Ariel: Thank you so much for this invitation. I'm a storyteller, so I'm going to tell you a few stories tonight about living in two worlds and what it means to breathe in two worlds and to write in two worlds. I'm going to speak in English because I think it would be best though I could have done it in Spanish. I'll explain later why that's so.

You know, this event has for me particular importance, let's say biographically. When I was twelve years old, I lived at 468 Riverside Drive, 119th street and Riverside Drive. My apartment was on the eighth floor and I would look across there, north, towards Riverside Church. I would be woken up in the morning by the bells of Riverside Church. I would be looking down and I would see the Barnard tennis courts and the girls were playing there so I would spend more time looking at the girls than listening to the bells. Let's just say they're not incompatible anymore ok, but back then that was the case. The Reverend, who was the Reverend of Riverside Church, lived at 468 Riverside Drive and he was a very good white man. And, over the years, later on, I would hear about what Riverside Church had become, the sanctuary for many different movements. It became a place where many people came to speak. Even in Chile I could hear about it years later.

So I was twelve years old and I spoke only English. And then I had to leave New York. Before I go into why I had to leave New York, let me explain why I spoke only English and what the trajectory of that is because the story of my bilingualism in some sense is the story of the last fifty, sixty years of not only my life but of the whole Americas or perhaps of world history because world history keeps on intervening in our lives whether we want it to or not.

I was born in Argentina in 1942 and I was born into Spanish. You know languages are not something that are just simply out there. They are forms, they are instruments, they are ways in which we relate to the world that is outside, they are ways in which we domesticate the demons of the dark. When you're a child and you have no way of naming, you name in a certain language. And that language is whatever language your parents are speaking generally, or the language that is around you, and then you use that language, those syllables and that grammar and that vocabulary becomes the way in which you begin to understand the world. In a sense the way in which you try to understand the consistency of the world; let's say the injustice of the world, the resistance of the world. And Spanish was the first language that I learned. I learned it like every little baby learns language, gurgling first then babbling and then slowly bringing phrases together. There are no humans who do not know how to do this.