A Cuban resident in Switzerland sparked social media this March by posting a video on TikTok in which she candidly stated that she is not interested in teaching her children Spanish, arguing that she prefers to prioritize their full integration into Swiss society.
The clip quickly went viral, splitting the Latin community into two irreconcilable factions: those who accused her of 'renouncing her roots' and those who defended her decision as a legitimate strategy for adaptation. "I don't hate Spanish, but I prioritize my children's future", the woman reportedly said, according to accounts circulating on social media, although the quote has not been directly verified.
The debate strikes a very sensitive chord among Spanish-speaking immigrants in Europe. Switzerland, where this Cuban resides, has four official languages — German, French, Italian, and Romansh — and Spanish is not among them. In this context, many Latino parents feel the pressure for their children to master the local language in order to access better job and educational opportunities, which sometimes leads to placing Spanish on the back burner.
It is not the first Cuban in Switzerland to spark conversation around these cultural and linguistic clashes. The influencer Lucy María González Machado, known on TikTok as @thezhoufam and with 1.8 million followers, has been documenting her life in the Swiss country along with her Chinese husband for some time.
In one of his most discussed videos, he humorously recounted that his son only obeys him when he scolds him in Spanish, not in Italian, clearly indicating that the mother tongue holds an authority that no other language seems to replace. In February 2025, he also taught Cuban slang to his husband: "You are my jevita, asere," was one of the phrases the man attempted to repeat amid the laughter of his followers.
The phenomenon raised in this debate has figures that both support and complicate it equally. According to data collected by Univision, 51% of children of Hispanic immigrants are bilingual, but that figure plummets to 24% in the third generation. At the same time, a 2020 study by the University of Michigan revealed that approximately 90% of Latino parents believe it is important to transmit ethnic and cultural pride through language and traditions.
Within the Latin community itself, there is also a phenomenon that generates stigma: that of the so-called 'no sabo kids', young people who do not speak or speak poorly in Spanish and who, according to a report from Infobae in November 2023, are subjected to mockery by other Latinos in 40% of cases. A painful paradox: they are criticized for not speaking the language that their own parents chose not to teach them.
The main obstacle to maintaining Spanish among the children of immigrants, according to experts, is not the lack of family will but rather the limited political, social, and educational support to preserve minority languages. In many schools with a high Latino population in the United States, students receive only 45 minutes of Spanish per week, which is insufficient time to develop fluency in their native language.
What began as a video of a Cuban woman in Switzerland turned into a reflection of a tension that millions of Latin families around the world live with in silence: the choice between integrating and not forgetting where they come from. This tension has also been explored by the Cuban influencer @thezhoufam as she reflects on living in Switzerland, documenting the contradictions of belonging to two worlds simultaneously through humor.
Filed under: