When I was young I used to think that all schoolchildren went to visit Spanish missions or places like Old Town.

I’ve often wondered what it is like for my neighbor, whose husband speaks only a few words of Spanish, to stumble in her big slippers into the coffee-scented kitchen and never hear her husband say lovingly, “¿Como amaneciste?” (How did you wake up?) Perhaps he says to her, con cariño, “How did you sleep?” And that is enough. It’s obvious by my neighbors’ actions that they love one another. Perhaps nothing is lost in the translation; the caress of the words is the same.

My father-in-law used to tell the same joke every time we went to visit. After we knocked on the door, he would call out, “Who is it?” Through the screen door, we would speak into the dark interior of the house, “It’s us.” Then he would laugh and say, “Don’t strain your voice.” When you live on the border of another country, when you live in the presence of more than one language, communicating sometimes feels as if it is through a screen or a sieve. Translators of books struggle with this problem on an academic and aesthetic level, but what is lost — or gained — in the ordinary daily exchanges between two languages, two cultures, two people?

In our eagerness to embrace multiculturalism, to belatedly validate difference, we have sometimes forgotten to reaffirm the many things we, as a species, have in common. When a jailer crosses racial, political, religious, and linguistic lines to call the prisoner he is guarding “sister,” or when Isabel Allende and a woman in India communicate about their grandchildren without a common language, we are reminded of what we share as human beings. Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, writes, “Cultures surely differ in how often their members express, talk about, and act on various emotions…[but] the evidence suggests that the emotions of all normal members of our species are played on the same keyboard.” Nevertheless, Pinker notes, “Who but the Jews would have a word, naches, for luminous pride in a child’s accomplishments? And does it not say something profound about the Teutonic psyche that the German language has the word schadenfreude, pleasure in another’s misfortunes?”

There are words in Spanish, as well, that have no absolute counterparts in English. Tocayo, for instance, means someone with whom you share the same name. My Larousse translates tocayo as namesake, a word we rarely use in English and not in the same way.

If I meet someone named Susan, she will happily exclaim that we are tocayas. (I have changed the ending to reflect female and plural status.) Since I am on the border of Spanish, as opposed to being of it, I know the meaning of tocaya, but when I try to affix an emotion to it, I am uncertain. Does sharing the same name with someone a priori establish a fraction more intimacy between my tocaya and me? Does the fact that we both walk around experiencing the varied world under the same name mean that our relationship to the world has more similarity than, say, my relationship to the world and Alice’s?

I love to think of words as possessions. I tell ESL students, once they use a word it belongs to them — a bird in the hand, a morsel in the mouth. But what does it mean to possess a word and not its nuance? It’s like knowing the lyrics of a song but not what they really mean, or knowing a math formula but not being able to arrive at the solution.

Language can be currency or liability along the frontera. Chula Vista, the city in which I live, is situated 11 miles north of the Mexican border. A person must pick his or her way carefully through the linguistic minefields here. Yesterday I went to Henry’s to buy some vitamins. Beside me in the aisle I heard a woman speaking Spanish to the clerk. I understood the customer to be asking the clerk if she could order a certain brand of vitamin. The clerk, who had long dark hair and whose badge read Rosa, called over another clerk and said, “Would you explain to this woman that we don’t have the brand she is looking for but we could order it.” The translation began, but the Spanish-speaking shopper interrupted sharply in English, “I understood perfectly what she was saying.” Rosa, looking as piqued as a salesperson is allowed to in the face of a client, replied, “But why didn’t you speak to me in English?” The woman answered, “I thought you spoke Spanish.” Gradually, things got resolved in both languages, because the assisting clerk kept speaking Spanish to the customer, Rosa continued in English, while the customer, as a point of honor, kept up her part in both languages.

Later, in the checkout line, the same woman approached the cashier who was helping me — and who had a long line of foot-tapping shoppers — and asked in Spanish if she could have change for a dollar. The cashier said with some irritation, “I think what you’re saying is you need change, but it will be a while before I open my register, so try another checker.” At which point I, who am always foolishly compelled to leap into silence or linguistic gaffes, said to the woman, “¿Que tipo de cambio quieres?” I suddenly felt self-conscious because I belatedly recognized that this was the woman who spoke English, and because I had used the familiar instead of the polite form of address. The woman said to me in English, “I just need change for the telephone.” Then we exchanged the only sure coin of the realm. Although you cannot judge a book by its cover, you would at least know what language it is written in. In this region, it is a mistake to look at someone and assume what language they speak or wish to speak. Aside from communication, language becomes a question of diplomacy.

Bob Dylan’s early lyrics capture the cultural genuflecting politicians do to win votes.

• Now, the man on the stand, he wants my vote/
• He’s a-runnin’ for office on the ballot note/
• He’s out there preachin’ in front of the steeple/
• Tellin’ me he loves all kindsa people./
• He’s eatin’ bagels/
• He’s eatin’ pizza/
• He’s eatin’ chitlins.

Nowadays, politicians have to talk the talk as well as walk the walk. “Yo habla español muy bien,” Bob Filner said on election night in downtown San Diego, November 2002. Obviously, he didn’t speak muy bien: he got the verb conjugation wrong (the purpose of verbs, it sometimes seems, is to confound the non-native speaker). Habla is third person, hablo is first. Across the floor, David Valladolid, chair of the board of directors of the Chicano Federation, made an amused comment about the number of politicians throwing Spanish words into their sentences. What was not so amusing was to hear George W. Bush, during his campaign for presidency, trotting out his high school Spanish. He used Spanish like an overanxious suitor uses cologne; when he spoke with corazón there was a suspicious reek. And surely there is some irony that politicians in California feel compelled to press Spanish into service after angst-ridden voters have declared English as the official language.

In the 2002 mayoral race in Chula Vista, both candidates, Mary Salas and Steve Padilla, were of Mexican descent (Padilla is also Portuguese), but neither candidate spoke Spanish very well. Nevertheless, a little Spanish word entered the fray — and perhaps cost Salas the election. A Padilla campaign brochure mailed to Chula Vista residents, in language that resembled high school finger-wagging, read, “Shame on you Mary for saying things that divide our community.” Across the page the campaign ad had extracted a Salas quote from El Latino magazine: “Gringos [white people] don’t understand how powerful us Latinos are.” The bracketed definition of “gringo” was part of the brochure. The growing power of Latino voters was being observed by everyone at the time (an objective, not subjective, point), but Padilla seized on this as political fodder and used it himself to divide the community. Several Anglo-Americans I spoke to said they could not support Salas after she spoke about white people that way. When I pointed out that gringo is not a pejorative term — and in some dictionaries is simply translated as foreigner — they remained unconvinced.

The author Rubén Martínez describes himself as a Chicano, descendant of the “cultural swirl” that includes the “Old World (Virgin of Guadalupe votives always aglow at my grandparents’ house) and the New World (the tube flashing with The Brady Bunch at my parents.’”) However, while researching his book Crossing Over and living in the small Mexican town of Cherán, Martínez applies this troubling noun to himself. “There is great laughter when I announce that I will be joining the harvest today. The thought of a gringo in the corn rows is just too much.”

Mexicans reserve for Mexican-Americans a word that is much harsher than gringo — pocho. Many of the students who attend my English classes speak of their visits to Mexico and the bitter experiences using the Spanish they acquired in the United States. No amount of linguistic exercise designed to teach their tongues to roll their r’s can save them from being called pocha or pocho. The novel Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility is situated in Palm City, several miles closer to the border than Chula Vista. The author, Patricia Santana, demonstrates the cruel application of this term by cousins only 20 minutes to the south. “But on some Sundays, we were forced to spend the afternoon with our other cousins in Colonia Chapultepec, the rich section of Tijuana. Torture. Humiliation. We were considered the ‘pochos’ who lived ‘al otro lado’ and spoke a mishmash language — not completely English, not completely Spanish.” When the narrator’s sister asked the rich cousins to watch “cartones,” the rich cousins replied, “What size of carton would you like to watch?” The sister tried to clear up the confusion. “You know, like ‘Popeye.’ ‘Cartones,’ the cousins laughed, running down the long marbled hallway of their rich house… ‘Ay, ¡que pocha!’”

But we are all pochas or pochos here in the southernmost part of California. On any given day a guy named John might respond to the question, “Do you speak Spanish?” by answering “Un poco.” On Friday, John might decide to go with his friend down to Tijuana for some cervezas, so John leaves his house on Via Caliente and heads south on I-5, passing through San Diego, stopping to pick up his friend Luis in Chula Vista, where the two of them might grab a burrito at Roberto’s, which will cause John to drive a little loco because it’s hard to steer and pour salsa at the same time. They might discuss the last pathetic Padres game, or the portrayal of youthful male sexuality in the Mexican movie Y Tú Mamá Tambíen, while they listen to Los Lobos on the CD player. After they pass through San Ysidro, they’ll cross the border and head for Revolución, where a vendor, who speaks English because he has lived on the other side or is listening to language tapes called Ingles Sin Barreras, will call out to John, “Hey, amigo, come on in, take a look. I have the best prices in town.”

In his book Brown, Richard Rodríquez reminds us that American English was never pure. “Even before our rebellion against England, our tongue tasted of Indian — succotash… Mississippi… Our tongue is not something slow and mucous… Our tongue sticks out; it is a dog’s tongue, an organ of curiosity and science… Nativists who want to declare English the official language of the United States do not understand the omnivorous appetite of the language they wish to protect. Those Americans who would build a fence around American English to forestall the Trojan burrito would turn American into a frightened tongue, a shrinking little oyster tongue…”

President Bush spoke a mishmash (perhaps in more ways than one), which is why if you check out the website pocho.com, you will find that Bush was once nominated for Pocho of the Year. All languages absorb and mutate. Where would Spanish be without the Moorish Ojalá — I wish, I hope, If Allah wills?

Though this linguistically complex area we live in is fraught with difficulties, it is also rich with possibility. Children sing “Feliz Navidad” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”; poets declaim verses in two languages. My friend and office mate, Francisco Bustos, lives in Playas de Tijuana but is a professor of English in the United States. His fluency in two languages dances cumbias around my poor, dull tongue. Francisco once told me that when he was in high school he wanted not just to learn English but the culture as well. He read all of Hemingway’s novels. He writes fiction, and his prose, like his conversation, dazzles in two languages. So, when he switches to Spanish in the middle of a conversation, or in the middle of a paragraph, I know it’s not because he is at a loss for words; rather, his selection of words is an act of attention, an ability to mine two languages for the most precise form of expression. Academics call it “code switching” when a speaker interweaves two languages.

Richard Skiba, in an article entitled “Code Switching as Countenance of Language Interference,” from The Internet TESL Journal (a monthly web magazine for ESL teachers), suggests that people alternate between two languages for a number of reasons. Sometimes, according to the article, the switching will be done to “compensate” for a deficiency. However, code switching is also seen as a bilingual tool used to create exclusion, rapport, or to convey an attitude. “Where monolingual speakers can communicate these attitudes by means of variation in the level of formality in their speech, bilingual speakers can convey the same by code switching.”

If we were speaking in Darwinian terms, we might say Francisco has developed an adaptive strategy that will ensure his success in the border region. My neighbors have two children who are also on their way to becoming bilingual, but their progress is more complex, more circuitous than a monolingual child’s. Their English words have Spanish accents. Or English words get tangled in the net of their Spanish phrases. But one day, they will be well prepared to slide into that adaptive niche. My neighbors’ children might be a metaphor for living on the border of a country. One language for the father, another for the mother. Or the truth might be other: an integrated use of both languages, not unlike Francisco’s — una mezcla.

I don’t speak Spanish as well as I’d like to. Though I have pursued Spanish in classes — in Guadalajara, Taxco, Barcelona — fluency eludes me. And where once I hoped language would be a bridge, it is only a bridge so far. I have a good friend in Ensenada named Norma Muñoz. When we get together in Ensenada, we speak primarily Spanish. Her tolerance for my frequent pronoun and verb errors, as well as my poor pronunciation, comes from two things. She was once a speech therapist, and so she learned to teach by listening. And she believes that when you are in Mexico, you should speak Spanish, if you can. When we get together, sometimes after months of not seeing one another, there is such eagerness to relate our experiences that what we seem to speak is the pleasure of one another’s company, rather than English or Spanish. We also make small gifts to one another that are like cultural exchanges. She sautés some nopales (cactus strips) with onion in olive oil. I bake a brie from Trader Joe’s. She gives me some homemade mole and a recipe; I make Trader Joe’s pizza. Our communication is also strengthened by our many shared interests, our shared geography, and after ten years, a certain amount of shared history. I am cheered by the fact that though the bridge of my Spanish carries us only so far, desire, intention, and the things we share carry us the rest of the way.

When I was young I used to think that all schoolchildren went to visit Spanish missions or places like Old Town that refer to the layered history of San Diego. We are often blinded by the familiar, and I was slow in realizing the unique area to which I belong. It wasn’t until I went to the East Coast to visit relatives that I discovered what a different sense of belonging children have who went to visit Pilgrim villages, Mayflower replicas, or Washington, D.C. The Mexican author Elena Poniatowska writes about finally feeling a part of Mexico. In order to write the testimonial novel Here’s to You, Jesusa, once a week for over ten years Poniatowska visited Jesusa, a woman in her 80s who lived in a poor neighborhood in Mexico City. By vicariously experiencing almost a century of Mexico’s history through her acquaintance with Jesusa, Poniatowska at last achieved a deep sense of belonging. “What was growing, although it may have been there for years, was my Mexican being, my becoming Mexican; feeling Mexico inside me, the same one that was inside Jesusa. I wasn’t the eight-year-old girl who had arrived on a refugee ship.… Now Mexico was inside me…. My grandparents and my great-grandparents always repeated a phrase in English that they thought was poetic: ‘I don’t belong.’ Maybe it was their way of distinguishing themselves from the rabble, not being like the rest. One night, before sleep overcame me, after identifying strongly with Jesusa…I could finally say to myself in a quiet voice: ‘Yo pertenezco,’ ‘I do belong.’ ”

Southern California is not Mexico (anymore). Yet to see more clearly the distinctness of the region to which we belong, we have only to look at the assimilation process that people from Wisconsin, or Vermont, or New Jersey, or Idaho have to go through. You hear it in the way they wrap their mouths around their new street names or their new friends’ names. You see it in the tentative way they approach cultural events with Spanish words in their titles. You see it in the way they marvel at the architecture; sure, we have the same Golden Arches, but we also have graceful and utilitarian Spanish architecture. You see it in the way they are eager to try the new cuisine. We once took a French foreign-exchange student to a Mexican restaurant. Before we could stop him — he was very hungry — he chomped down several jalapeños and carrots thinking they were crudités, or raw vegetables.

For a long time we have heard how close chimpanzee DNA is to human DNA. What we haven’t heard as much about is how genetically similar we humans are, irrespective of race. In an article called “Ciencias: the case against raza,” from the magazine El Andar, Camille Mojica Rey, Ph.D., writes about relatively recent scientific discoveries. “The data collected by Craig Venter and government-funded scientists shows, once and for all, that there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them. Any two people chosen at random from around the world are just as likely to be genetically similar as two people chosen at random from the same racial group living in the United States. ‘There are no genes that define ethnic groups,’ says Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute for Genome Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

This information points to the living experiment that Southern Californians have been conducting, that shared experience, shared language, and shared geography may ultimately be more important than shared genes.

A colleague and friend of mine, Andrew Rempt, is fond of saying that we are all black females, because in the womb, we are initially female and because the largest proportion of genetic material we possess comes from Africa. Culture, then, becomes the interesting variation. David Mura, a third-generation Japanese-American, grew up in Minnesota and seldom saw his own features reflected in the population around him. His book Turning Japanese relates the shock he felt when he got off the plane in Tokyo, surrounded at last by people who looked similar to him yet possessed an absolutely foreign language and culture. (Mura only had a few Japanese lessons before he left the United States.) In an article called “The Legacy of Conquest and Discovery: Meditations on Ethnicity, Race, and American Politics,” from the book Borderless Borders, the Mexican-American author Gerald Torres shares this experience: “One spring day when I was home from college, [my mother] told me, with great prescience, ‘Gerald, you are white in ways that you don’t even know.’”

This is a refrain I often hear from Mexican-American students who adamantly claim the culture of Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley, Ford, Jack’s Secret Sauce, Hemingway, and so on. Likewise, all of us who live along the border are Mexican in ways we don’t even know — after all, we have eaten from the Trojan burrito.