“ Emilia Pérez,” Jacques Audiard’s musical film set in Mexico about a narcotraficante’s secret gender transition, has sparked a lot of chatter. It won awards at the Cannes Film Festival, including Best Actress for the all-female ensemble cast, picked up nominations for the 2025 Golden Globes, and is rumored to be a contender for the Oscars.
The talk isn’t all positive, though. Critiques of actress Selena Gomez’s Spanish in her portrayal of Jessi del Monte are particularly harsh, culminating in the Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez’s recent characterization of her Spanish and acting in this movie as “ indefensible.”
These attacks are not new. Comments on her Spanish in a shampoo commercial and YouTube compilations of her speaking Spanish focus on her flubs.
While I cannot judge Gomez’s acting chops, I do have over 30 years experience teaching and assessing Spanish on the university level. The commentary on Gomez’s Spanish says more about cultural attitudes toward languages –and Spanish specifically– than about her proficiency.
Language is about communication. When people understand each other’s intended meaning, no matter their grammatical accuracy and accent (and we all have an accent), then their language has been successful.
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACFTL) Can-do Statements assess proficiency by what language learners at different levels can achieve, not by their mistakes. Linguists know bilingualism exists on a continuum, not the all-or-nothing scale people often apply to speakers.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.5% of the population identifies as Hispanic/Latino; almost one in five people speak a language other than English at home, and of those, 62% speak Spanish. Globally, Spanish is the official language of 21 countries, but given its variations across geographic, social clas,s and generational lines, there is no one right way to speak Spanish.
Too bad then that Gomez seems to have internalized the nitpicking of her Spanish and the culture’s rigid ideas of language proficiency. The lyrics of her 2021 collaboration with Rauw Alejandro, “ Baila Conmigo,” open by questioning how much Spanish she understands. Throughout her interviews promoting the film, “Emilia Pérez,” she declares that she is not fluent and expresses a mixture of pride and disappointment in her language learning results for the role.
However, Gomez´s portrayal of Jessi goes beyond words. She communicates the heart of her character when she cuddles with her family under the stars, switches to a frosted hair color when separated from her husband, and gives her lover a sexy jiggle after she exits his car and before returning to the family enclave.
Language is also about identity. Gomez was born in Texas, and her father is of Mexican descent. She grew up with Spanish until her parents divorced, making her a heritage Spanish speaker with a linguistic, cultural,l and family background to be proud of, and proficiency levels vary widely among heritage speakers.
However, as stated by the National Heritage Language Resource Center, “Too often, speakers of heritage languages feel insecure or even ashamed of their heritage language. These deficit feelings, combined with societal pressures to use the dominant language, can contribute to speakers abandoning their home language.”
In essence, Gomez is critiqued for experiencing the typical challenges of heritage speakers while being held to native speaker standards–a no-win situation that a rapidly growing number of Americans can relate to. The character Jessi’s linguistic background is not explained in the movie, but she is from the United States and switches between Spanish and English, a form of translanguaging common among bilinguals and heritage speakers.
In the United States, some Spanish speakers experience linguistic racism. People perceived as “Latinx” who speak Spanish in public places are routinely discriminated, verbally harassed or even detained by Border Patrol.
Yet non-Latinos who learn Spanish are often celebrated for their bilingualism. So, while compilation videos poke fun at Gomez’s Spanish, other YouTube videos laud the bilingualism of actors who are non-native speakers, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Josh Hutcherson, Ben Affleck, and Will Smith.
To be sure, proficiency levels do exist, though common notions of bilingual and fluent can be elusive and hard to define. The ACTFL proficiency levels range from novice to distinguished, and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) starts at A1 and goes to C2. But these proficiency labels do not reflect the nuances of what it means to “language” in the United States, especially for people of color.
The criticisms of Selena Gomez´s Spanish in this film aren't just overly simplistic and damaging. They miss the point of a movie about mutability, voice, trans lives, and transnational living. The desire to pin down Gomez as bilingual or not, her Spanish as good, or bad, her accent as authentic or gringo is antithetical to the movie’s main message.
The criticism also misses the point of empathy and acceptance of different cultures, heritages, languagesand individuals, colliding and collaborating to meet people where they are and who they are.
Selena Gomez has spoken fondly of Mi Camino, the song Jessi and her boyfriend sing at a karaoke bar in the film, stating that “my laugh was real because I was messing up the words.”
Making mistakes with language is inevitable; approaching languages with a spirit of playfulness and acceptance is a choice. After all, as the lyrics Gomez sings, say, “Si mi equivoco de camino, igual. … Quiero quererme a mí misma.”
Annie Abbott is an Associate Teaching Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.
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