Glasgow loads. But then in March the Covid-19 pandemic hit the UK and travel completely shut down. For me, making Accentricity has always been about meeting new people in person and connecting with the world outside my home. All of the plans I’d had to get to know my new city through podcasting went out of the window. I didn’t want Accentricity to become just me on my own talking into my microphone.
For a while I’d been thinking about ways to make my podcasting more collaborative. The Covid-19 lockdown was shit, but some people had a bit more time on their hands than usual. Working with John, the other half of team Accentricity, I decided to run a free online podcasting course where the people taking part would tell their own stories and we could play these stories on Accentricity. We asked for applications from people anywhere in the world with stories to tell about migration. Together we’d explore what it feels like to move from one place to another, whether that’s a big move or a small move, a long ago move or a recent move, a fun adventure or a necessity. Compared to most of the people we ended up working with, my move from Glasgow to Manchester is tiny. But I thought, if this move feels big to me then what does it feel like to move say from Argentina to Sicily?
The next seven episodes on Accentricity will be the results of the first round of this podcasting course, which we’ve called the Moving Project. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. I’m telling you this just because I think it’s incredible how good they sound. Each person who took part has their own episode made up of a 10-minute audio piece and an interview with me. Each person brings their own style and personality. Because of this, these episodes are a bit different from the usual style of Accentricity. I hope you enjoy the variety and enjoy hearing lots of different voices from lots of different places.
The first story you’ll hear is Veronica’s. Veronica is the youngest member of the group at 23. She was born in Argentina and moved to Sicily when she was eight. First, you’ll hear Veronica’s 10-minute audio piece which is about her journey from leaving Argentina to becoming a confident young adult making a podcast in her fifth language. It’s a story of courage and curiosity, and a celebration of multilingualism and multicultural identity. It’s full of personality and joy. But Veronica’s also been through some really hard times and after her audio piece you’ll hear a conversation between us where amongst other things, she talks about the difficulties her family faced before leaving Argentina. As a quick content warning, you’ll hear some descriptions of violent crime. But first, here’s Veronica’s audio piece.
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Veronica (voiceover): My first experience with a different language than my mother tongue wasn’t ideal or pleasant. I was eight years old and was leaving my homeland, Argentina, to search for a better life in Sicilia, my grandmother’s birthplace, with my whole family. I had never taken a plane before, so I was extremely out of my comfort zone already.
Listening to several announcements both in Italian and Spanish during this journey contributed to increase my fear for the new place and culture I was heading to. Words in these cousin romance languages were quite similar but still different. For me as a child that was just confusing. However, I tried to keep a positive vibe in order to make things go easier, but when no one at the airport in Sicily could translate the customs questions into Spanish for my mum I knew it wouldn’t have been a walk in the park.
[Veronica’s mum speaking in Spanish]
Veronica (voiceover): This is my mum and her perspective about the episode.
No one in that division could speak Spanish. A man would ask me questions in Italian, and I would answer him in Spanish, so he couldn’t understand me, and I couldn’t understand him. It was really frustrating because I thought that they were prepared to welcome people from all over the world.
My mum and us, with our many suitcases, arrived in the evening in the small village by the sea. The curious locals were peering out from their windows. It was summer so we had a few months to learn the language before starting school.
It was all an adventure, every day, everything we got to know, every place we would go, or every person we would talk to, it was always an adventure. Everything would spark our interest.
From the first tours around the village, I realised that the people didn’t speak in the same way as those on the tv. They spoke with strange incomprehensible sounds at times.
It took me a while to realise that that was the Sicilian dialect which I had heard in traditional songs a few times from my grandmother in Argentina. I remember meeting these sisters in the park and trying to have a conversation with them. I unforgettably recall that they were trying to be more understandable by speaking very, very slowly and adding -s at the end of each word.
Ciaos. Comes ti chiamis? Capiscis?
I was trying to tell them that I had four sisters and a brother but instead of saying fratello, I said sorello.
Their laughing was the loudest and longest I’d heard by that time. This was the first cross linguistic accident that I had in public. Little I knew that there would have been so many others coming. I had to learn not only Italian, but also the local dialect to get access to the community and feel partially accepted. So many differences and rules to remember.
[translating her mother’s words] You were hoping to learn and made a lot of efforts for you. You were also very curious and willing. So anything you couldn’t read, whoever you could talk to, always asking for the meaning of the Italian words you didn’t know, you did.
It took me some time but in the end I managed to find an equilibrium in this trilingual environment. Spanish at home with my family, Italian at school, and Sicilian everywhere else.
Practice makes perfect was the motto I was following. So I learnt to mimic what people said on TV, put my sense of embarrassment away and made as much practice as possible with people even if that would mean them laughing at my tremendous fails and correcting any little mistake of mine. Some years later, I’d learned French and English using similar strategies.
[translating her mother’s words] To learn English and French you would lock up yourself in your brother’s room. You would put his headphones on and listen to the CDs of your schoolbooks for hours and hours until you were able to at least say a good full line of speech. So you have always been willing to learn languages.
Bonjour, comment ça va?
I had found that speaking Spanish, Sicilian, English, Italian, and French was a real good thing that not anyone could do so easily. I felt quite special for this after all the hard work learning my first foreign language, languages weren’t a nightmare anymore. They were sort of master keys which allowed me to open so many doors even without having the chance to visit other countries directly.
So when time came for choosing what to do at the university, I decided I want to go for languages and translation, but quite far from this Sicilian village that had started to feel smaller and smaller to me. Especially after I had seen London for an immersive language course during my last year of high school. The English city was so diverse.
You would hear people speaking different languages in any corner and above all you could feel free and able to go wherever you wanted. I wasn’t having the same feeling in Sicily instead I had started to get bored. I wanted to find the answers to some questions rose during my multilingual growth and explore the science behind languages. So that’s why I left when I was 18 to go to study in Trentino. Trento has an extremely international academic environment. I had the chance to make friends with people from all around the globe, try their dishes like delicious chicken biriyani, arroz con leche, arepas, and know more about their cultures. It all felt like a dream for me.
Hallo. Wie geht’s? Guten Morgen. Guten Tag.
I had also started to learn German, and what better way to improve your language skills than going to live in a country where that language is spoken every day. Without thinking much about it, me and my scarce German abilities decided to make an Erasmus in Stuttgart.
It was like reliving the journey I started when I was eight but this time I wasn’t scared. I didn’t fear airports or linguistic accidents to improve my linguistic skills. I had matured and learned that languages were the best means to get connected with other people and discover new places and cultures. I was to my first ever Oktoberfest even if I didn’t know how to order beer in German, spend my Christmas in Stuttgart and visit the magic Weihnachtsmarkte. I also had the chance to try the Schwabish food like Spätzle, Hefezopf, Kartoffelsalat, Bratwurst. All this has a special place in my memories.
Maybe it’s because I have left my own country when I was little, but I do not get sad when I leave a place I know for a new one to discover. Instead, I am extremely curious and excited.
The last and most recent destination for my linguistic adventure has been South Tyrol. I’m attending a masters here and chose to move to this place because it’s an official drei sprache province -- trilingual autonomous province. Here people speak German Italian dialect on a daily basis.
Even officially everything is trilingual like bus stops, advertisements, street signals.
This is the perfect place to find other doors to be unlocked.
Languages have really influenced my life since I was a child, so much so they are now what is characterising my profession as a young linguist. They have also contributed to make me the person I am now by helping grow my character. My mother tongue, the Spanish of Argentina, has made me very cabezuda y pasional -- stubborn and passionate. French made me find my romantic and melancholic side. Italian has contributed to my love for le arti la letteratura classiche -- classical arts and literature. Sicilian has allowed me to create a bond between lu beddu mari e l’anima mia -- the wonderful sea in my soul. While German gave me beautiful words such as Fernweh -- desire for the distant, and Reisefieber -- that is what I’m feeling now not being able to travel. And English, it has given me the courage to always start wherever I was talking to the people around me, even you now.
It’s not just about saying the places and thinking about those things that you already know. It’s more about being curious and gaining knowledge, always keeping the enthusiasm up and the strength to go ahead, because goals can be achieved. You have to work hard for them but in the end, you will be able to accomplish them.
Being multilingual, although the road to becoming one is quite uphill, is one of the biggest things that can happen to us in life.
***
Sadie (to Veronica): You moved from Argentina to Sicily when you were eight, is that right?
Veronica: Yeah, exactly.
Sadie: Who did you have to leave behind in Argentina?
Veronica: I left behind my grandparents, so actually my grandmothers because my grandads are both dead, my cousins, my uncle, and the sister of my dad also with my cousins. It was really hard at the beginning, especially with the mother of my mum, my grandmother, I basically grew up with her because my mother was helping my father in the shop, and I was all the time with her. If I should say something I really miss about being together in Argentina is those times spent together with my grandmother. It’s kind of weird because I think also that growing up far from family you then are more prone to get close to people that are not family for you, but the friends become really close. Every time I will feel creating a very nice friendship with someone, I will immediately also see them to family. There is no limit in my friendships: you are very good friend of mine or we just know each other.
Sadie: So being separated from your family allows you to create family relationships with your chosen family?
Veronica: Yeah, it’s actually like this. This happens much more often with people that are not Italian, but they are from other countries because I feel a bond between people who have left their homelands or live far from there and now are in a new place. It’s like sharing the same or a similar journey and then creating new bonds with other people who are not your family. I remember this guy from Colombia that I met. He was the first guy from abroad I met after living in Sicily for some time. The first day I met him, and I heard he was from South America I was like “oh my gosh, you’re from Colombia. Would you like to come to my house and have lunch together?” And he still remembers this, and he was like “I was shocked because I could be anyone and you immediately invited me to your home.” We bonded so much that we are like brothers now.
Sadie: Because it sounds to me like -- I don’t know if you agree, I definitely get the sense that you’re someone who makes bonds and friendships quite easily now as an adult. Do you think that that experience of being a child and having to move and form relationships and start everything again, that feeling of dislocation, do you think that has fed into the way that you create bonds now as an adult?
Veronica: Yeah. I think it has for sure had an impact on my social growth also. I remember that when I first arrived in Sicily, I had a lot of trouble making new friends. I was very shy, and I always felt judged by the Sicilian people, especially the kids because I didn’t speak their language. I was always the weird one. During my childhood I would avoid very close friendships and every time someone would be too close to me, I would feel scared because maybe also the fear of losing them or having to leave them behind guided me to these kind of choices. As I was growing up, when I started travelling and I left Sicily, I opened up a lot more about this and now I am very happy to have friends from different parts of the world. Even if we are not close and we had to separate during our journeys I’m always willing to catch up with them and know what they’re doing even if we are far. It’s not like okay, we’re not in the same place, we lost our friendship. It just continues to go on and it’s very interesting like this for me.
Sadie: Because you were obviously very young when you left Argentina, but did you have to leave friends behind?
Veronica: In Argentina I had some friends in this private school, but we were all coming from different parts of the limited areas of Argentina and then we were together in this private Catholic school. So I had some friends but I never had these very close friends that I’m having now. I remember as I was a kid, everyone was pretending to be my friend because of my father’s job, and they were want to come to my place only because, I don’t know, I had this inflatable castles and I had these toys. I felt always like these friendships were fake. It was like this because indeed when I left, I remember this party that they threw because this was a very cool school for cool kids and everyone was willing to show you their power of their family, that they had some money and so on. They bought me so many gifts and presents and it was a lot. I took everything with me and then I said please give me your numbers so I can call you when I am really in Italy. I tried to call them but of course it was difficult because you couldn’t connect unless you bought this card to call abroad. I tried to send letters to one of them, but I got a reply a lot of months later so it kind of broke this bond that were not so strong at the beginning and then disappeared during time.
Then social media networks came so I tried to reconnect with them with Facebook and so on, but every time I was opening the profiles from my school friends, they were so different from how I remembered. Sometimes they would accept my friendship request, sometimes they wouldn’t accept, and they all grew up so quickly there because there is this mentality there for girls that are not sure about studying of immediately finding a boyfriend and planning to have a family. So they were already all with boyfriends, they were living together with them and I mean I wasn’t even 18 at the time so for me it was kind of a shock and I was thinking okay, if they don’t want to have to do with me then it’s probably better to leave behind these people and this way of living and thinking.
So that was a time where I realised that I should start making friends with the people of the place I was in at the moment. I tried to open up with Sicilia but it was hard because I also went through a lot of bullying and always this feeling of discomfort of not belonging to this group although I tried so many times. I think it has also to do with the fact in Argentina we were well being from this middle class and then we arrived in Sicily and my parents had no study titles that were recognised in Sicily, so we really started from no. My father would go and collect tomatoes and my mother stayed at home for like two years and then she found a job as a cleaning lady. So also, being down -- going down in social class really impacted my life because I was used to having everything I wanted and not valuing this stuff, to eating pasta every day for like a week while my father had to move and go working abroad in Milan. Because there wasn’t a lot of job positions open in Sicily for him, so it was hard.
Also, that impacted the way other children perceived me because I had not fancy clothes. In Sicily you really care about fashion, so everyone wears these fashion clothes that were sometimes very expensive. Then they would look and me and we went to go buy clothes in the Chinese shops that there were in Sicily because for us it was absolutely cheap and for me, they weren’t ugly. I didn’t realise there was this stigma attached to Chinese shops. My mum says an adventure but for me at first it was a bad, bad journey.
Sadie: In your episode you talk a little bit about what you remember of the move, but I wondered what you remember of Argentina before that. Do you remember much?
Veronica: Yeah. I have some memories about Argentina, but they are not refreshed because I haven’t been there since that time. Actually, went back to Argentina two years after we had been living in Sicily, but they are sort of confused memories. Basically, we decided to move because Argentina during that period wasn’t a real nice place to live. There was a lot of criminality going on. My parents had a little shop and they got robbed almost every evening so that became dangerous and also scary.
The last moment when they decided okay, we have to leave, was this time when robbers came to my house and my brother pulled open the park slot for my father. There were these two guys outside, they were pretending to be a couple and kissing but as soon as my brother opened the garage they just jumped inside of our home and took my brother with a gun pointing at his head. I remember that moment that I was confused because I heard something going on outside, but I couldn’t go out. The thing is that in Argentina, our windows are protected, and doors are fully locked, so I felt like in prison in my own home that time. I was peering out from the windows and saw these shadows quickly moving and my father wouldn’t get out of the car. It was half an hour of tension and my mother also being scared and telling us to be quiet. Then my father immediately rushed in and told everything that had happened. My brother was completely shocked because he was like 17 at the time and yeah, it was a crazy evening. We even tried to call the police but in Argentina there is also a lot of corruption among the police forces, so nobody did anything. My father tried to follow them with a car, but he got in a very dangerous neighbourhood and then he decided to leave them with the money.
It was terrible because economically we weren’t living like a bad life. It was just the thing that you felt in prison everywhere that you go. Also going to school was a very tough journey because we had to stay together with my mum. We couldn’t travel alone. We had also to go this private schools in order to be protected because they knew that my father had the shop. There was also a lot of kids being kidnapped and then people would ask their families for money and if they didn’t get the money they would chop children, left them in bags in front of people’s houses so. It was really scary.
But apart from this I also had familiar memories like going to my grandmother’s house or eating together with my cousins, having lunch together. Asado: that is a very big tradition in the Argentinian culture. So eating a lot of meat and joining the entire family with grandparents and all the kids playing together. Since I’ve been living in Sicily, we haven’t done that because my family’s all in Argentina and it’s just me my mum and my sisters and brothers living there.
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Sadie: We’ve spoken quite a bit about arriving in Sicily and having to learn -- well, really learning two new languages straight away.
Veronica: Mm-hmm.
Sadie: And that must have been really difficult in itself, not speaking the language, but do you think that -- it sounds like you were sort of learning a new culture as well. Did you feel like there was a lot to learn in terms of moving from one place to another culturally, as well as linguistically?
Veronica: Yeah. It was certainly also difficult to understand another culture that was so different from Argentina because while I was in Argentina and my grandmother was Italian, I thought okay I know the basics of Italian culture, but it wasn’t actually like that. Sicilian way of living is absolutely different from the Argentinian one. In Argentina I felt we were very open and friendly with people, and I thought the same would have been in Sicily, but it isn’t like this. They are very open with the tourists, someone who is coming and is joining them for a short period of time but if you’re someone who is meant to join them in their little communities, then it is more difficult for them to accept you.
First of all, you don’t know their dialect. It is the way of communication that they use the most. Secondly you are -- you didn’t grow up in the same way they did. For example, going to the campagna. That is this place where they cultivate vegetable and fruits. Everyone has one in Sicily, and I didn’t have this. Everyone was talking about yeah, the season and what fruits they would eat, and I didn’t know anything about it because I just used to go out to the supermarket and buy them. Or also yeah going to their relatives’ homes, eating at the grandmother’s places every day after school. I didn’t have that experience. Cooking and food was also a big trauma. I remember inviting one of them to eat at my place and they would look weirdly at the food my mumma had cooked because it was different. This cultural differences were strikingly hard.
Also, at school it was difficult because they had already their groups. I arrived at third grade of the elementary school. I was the new one who didn’t speak Italian and I remember also the teachers didn’t know what to do with me. It wasn’t like I had to start relearning the language because I had already known the alphabet and I could read but I couldn’t read in Italian. At first they assigned me this particular teacher just for me but they were pretending like I wasn’t alphabetised or… It was a journey like relearning how to write and things like that. Then they realised it wasn’t working because I was needing vocabulary knowledge and a lot of enrichment in the lexical field, not in the language itself. So then they shifted and they assigned me to the best student in the class and they made me sit with her. She tried to help but again, she was feeling always like feeling why do I have to do this? I want to be with my friends not with her.
But in the end -- yeah, my mumma remembers this very clearly, I came home one day tired of this and said okay, now I’m going to show them that I am capable of doing what they do and I can be even better. That day I decided that from that day I would have tried to be the best in any class I would be in. Then it was all this time fighting against myself and staying at home studying all the time. I became the nerd of the classes. I wasn’t the foreigner anymore; I was the nerd.
Sadie: And you said to your mum, you said to your mum you said I’m going to show them.
Veronica: Yeah.
Sadie: You must have been -- were you eight or nine or…?
Veronica: It was when I was 10 because in order to get more friends I also had started dance classes but it wasn’t for me. So I said okay mumma, I’m going to stop going to dance classes and I’m going to concentrate on this. And she said okay, that is what you want because she also saw me suffering a lot through this.
Sadie: You must have been such a determined 10-year-old. Do you think that’s something that’s stayed with you? Do you think you still have that determination to prove something?
Veronica: Yeah, I think that has really accompanied me. So this way of thinking is something that I kept from those days for sure because I realised that even being a kid, not being sure about your own capabilities because you are still growing, you can focus on some things and set your -- set yourself some goals. In the end I mean, if I was 10 years old and I achieved that small goal at the time, then now that I am an adult and I have much more resources and I’m also aware of my possibilities and also capabilities, then there’s nothing I cannot do. Or at least anything that I would attempt to do I will try to do it in the best way possible.
Sadie: It’s interesting to hear about trying to imagine it from your mum’s perspective because it must have been really difficult to see you struggling when you first arrived. What do you think the move was like for your parents? Because although they kind of didn’t have a choice, they must have had to make the decision we’re going to move now. And did you say you had -- so did you have some family in Sicily already?
Veronica: Yeah, there were these cousins from my grandmother actually. These cousins had children that were grew up at a time. They were 30 years old. I remember my mother and father would go to this translator in Argentina and they would ask this -- they would ask this translator to write this letter say explain the situation, then sending this letter. We got a response that no one expected and they said yeah, you can come to Sicily. We’re waiting for you. We will help you out.
At the beginning they tried to help us in the best way possible but then they saw things were quite difficult because we were a big family. We were five at the time, so two of my parents and us children. Then two of my sister: one was born right before we went to Sicily and then another yeah, I think one year later. So the family was growing and for them it was quite difficult to keep up with the family members and also I think my parents to understand the bureaucracy of the Italian government. And also, to find good jobs because you having to earn a consistent amount of money in order to allow your family a good life. So when the family’s such a big family then it’s not that easy.
For my mum it was hard because as I said, she was used to always having the help of my grandmother. At the same time, she knew that this was something that she had to do if she wanted to be sure that we would have grown up safely and have every -- she wanted us to have a good future. I think that was the thing that moved her towards this choice. My father he’s always been a very adventurous person. I remember him talking all the time about moving out from Argentina since the beginning. And when we were in Italy, he was even wondering okay we can move away from Sicily and go to the northern part of Italy because they say there is much more jobs opportunities and so on. He even thought about going to Miami, so he’s been really open about moving.
Sadie: I’m interested in what you see your cultural identity as now. Do you still -- because you moved when you were so young, would you say now do you feel Argentinian, or do you feel Sicilian or both or neither or…?
Veronica: This is a question I get asked a lot, especially right after I arrived in Italy. Everyone would ask me “so okay, now how do you feel?” I think that I would never abandon my Argentinian identity, but I cannot also refuse the fact that being in Italy for so long has influenced my personality and my identity. I’ve been living here for most of the time of my life. I should say Italian but since I started to learn different languages and knew other people from other places, I like to say now that I feel like I’m a citizen of the world, not a citizen of the place I’m in. So this is also the vibe for my personal identify. I don’t like to stick to a box or a country defining like how am I supposed to be or what sides of my character should be more emerging than others. I just feel free and influenced by all these cultures and languages I speak in a very nice way.
Sadie: And what about your family because you say that -- you were saying that you’ve only been back to Argentina once, is that right?
Veronica: Yes.
Sadie: So do you think -- I mean did your family, your parents, try to maintain Argentinian cultural things in Sicily? Did they try to maintain that connection with Argentina, or do you think they had to establish new identities for themselves?
Veronica: I think they mostly have tried to maintain this bond with Argentina especially because they always still nowadays are trying to communicate with our relatives in Argentina digitally or via, I don’t know, post. I think they are trying to allow us not to forget what -- where we come from. Even with meals or traditions like la quinceañera, that is your 15th birthday. It’s a very big celebration in Argentina. We still do this with our smaller sisters and they get to choose what they want to do: if they want to celebrate their 18th birthday like it’s used in Italy or if they want to keep the Argentina tradition. By now almost everyone has chosen to celebrate their 15th birthday, so keeping the Argentinian tradition. With my smaller sisters it’s starting to get a little bit difficult because they are a lot younger than me, they are 10 and 8, so they didn’t learn Spanish as a first language as we did. We also try to keep the language alive speaking to my grandmother using Skype to get language for real conversation in Argentinian Spanish.
Also, with food. I would say food is one of the strongest ways that we have to keep this connection with Argentina. Like eating a salad with this dish meat grilled or flan or desserts with dulce de leche. This is something I think that is the most striking way that we have to connect with Argentina. So every time we would cook this we would immediately think about our childhood or the life in Argentina.
Sadie: Do your family still speak Spanish together?
Veronica: At first no. We left Spanish behind because my mother was thinking that this might help us learning Italian better. It worked but then it was also weird whenever I ever start listening my mother speak Spanish with my relatives, I would also be wondering what it would be like if I had kept speak Spanish -- speaking Spanish. So then I asked her to start speaking Spanish again together. We did it, although it sounds weird because my pronunciation is not that Argentinian now. Because I don’t use that language almost every day but still nowadays, we speak Spanish sometimes when we are together.
It depends on the topic. Sometimes my mother would even start speaking Sicilian. That is very weird to hear from her because she has got this Spanish accent behind and then she tries to pronounce this Sicilian weird sounds. But it’s very funny because yeah, we speak a lot of different languages in my family. My sisters also study languages but yeah even my smaller sisters sometimes just use Spanish with my mum, especially when they are outside, and they want to make like a confession to my mum that nobody else should understand. So that this has become something cool now but before it was like a stigma. I wouldn’t like my mother speaking Spanish to me in front of other people. Now it’s like oh yeah, I’m that cool kid that can speak Spanish with the mother.
Sadie: When do you think that shift happened? When do you think it went from being something you were shy about to something you felt good about?
Veronica: I think when I was in high school, and I started to learn English I would love like people who were multilingual and had parents coming from different parts of the world. When I was in London during my last year of high school, I will listen to all these people speaking to with their families and then speaking perfect English with the other people. I was like I want to be like that too. I went back home and I had this dream and told my mum that I wanted to do that. She said okay we’re going to do that and we still do it now.
Sadie: That’s really cool. I loved in your episode when you spoke about how your different languages are tied to different parts of your life or your personality. So Spanish for you, is Spanish still tied to -- is it still tied to Argentina for you or is it tied to family life?
Veronica: I would say more family life than the Argentinian country but sometimes it goes beyond my family and starts connecting with the Argentinian culture. Like people being very stubborn, having this strong character, strong feelings. You always when you are Argentinian, I think there are no limits for the feelings you feel. You always want all or nothing. This is something I took and I learnt this through videos, watching movies, things online that were not that authentic. Sometimes I even have these weird conversations with the brother of my mum because he always tells me “you should never forget a place you come from. I see that you are very determined because you are born here. Argentinian people are so stubborn, so you are going to make it very high in life” and things like that. So he always reminds me why and where I come from.
Sadie: It’s interesting because the first eight years of your life are really important formative time where there must -- that you couldn’t completely leave that behind. Obviously all of your adult life and all of the grown up decisions you’ve made, your teenage years when you kind of work out who you are, that’s all happened in Sicily and roundabout for you. Where do you feel home is now for you? Do you have a sense of where home is?
Veronica: No. Actually I think that I have lost this concept because I’ve overused it over time. Every time I was in a place, I felt really well like in Trento, in Bolzano, I always said oh this feels like home. Now I’m realising there is actually no place I can definitely call home because this notion of home is always changing in my head. When I was in an Erasmus in Germany I even dared to call that place I was in a home because I was living with this lady and she would feel very close to me, like a relative. Like the sister of my mum or she could be also sometimes like my mum. Because I was so close to her and also her family that I was always saying oh yeah it feels like home here. And they were all laughing but for me it was really like that.
Sadie: Is that something -- if you first say to me “oh, I don’t really have a home, I don’t feel like I know where home is” that sounds like a sad thing but when you talk about it, it sounds like quite a happy thing.
Veronica: Yeah. At first I also felt like yeah, I have to find a place to call home because when you say I have no home, it is as you said, people think it’s something sad. That you don’t feel like belonging to a place or being happy in a particular place, but on the other side I love this notion of being homeless in such a world we’re in because everywhere we go can become our home depending on the experiences you do in that place. For example, I wouldn’t call Sicily home 100 per cent because every time I go there, I have to see my family but I also have these memories of this difficult childhood growing up there, having to get used to that place. Instead, when I think about the northern part of Italy where I’ve been studying and growing up as an adult, this is some place I would call home, but I didn’t spend a childhood there. So it depends from your point of view in the moment you are living there especially with the people you are with.
Sadie: We should talk a little bit about podcasting then. What did you -- so you’ve made this -- this podcast episode that I think is fantastic. What made you want to give podcasting a try in the first place?
Veronica: I remember finding this website that was Bilingualism Matters, saying okay, these friends of ours are doing this podcast and looking for people for this Moving Project. At first, I was like umm I don’t know but at the same time inside of me there was this feeling of willing to share my experience with people I didn’t know. Because maybe these people had similar experiences or also people want to hear what it is like when you live this sort of experiences. So I decided to go for it but at first I was like no, they are never going to choose me because my story is not that interesting. But when I got to talk to you and I knew that I had been selected, I was like oh my gosh this is crazy. People are really interested into my life and to my experiences. So then from that day I took it really seriously because I was willing to learn how a podcast works. It’s something that you can listen to even when you are doing something else in your life, so it’s keeping you company but at the same time giving you emotions that are not light emotions, they can be really big.
Sadie: And I think you’re totally right. I think it’s obviously a little bit of a scary thing to share your story with complete strangers, but I think that people will -- I think you tell your story so well and it is such an interesting story. I think there will be people who listen and recognise the experiences you’re talking about and feel comforted or feel inspired or feel a connection with your story, despite the fact they’ve never met you in real life. I think I’m really excited for people to hear it.
And then are you thinking about continuing with podcasting in the future?
Veronica: Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I was wondering whether to start a podcast on my own or to involve other people that I think share this multicultural view of the world and have done such experiences. I’ve talked with my university, and they said they are going to start a podcast about the students at my university --
Sadie: -- Ah, brilliant.
Veronica: -- but they want to keep it formal. So this scares me a little bit because I wanted it to be very spontaneous like a chat with a friend. This makes me wonder really if I should start a podcast on my own. I know it’s a lot of work to do but it’s something that I feel I should continue doing: to share experiences with people and connect with each other.
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Sadie (voiceover): Thanks so much to Veronica for sharing her story and for bringing so much energy and fun to the project. Thanks as always to John McDiarmid and to Martha Ryan: she made the t-shirts happen. To Seb Philp for the music and to Aileen Marshall for transcription. Remember to follow the links in the episode description to buy a t-shirt, become a member on Patreon or Steady, or to make a one-off donation. Thanks to our current supporters and past donations we’ve been able to run the Moving Project without any additional funding and at no cost to the participants. We’d like to be able to keep doing things like this in the future and your support will help us to do so. Thanks for listening.