LISTENING TO THE ACCENTS AND HER PANTIS

So many times, in some many places, my accents, were instrumental in how I was viewed and treated. I am not the only one. A few years ago, a Puerto Rican cabaret singer who had been living in Argentina for seveal decades was questioned with regards as to how she spoke Spanish -with a sarcastic tone- by an airline employee at the airport counter, when checking in. The diva, who was well known in PR, since she was a singer with Las Caribelles, a woman's only musical group quite popular during the late sixties, did not miss a step and angrily said to the young woman why she sounded Argentinian, and then added an insult, telling the clerk that she was free as an artist while "you are stuck there from 9:00 to 5:00. Monday thru Friday" (my translation). A Puerto Rican professor of Spanish -now retired- who had never lived in Argentina also acquired an accent from the lands of the gauchos. I assume she did that because when she was hired the South Americans cotrolled the Spanish Departments in the USA and, there is no doubt in my mind, had she kept the Puerto Rican one, she would have not been hired. In some USA institutions, that seems to still be  operating as a sublimal criteria.  Early in my childhood, I learned that I could not talk like my parents, mountain jíbaros, with their "errres" (/r/ velar), "gritito", up and down intonation, and extension of the vowels that was characteristic of that population up to the 1950"s. "De verdaaj". My siblings and I adapted quickly the "deje" of the urban more educated populations; and modified the nasality to sound less "fañosos". Nasality is another characteristic of Puerto Rican Spanish. It has now been modified and refined by the bourgeoisie in the islands of the brave and beautifully colonized. An old female college peer always had a good laugh at my pronunciation in English of the word "panties". Luckily it was only the pronunciation. She knew I was gay, and was not interested in getting into her "pantis".