My Abuela Trini used to call our house in San Antonio every Sunday at exactly six, right after her novela ended in Guadalajara. One week I answered in the mash of English and Spanish I actually spoke — "Sí, abuela, pero I have tarea" — and she laughed, not unkindly, and said, "Ay, mijo, ya ni de aquí, ni de allá." She wasn't scolding me. She said it the way you'd point out the weather. It was the first time I understood that there was a name for the particular kind of homesickness you feel for two places at once, neither of which quite claims you back.
What does "ni de aquí, ni de allá" really mean?
"Ni de aquí, ni de allá" translates literally to "neither from here, nor from there," and it describes the feeling of not belonging fully to either your family's country of origin or the country where you were raised — a state of being caught between two cultures, two languages, and sometimes two versions of yourself.
Where the phrase comes from
Unlike a lot of dichos that trace back to a specific region or era, "ni de aquí, ni de allá" doesn't have one clean point of origin — it's a piece of everyday folk speech that families across the Spanish-speaking world have long used to describe displacement, whether from moving between provinces, crossing a border, or just growing up different from your parents. What's changed is who's saying it and why. Among immigrant families and their U.S.-born or U.S.-raised children, the phrase has taken on a specific, sharper meaning: it's become shorthand for the particular ache of the 1.5 and second generation, the ones who visit family "back home" and get called gringo or pocho, then go to school in the U.S. and get asked why their lunch smells different. Writer and filmmaker Denise Soler Cox built an entire project around this exact tension, reframing the in-between not as a deficiency but as its own complete identity.[1]
How it actually gets used
In practice, the phrase shows up in two very different tones. Sometimes it's gentle, almost teasing — a grandmother noting that your Spanish has gotten rusty, or a tía joking that you eat your tacos "the American way." Other times it's heavier, said by the person feeling it about themselves: after a trip to visit family where relatives comment on your accent, or after a moment at work or school in the U.S. where you're reminded you're seen as foreign no matter how long you've lived there. A cousin might say it about you at a wedding when you fumble a toast in Spanish. You might say it about yourself, quietly, after realizing you dream in a language your own parents don't fully speak.
Regional and generational variations
The exact framing shifts by community. Nuyoricans in New York built an entire identity — "AmeRícan" — out of refusing the either/or logic the phrase implies. Chicano communities in the Southwest have their own long history of naming this in-between space, from "pocho" (sometimes an insult, sometimes reclaimed) to the broader Chicano identity movement itself. More recently, terms like "Eñye" have emerged specifically to give the in-between a name of its own rather than treating it as a gap between two "real" identities. The dicho itself stays remarkably consistent across these communities even as the words built around it change — proof that the feeling it describes is close to universal for diaspora kids, whatever specific culture they come from.
Why it endures
The phrase has stuck around for generations because it does something rare: it gives shape to a feeling that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it. It's not quite sadness and it's not quite pride — it's the specific vertigo of loving two places that don't fully claim you. Naming it out loud, the way our grandparents and parents have done for decades, takes some of its sting away. It turns a private confusion into something shared, something with a history, something other people in your own family have survived and even made peace with.
That in-between feeling doesn't go away, but it does find a home. If the push and pull between two cultures is something you carry too, explore the Cultural Pride collection — a way of holding both places at once instead of choosing.
Dichos like this one survive because they do the emotional work we don't always have language for ourselves. Every time someone in the family repeats "ni de aquí, ni de allá," they're not just describing a feeling — they're quietly telling the next generation that this in-between space has always existed, and that it's survivable, even sacred, in its own way.
Keep reading: Buen Provecho, Que Pasa Calabaza, and the Everyday Phrases That Make Us Us · Cafecito y Chisme: The Ritual That Runs la Familia
[1] Fuente: Denise Soler Cox, "Ni De Aqui Ni De Alla," Project Eñye.