My First Contact With Spanish

Although I took Spanish in high school and college, Spanish didn't take to me there. I first began to learn to read, write and speak Spanish when I traveled to Chile, when I was seventeen years old. Actually, it was my first girlfriend, Natalia, who taught me the most Spanish, under the most intimate of circumstances . . .

Later, returning to the United States enthralled with the task of learning Spanish, by singing popular songs, reading the well-known poets, and corresponding with my friends in Spanish, my abilities increased more broadly and deeply than they ever would have, in my case, while studying in school.

So, after one semester at my university, I decided to return to Chile on "field study" to travel around by bus and by hitch-hiking, studying the revolutionary music and culture that had both spawned the Allende Socialist government and led the United States to want desperately and successfully to overthrow it.