#unless you are someone like Chapel or Alicia and would like to add your thoughts

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

Hi, so, potentially sending this question to the wrong place, but I feel like I remember you reblogging some stuff about adding Spanish into fics without being racist or fetishizing the language or anything like that, as that's been an issue with Buddie fics. Is there any chance you have a reference or two to share so that I can respectfully write Eddie as bilingual? (Or let me know who I could ask, please!)

With all due respect, you did send it to the wrong place. I'm white, and this is not my lane. However I'm real tired of my Latinx/Hispanic/etc friends having to answer this same question over and over and over ad nauseum and they deserve a damn break so.

The short answer is: Don't.

People in this fandom I swear to fucking God are obsessed with having Eddie speak Spanish. I get that it's a Thing for people to want to see a character speak another language that they canonically in some way speak, I've seen this in other fandoms from time to time, but there are plenty of examples in this fandom of people speaking up about why you shouldn't do it with Eddie. @extasiswings and @buttercupbuck and others have talked about it at great length. Here are some posts about it that I could find from a quick search of extasiswings' blog.

Eddie is only shown speaking Spanish three times in all the years he's been on 9-1-1 and two of those times were to family. Being mixed-race is something that has a lot of layers and complexities behind it and long story short, Eddie is fluent in English and that is what he would speak 95% of the time. Unless you yourself are mixed race and know how being bilingual in a mixed-race setting works, don't touch it. Don't go there. Don't collect $200. It ain't your lane.

There is no reason to write Eddie speaking Spanish in a fic unless he is with his abuela or perhaps his aunt. We even see him speaking in English to his parents. His mother probably doesn't speak a lot if any Spanish. This is a complicated and nuanced subject and frankly it's not one that non-mixed-race-Latinx people are gonna handle well. You're just not. You're just not! I'm not! So don't do it!

To quote a friend, "unless you can read this fic and intimately understand it, do not pass go." And that doesn't mean in an empathetic or "this reminds me of [x]" kind of way. It means "unless you have had this experience with language in a mixed-race family and this recalls episodes in your own life, don't pass go."

I'm sorry if I'm snippy. I don't mean to be. But I'm tired. I can't even imagine how tired the non-white people in this fandom are feeling. This is a conversation that we seem to keep having in this fandom every few months as people crop up and say, wait, could you please explain this to me? What does this mean? What's going on? People of color in this fandom have explained it already, a dozen times over.

I understand you want to be respectful. You probably want to honor the fact that Eddie has Mexican heritage and honor that part of him and I understand that desire. But the way to be respectful is to not write about that. If you really truly absolutely have a gun to your head must, then write him speaking Spanish the way it's written in canon: he will say a word or phrase to one of his family members (primarily: Isabel, Pepa, maybe Christopher). And that's it! He will not speak Spanish to Buck, I don't give a rat's ass that Buck spent time in South America. He will not speak Spanish in long conversations. He will not have conversations in Spanish around other people. He will not call Buck any kind of Spanish endearment (y'all are getting the endearments wrong 75% of the time, by the way). He will be able to listen to people speak Spanish and understand it but will probably reply in English since listening is easier than speaking (I can confirm this with my personal experience as a multilingual person).

The fact is the show is not “ignoring his heritage.” It’s realistically portraying his use of language as a mixed-race person who grew up in America.

So yeah. Eddie is mixed-race and because of [insert essay on the American diaspora and racial politics and assimilation vs cultural heritage here] he would speak English. That's what he's fluent in. Period.