My mother learned English from a Compaq Presario. This is not a metaphor.
In 1996, two years after we arrived in Miami from Bogotá, my father brought home a beige desktop computer from a garage sale. It ran Windows 95, and every menu, every dialog box, every error message was in English. My mother, who spoke no English at the time, sat in front of it every evening after her shift at the hotel and clicked on things until she understood what they did.
"I learned 'Cancel' before I learned 'hello,'" she told me once, laughing.
The Language of Machines
Computers have always had a language problem. Or more precisely, they have always had an English problem.
The ASCII character encoding standard, developed in the 1960s, allocated 128 code points — enough for the English alphabet, Arabic numerals, and a handful of punctuation marks. It was, by design, a monolingual system. If your language used characters outside this set — accents, tildes, characters from non-Latin scripts — you were, in the most literal sense, not computable.
My mother's name is María. The accent over the 'i' was a recurring source of frustration. Forms rejected it. Databases truncated it. Official documents misspelled it. The accent — a fundamental part of her identity — was an edge case.
Unicode and the Promise of Inclusion
The Unicode standard, which began development in 1987 and now encompasses over 150,000 characters from virtually every writing system, is one of the most ambitious projects in the history of computing. It is also one of the least appreciated.
Unicode did not just add characters to computers. It made a philosophical argument: every human writing system is equally valid, equally deserving of digital representation. The Consortium's stated goal — "a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language" — sounds like engineering. It reads like a human rights declaration.
What the Machine Remembers
My mother is retired now. She uses a smartphone, texts in Spanish with perfect accents, and video-calls her sisters in Bogotá every Sunday. The technology caught up to her name. But it took thirty years.
I think about this when I write about technology — how the systems we build encode assumptions about who matters, whose language counts, whose name fits in the field. My mother's story is small. But it sits inside a larger one about who gets to be legible in a digital world.
Published in the Graywolf Press annual anthology, "New American Voices," 2024.