Spanish on the Go

Cruz Rodriguez is a language educator, travel writer, and lifelong learner who has spent over fifteen years exploring the Spanish-speaking world. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he grew up in a bilingual household where Spanish was the language of family stories, recipes, and laughter. After earning a degree in Linguistics from the University of Puerto Rico, he moved to Madrid to teach English and quickly discovered that his passion lay not in teaching grammar from a textbook, but in helping travelers communicate with confidence in real-world situations.

Over the next decade, Cruz lived in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá, teaching survival Spanish to thousands of expats, backpackers, and business professionals. His classes were known for their energy, practicality, and humor—students would leave not only with phrases memorized but with stories about the local markets they had navigated or the taxi drivers they had charmed. He began documenting his most effective teaching methods and phrase sets in a blog called *Spanish on the Go*, which grew into a popular online resource for travelers.

Cruz has contributed language guides to travel magazines such as *Condé Nast Traveler* and *Travel + Leisure*, and he has been a featured speaker at language-learning conferences in the United States and Latin America. He believes that language learning should be joyful, accessible, and deeply connected to culture. When he is not teaching or writing, Cruz is usually planning his next trip—often to a small town he has never visited, simply to learn its particular dialect, taste its street food, and walk its plazas until the rhythm of the local Spanish feels like home. He currently resides in Austin, Texas, where he continues to develop online courses and host immersive weekend workshops for travelers.