The H is silent

The other day, I went to get a medical check-up done. As I sat in the lobby, I saw a familiar sight, one so ingrained in me it felt like second nature. I started gathering my things, already knowing—despite the crowded room—that I would be called next.

And then it happened. The nurse stood there, staring at the paper for ten long seconds. I felt it in my bones before I heard it. The pause. The hesitation. My silent "H."

"How do you pronounce your name?"  

The question I’ve been asked since I was five.  

"No-Emmy. The H is silent."  

The same answer I’ve given since I was five.

Recently, I started adding, "Like the Emmy Awards, just put a No in front of it!" It gets a laugh, a clever smile, as if I’ve gifted them an easy way out of their own discomfort. "So clever!" they say, and I smile. But inside, I feel the weight of that H. The weight of silence.

The H is silent. It always has been.

In elementary school, I hated my name. Not because of what it meant, but because of what it didn’t mean to others. The pause, the butchered attempts, the eventual surrender to my last name—my identity reduced to a guess, a shrug, an inconvenience.

The H is silent. But it wasn’t just the H. It was me. For a while, I let that silence define me. Twenty-seven years of a quiet letter, twenty-seven years of a quiet girl.

The H is silent when I say I majored in Theater but don’t know the American classics. I didn’t grow up on Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller—I grew up on Flor Silvestre, who left Andrés Nieto for Antonio Aguilar. The H is silent, pero el chime isn't. That’s my world. But it doesn’t seem to matter here, where Aubrey Hepburn is iconic and  Maria Felix hides in the shadow of Frida Kahlo because she's the main Latina that is acknowledged here.

The H is silent because I discovered Charles Chaplin as a teenager, not through the reverence of cinema history, but in a government class where my teacher was too sick to lecture. Meanwhile, I grew up watching Cantinflas with my family. But who here cares about that?

The H is silent when I watch La Familia P. Luche and hear it compared to Modern Family. Yet the only character I truly understand is Gloria, her accent, her struggle to belong, her unapologetic Latinidad in a world that expects her to soften it.

The H is silent. So why would I bother correcting anyone when they never even try?

Except for once. In high school, during a volleyball class, the teacher hesitated over the attendance sheet. I felt the familiar frustration building, but then she tried. “Nahoime?” She didn’t get it right, not at first, but she tried. And that effort—that one attempt—meant everything. For the next two years, she pronounced it perfectly.

The H is silent here, in the U.S. of A. But in Mexico, in my motherland, the H doesn’t need to announce itself. It simply *is*—unquestioned, understood, part of the flow of language and life. No one trips over it. No one pauses.

In Mexico, my name fits. I fit. There, the H doesn’t carry the weight of my displacement, my otherness. It’s just a letter, one among many, fluid and easy. Almost like the generations of women who came before me—seen but not heard, existing in silence, their power unspoken but undeniable.

The H is silent, but its presence runs through me like the tequila my ancestors distilled from the agave fields. It’s in the silence of my parents, who came to this country with nothing but the weight of their dignity, loud and proud in a place that tried to silence them.

The H is silent because my people have been silenced for so long.  

But our food, our music, our traditions, our colors—those are anything but silent. They are loud. We are loud. We have always been loud, even in the face of silence.

The H is silent, like the erasure of Mexican lynchings from history, like the gold stolen from our land, like the violence we endured for speaking our language in Texas, in California, in the lands that once belonged to us.

The H is silent because Los Niños Héroes died on their own terms, choosing death over surrender, holding their dignity like a flag they refused to let fall. The H is silent because it carries the weight of conquest, of resistance, of survival. It’s silent, but it speaks volumes.

The H is silent when I switch from English to Spanish, when my tongue dances in the space between two worlds, bridging cultures that rarely understand each other but somehow, in me, coexist. 

The H is silent because I fight silence in every other part of my life. The music, the novelas, the mariachi filling the spaces where silence tries to creep in—my constant companions in a world that too often expects me to stay quiet. 

But the pause? The pause never leaves. It lingers like a shadow, a reminder of the histories left unacknowledged, of the voices yet to be heard.

And maybe that’s why I’m okay with the H being silent. Because in a world that demanded my silence, the silent H is the only thing I never had to defend—just explain. 

The H is silent. It’s a part of me. It holds all the silences I no longer have to carry. All the pauses I’ve learned to fill with the fullness of my own voice. 

So let the H be silent.  

Because I am not.