While Valerio and Arcadia reported feeling discriminated against at work for being an immigrant, Nina was the only participant of the fourteen who had experiences in which she was positioned as an outsider or other for reasons of language use - using Spanish in public in the U.S.

She mentioned two such incidents in her interview from 2006. When asked directly about a different feeling or personality that she has when using English, Nina responded that she "feels different". However, she then gave two examples about criticized for using Spanish. In the first, she said:

"I feel that I am not from here, I am from somewhere else. And there are people that listen to you and they know that you are not from here. And I think that there are people who don't care and there are people who do not like that. One day I went to the laundry, I have a big comforter that I needed to wash and my daughter was showing me how to use the machines. And a woman shows up but she looked a little disrupted and she said ‘please just speak English because we are in the U.S.' And everybody in the laundry looked at her in a very weird way. And my daughter said to her: ‘What is the problem, I am American and we are speaking in Spanish.'"

When asked if there had been other incidents like this that she had experienced, Nina replied:

"I think that the American people are good people. I just had one incident when I came for the first time at the U.S, at the airport. I came and there was an American with long hair and my son-in-law was helping me. I was returning to Peru and I was showing him my passport and this man who was behind me said: ‘Why did you come if you don't speak English.' But I did not understand anything and my son-in-law was very upset and my daughter calmed him down. I was confused in that moment, then they explained me what that man said to me.

Nina was not asked about this directly and we have no other evidence to suggest that such attitudes were responsible for Nina's not learning a lot of English. But such xenophobic attitudes against the use of Spanish surely created an image of the U.S. as not welcoming to people from other countries with other languages. And we see Nina express that sentiment in the preface to her first story (above) "I feel that I am not from here, I am from somewhere else".