On Language, and Belonging

Originally shared in Tuesday Notes on February 10, 2026.

This week's conversations around Bad Bunny performing in Spanish at the Super Bowl landed a little closer to home for me than usual.

I grew up in a family shaped by many places; born in Panama, to a Swiss father and a mother from Trinidad and Venezuela, raised between Mexico and Switzerland. I learned early that language is a strange shortcut people use to decide where you belong. Speak it well, and you're expected to fit. Speak it imperfectly, and you're often marked as "not quite."

But experience taught me something different: speaking a language, even fluently, doesn't automatically mean inclusion. And not speaking it perfectly doesn't automatically mean exclusion.

We like to believe integration is technical: learn the words, master the grammar, soften the accent. But belonging isn't rational or procedural. It's emotional. Relational. Often unspoken.

You can speak the language perfectly and still be treated as an outsider. You can speak it imperfectly and still be welcomed.

Because inclusion isn't about linguistic competence, it's about whether there's space for you to exist without performing correctness.

There's something about Latino culture that illustrates this beautifully. It doesn't always translate neatly. It isn't designed to slow down for explanation. It's expressive, loud, emotional, rhythmic. Conversations overlap. Music leads with feeling before meaning. Accents aren't corrected, they're expected.

In many Latino spaces, you don't belong because you got everything right. You belong because you showed up.

Volume isn't aggression. Emotion isn't chaos. Imperfection isn't a failure, it's normal.

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Tuesday Language Lesson

There's a small detail about the Spanish language I have always loved.

We have two common ways of saying "I love you": te quiero, and, te amo. They're often translated the same way, but they carry different emotional weight.

Te quiero is the love you use with friends and family, and sometimes with the person you're slowly falling for. It's tender, everyday love.

Te amo is different. It's reserved for the person you love as a partner. It's deeper, more deliberate and not said lightly.

English, and most other languages I know of, collapse both into one phrase. Spanish doesn't. It allows love to exist in layers, connection without intensity and meaning without immediacy.

And maybe that's another quiet lesson about inclusion: not every form of closeness needs the same language to belong.