Why Hispanic Lawyers, Doctors and Executives Are Quietly Ashamed of Their Spanish

When a Latino professional reaches a certain point in American life, something peculiar occurs. The degrees are framed. The title is well-deserved. The pay exceeds six figures. Additionally, the Spanish becomes quieter at some point. Not completely gone, but muted—spoken only at family get-togethers, whispered into a grandmother’s phone, and completely avoided in meetings where it might raise an eyebrow or, worse, an assumption.

Hispanic lawyers, doctors, and executives who developed their careers by becoming so proficient in English that their Spanish began to feel like a liability may have the most painful understanding of this paradox of any group. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, over half of Latinos in the United States who speak little or no Spanish report that other Latinos have made fun of them for it. The percentage rises above fifty-seven percent among those between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine. The version of shame that exists in hospital hallways and corner offices, however, is not captured by the data. This version of shame is quiet, internal, and wrapped in professional respectability.

Think about the Houston lawyer who effortlessly transitions between client calls and contract negotiations, but falters during a phone call with her Guadalajara aunt. Or the Chicago cardiologist whose parents gave up everything to send him to medical school, only to see him react to their Spanish with halting, regretful half-sentences. These individuals are not fictitious. The majority of them would prefer not to discuss it, but they are ubiquitous. There is a sense that acknowledging the difference between their professional identity and their upbringing runs the risk of revealing something more serious than a language barrier. It seems like a betrayal.

This has decades-old roots. Across the nation, Latino parents were informed that assimilation meant giving up Spanish, sometimes overtly and other times through the blunt machinery of English-only laws and school policies. Children who grow up speaking Spanish at home frequently stop doing so once school starts, according to Silvina Montrul, a linguistics professor at the University of Illinois who studies bilingualism in heritage speakers. The younger siblings follow their elder sibling in introducing English into the home. Resistance grows even when parents continue to speak in their mother tongue. Many Latinos of the second and third generations become functionally monolingual by adulthood, possessing only fragments of a language they once knew naturally.

Professionals experience this differently because of the expectations on both sides. Occasionally, Anglo coworkers treat any hint of Spanish as a sign of foreignness, something to be courteously disregarded or lightly ridiculed through remarks about accents and pronunciation errors. The non-Spanish-speaking executive, on the other hand, might be perceived by other Latinos as an inauthentic person who sacrificed culture in order to pursue a career. Pitzer College linguistics professor Carmen Fought has maintained that prejudice against Spanish is more about the speakers of the language than it is about the language itself. It’s a two-way street. A successful Latina is doing more than just controlling perception when she stays away from Spanish in a boardroom. In order to survive, she must perform a kind of belonging that is subtly required by American professional culture.

It’s difficult to ignore the irony. There are more Spanish speakers in the US than in Spain. Numerous studies have connected bilingualism to better concentration, more robust problem-solving, and a delayed onset of dementia. However, Spanish still carries an unseen burden in professional contexts, something that should be controlled rather than embraced. Hispanic Executive columnist Laura Martinez’s follower revealed that her own mother, who declined to teach her Spanish, now makes fun of her for not knowing the language. This kind of contradiction affects how people progress through their careers on a daily basis, but it doesn’t appear in workforce diversity reports.

A new generation of Latino professionals is attempting to change this. Some people are using conversation groups and apps to relearn Spanish. For the first time, others are publicly discussing it in the workplace to see if the atmosphere has truly changed or if it is merely a claim. It’s still unclear if the harm caused by decades of language suppression can be reversed. However, the silence surrounding it—the silent guilt that lies between identity and success—deserves more attention than it currently receives. You shouldn’t have to forget where you came from in order to succeed, and learning a language shouldn’t make you feel ashamed.