Benjamin Alire Saenz on the bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso

Of course, there were growing pains. At first many of the English-speaking students were resistant and impatient with having to deal with so much Spanish in the workshops. And some Latin American students were unaccustomed to the kind of Spanish that is common on the border. One of the great lessons for all of us was that we had to accept that we speak different versions of Spanish, just as we speak different versions of English.