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“[Marco Rubio] has got a language advantage over me, ‘cause I’m not learning your damn language,” Trump continued. “I don’t have time. I was okay with languages but I’m not gonna spend time learning your language. That much I won’t do.”

— Donald Trump to Latin American leaders, March 2026

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October 2008. I walk into a French restaurant in Santiago de Chile feeling out of place. Casual slacks and an untucked blouse, my hair a frothy mass of curls, too long. My face damp and make-up smudged. Alone.

I feel thousands of miles from my Nevada home and a lifetime away from the comfort of speaking English. So few chilenos speak English. This makes Santiago an excellent place to immerse myself in language learning.

That said, I’m tired of working so hard to communicate.

Estoy sola. Estoy cansada. Tengo hambre.

So hungry. The restaurant’s foyer is narrow, dark, humid. Still air. Shuttered.

No one greets me or acknowledges my presence. It’s 7 p.m. Mas temprano. Too early for self-respecting chilenos to be dining out. Two or three men sit alone in booths, reading newspapers, drinking pisco sours topped with frothy egg whites.

Today’s El Mercurio is folded under my arm.

I catch the eye of a bustling waiter, setting up for the night. He’s placing carefully folded white cloth napkins on tables. Arranging forks. Aligning wine glasses for white and for red.

I straighten my back.

“¿Permiso?”

Nothing. I try a more commanding, confident tone. Soy profesora.

“¿Perdón?”

He finally looks at me. I gesture to a table. He shrugs. I sit. Unfold my paper. Wait for a waiter.

I stare at the closest, willing el mesero to come to the table. I catch the gaze of another, walking briskly out of the kitchen. He sees me. Catches my eye. Looks away.

Unlike me, the waiters seem cool in the heat of the late spring evening. No discernible sweat. Brisk in pleated pants and crisp white shirts. Collared like coiffed French poodles.

Mas temprano.

It was a Friday night and my students had taken a bus to Viña del Mar en la costa. My plan was to force myself to get out and practice language skills. I decided on dinner at a French bistro, highly recommended by students, a block from metro Estación Manuel Montt. With a population of more than 6 million, Santiago is the largest city I’ve lived in, by far. I’m teaching two university classes for a study abroad program at La Universidad Andrés Bello. I’m enrolled in four semesters of Spanish compressed into five months. Como reportera necesito hablar español.

I rent an apartment in Providencia, close to metro Estación Salvador. My place is equidistant between the university campus and fine dining, galleries and clubs where my mostly U.S. students dance until 4 a.m. One wanders into my morning classes in the clothes she wore the night before.

I’ve dined by the pool at a renowned Peruano restaurant Barandiaran, ordering ceviche, the best I’ve ever tasted. But that night I was with people, some of them men. And it had been the right time for dining – after 9 p.m. But I was raised in the U.S. Midwest where we enjoy an evening meal at 5 p.m. So I wait to go out until 7 p.m.

Which is still desmasiado temprano. Ahora estoy sola. Me siento cohibida. Feeling self-conscious. Every hair out of place, keeping my arms at my sides so pit sweat doesn’t show. I lean into the aisle and practically trip a waiter.

“Un cerveza, por favor,” I ask. Looking at his eyes. Which are averted. And he repeats the order, correcting my careless gender mistake, as much for the lurking staff as for anything.

“Una cerveza, por supuesto,” he said, pronouncing the “ah” in “una” distinctly. A beer is a girl, not a boy. “Una cerveza para la señora. Claro.”

And I wish I were home in my 11th floor condo overlooking Parque Balmaceda, tucked in safe with a pot of boiling water on the stove, a plastic sack of elbow macaroni and The Daily Show to watch on my Macbook. I’d cook the noodles al dente and stir in grated cheese. A crushed clove of garlic, bat of butter, squirt of sriracha. Porque tengo hambre. Hey, estoy pensando en español.

I catch myself thinking in Spanish for a few seconds almost every day. For weeks, I have had to focus hard and plan ahead, memorizing words to accomplish life’s simple tasks – eat, drink, buy groceries, travel. I panic before opening my mouth to speak. I stand in line at el supermercado, rehearsing answers to the standard questions. Do you have an account here? Do you want paper or plastic?

The workers speak fast so I have to guess the questions and often give up and answer no, no. If I hear language that sounds like the standard “how are you paying for this?” I respond with efectivo, gracias, and whip out chileno pesos. Given occasional confused looks from clerks, I likely give this answer to the wrong question.

“How are you doing today?”

“Cash, thank you.”

Most days, I want to be back in Reno where I don’t have to remember to tip the young person who packs my food items into bags. Where I don’t have to ride the metro home with bags on my arms. Where I can drive my car to Safeway, type my phone number into a keypad for deals, pay with my credit card, and load groceries into my trunk. Where I don’t have to rehearse my orders at the deli counter and remember that half a kilo is a pound of cheese. Medio kilo, I would say, and point to el queso.

I point so much. When you can’t speak a language, you point and point. When you can’t speak a language, you can’t understand directions to the store that sells towels and you can’t find café entero or la machina in which to grind whole beans. My first week in Santiago involved attempting to find good coffee or a grinder for the whole beans that I’d packed in my luggage.

After many frustrating quests, I bought a jar of Nescafe. Instant coffee is easy. Add a little cocoa powder and you’ve got a gas station mocha. My new chileno friends joke about this, about my weird affection for No Es Café.

But tonight, tengo hambre. I plan to order delicious French cuisine. I will point to menu items and the pretentious chileno waiters will not try to hide their scorn for my 43-year-old female solitude. I will read the paper to hide from them. But my belly will be full.

I wait and I wait. Espero y espero. The gorgeous verb “esperar” means “to wait” and also “to hope.” My beer arrives and I drink it. But no menu. The waiters have disappeared. I give up. I fold my paper, leave the equivalent of $10 on the table and walk out.

It’s two blocks to a shop with 50 flavors of helado. I like frutas del bosque the best. Fruits of the forest.

Next to me in line, a chileno starts a conversation in English. He introduces himself.

“Hello, I am Geraldo.”

“Didra,” I say. If a Spanish-speaker looks at those letters, they will pronounce my name exactly right.

“Are you of the U.S.?”

“Si, soy estadounidense.” Weird to me that we don’t have a word in English for a UnitedStates-ian. We are all americanos, of course, from Canada to Patagonia. It takes travel to learn the reality of this.

I order frutas del bosque.

“Sabe a moras,” I explain to Geraldo that it tastes like blackberries. He asks for the English translation. He likes to practice English and says he studies my language by watching The Simpsons.

“Black, how you say, berry?”

“Blackberry, si, perfecto.”

He asks where I live in the estados unidos and I say, “Nevada, Las Vegas.” I’ve tried telling people I’m from Reno but Las Vegas is more widely known in sudamerica.

“Las Vegas!” Geraldo’s eyes light up. “It is my dream to go there for one weekend. I would, I think you say, clean up.”

“Buena suerte!” I tell him. “If you get to Las Vegas, Geraldo. I hope you do. Espero.”

We part ways. Fueled by frozen dairy, I walk to the bar district in Bellavista and slide into a dark dive with live music. It’s almost 9 p.m., and the place is starting to fill.

“Una cerveza,” I say at the bar, fucking nailing the gender this time. “Guiness, por favor.”

New language, new soul, new window to the world. Familiar Irish beer.

El barman responds without delay. I will tip him well. Men are smoking at the bar. I light a Lucky Strike. Inhale. Exhale. Fumar es una dicha. Bliss to my lungs. Nicotine surges into my bloodstream, heightening senses and mental acuity. I lean back, smile and take in the scene.

In a dark corner of the room, a teen sings from a tall stool, long bangs drooping over his face. He plays an acoustic guitar plugged into an amp and leans into a microphone, singing mostly 1990s covers from U.S. bands. He’s learned the sounds of words, stringing together unfamiliar consonants and vowels memorized. Language is a cryptic mesh of noise that we learn to decipher, to unglue meaning. So many people learn English by watching and listening to U.S. popular media. I’m impressed. The singer throw his heart into the lyrics of Pearl Jam, Sublime, Guns and Roses. Channeling Cobain, he strums and sings: “come as you are, as a frand as a nold enemy.” I realize I don’t know the lyrics to “Come As You Are” or I might sing along. Because I’m drinking.

Alcohol is a universal language. I sink into the spell of warm imported beer, overpriced and only slightly better than the local macrobrew Crystal. The men next to me, I guess early 50s, are tipsy from beer and whiskey. They look like shorter, heavier versions of Robert DeNiro, with an extra chin, and Harvey Keitel, balding with a comb-over. We engage in small talk but soon launch into inquiries about U.S. politics and the upcoming election.

“¿Las elecciones en estado unidos? ¿Te gusta McCain?”

They want to know how will I vote. Do I like John McCain? Do I support the right – and perhaps by extension Pinochet-style dictatorships or the left, this Obama guy, this wannabe Salvador Allende. In Chile, it boils down to this. Fascism or socialism. Security or equity. I try my best to express my ideology en español.

“La gente de mi país tiene miedo.” The people in my country have fear. I don’t have the right words to describe my nation’s growing terror of The Other — immigrants, women, people of color. I don’t know how to say I think George W. Bush’s administration exploits those fears.

No tengo el vocabulario para describirlo.

I bungle it. Double Chin DeNiro stumps out his cigarette, sips his whiskey neat and asks me:

“¿Ellos piensan que Obama es peligroso?”

“Ah, no. Disculpe. La gente piensan que todos es peligroso.” The people think that everything is dangerous. “Me gusta Obama. Espero que gane.” I like Obama. I hope he wins. Espero. Espero.

Double Chin DeNiro laughs at this, pats my shoulder, changes the subject. Combover Keitel leans in close and chides me for smoking Lucky Strikes. The Luckies have too much nicotine for a girl.

“Demasiada nicotina,” Keitel says. He furrows his brow. “Deberías fumar algo menos.” You should smoke something less. I observe that nicotine, like beer, is also a girl.

I use my Lucky to light another Lucky. Keitel and DeNiro cackle at this and shake their heads. I lean back to watch Chileno Cobain cover Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I feel comfortable. Me siento a gusto, I think, I feel OK in this moment.

“Una cerveza mas, por favor,” I ask el barman. “Una mas.”

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Postscript: A month later, eight of my travel writing students gathered in my Santiago 11th floor apartment to watch election returns. We made a huge pot of a traditional chileno stew charquicán and drank pisco sours and vino tinto chileno. I cried as we watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. It had been eight long years.

Espero y espero.

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Deidre Pike is chair of the journalism department at Cal Poly Humboldt. Ella pide disculpas por los errores en español.