Eralia

Eralia was a senior when this study was being conducted. Eralia’s parents were originally from Jamaica, and they spoke American English and Jamaican Patois at home. She could understand AAVE because her sister learned AAVE from school and spoke it very often to her. Eralia grew up in a neighborhood with a large population of Hispanics in Broward County, Florida, where she was surrounded by both English and Spanish, and she took Spanish language classes from fourth grade to tenth grade. Eralia chose to learn French language starting tenth grade until the first year of college. She also dabbled in learning Arabic, Japanese, Icelandic, and Turkish with Duolingo. But Eralia was more confident saying that she spoke American English, Jamaican Patois, some Spanish and French. 

Eralia chose yellow for English and green for Jamaican Patois, because these two colors were from the national flag of Jamaica. She colored the head in both yellow and green because she always used these two languages together, but the green heart in the middle of the head showed that Patois was deep-rooted in her mind. She highlighted both hands in yellow because English was the language she used to interact with the world. Eralia reserved her favorite color, purple, for half of the body to represent her Jamaican identity, and then she used red for another half of the body to indicate her hometown, Broward County in south Florida, which represented her American identity. And then Eralia inserted brown for one leg to represent her Black American identity. Because she felt that she had been “integrating” her different cultures, she drew a gemstone in the middle by including all the colors that represented Jamaican, American, and Black cultures (Focus group interview). The yellow and green dots all over the body meant that English and Patois were the languages through which she experienced her cultures. In the individual follow-up interview, Eralia decided to add Spanish and French into her language portrait. She used blue, one of the colors in French national flag, to draw bracelets and anklets to represent French. After some thoughts, she selected orange to contrast with other colors for Spanish, represented by the hat, necklace, belt, and the fingernails.