Bigotry spoken here

June 4, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

A Salt Lake City firm called Vehix.com that sells cars online is trying an experiment: Spanish-language television commercials.

What’s the big deal, you might ask? Spanish-language commercials air on Telemundo and local stations that cater to the Hispanic market all of the time.

The big deal is that Vehix aired them on cable networks like Spike TV, Nick at Night, the Sci-Fi Channel, FX and others — networks where the programming is in English. Vehix figured that a lot of Spanish speakers are watching those channels, and it wanted to reach them.

As I read a story about this in The Washington Post, I said to myself, “OK, where are the quotes from the outraged ‘English-only’ nuts?” No English-only organizations were quoted, but the story did say that Vehix has received numerous e-mails complaining that in America, we speak English.

Well, a lot of us do — but more and more people are also speaking Spanish. It’s a rapidly growing segment of the consumer market, and businesses are taking notice. The country is truly becoming bilingual.

There are two ways to deal with this: Throw a big hissy fit and press for passage of regressive “English-only” laws or get over it.

I say get over it. Take some Spanish lessons. You might learn something.

The fact is, all the laws in the world are not going to force people to speak English. In the privacy of their own homes, when hanging out with family members and friends, in restaurants, clubs and shops that cater to them, many Hispanics are going to speak Spanish.

They’re only doing what your ancestors probably did many years ago. If your people came to America from Poland, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, Greece or Russia in the early 1900s, chances are they moved into an insular neighborhood, spoke their native tongue around the house, read a foreign-language newspaper and shopped at a market that catered to their wants staffed by people who didn’t speak English unless they had to.

My ancestors were Irish — so they spoke something like English at home. But they lived in an Irish neighborhood, ate Irish meals, belonged to Irish social clubs, enjoyed a drop or two (or three or four) — and kept a wee leprechaun under the bed at night to make him give up his gold (just kidding). My point is, they did not surrender their ethnic identity when they came to America. In fact, they tossed it into the melting pot, and today a lot of people think that’s cool and want to learn Irish clog dancing and find 56 ways to cook potatoes. The Irish didn’t give up their identity, so why should today’s Hispanic immigrants give up theirs?

The fact is, most Hispanics who come here are smart enough to realize that English remains the dominant language. They want to learn it. Laws that punish them by forcing English or penalizing them for failing to learn it fast enough are counterproductive.

Many of my neighbors are Hispanic. I’m jealous of them because they have a skill I lack: They’re bilingual. I wish I had worked harder to learn Spanish back in college. My Hispanic neighbors speak flawless English, but I would enjoy conversing with them in their own tongue.

Sure, I could try to learn it again. Maybe I will, if I can overcome my own laziness. But one thing I’m not going to do is blame Hispanics for my lack of ambition or feel threatened by their initiative.

The times are changing. English will remain the dominant U.S. language for a long time, but in the future it will increasingly share the stage with Spanish. If this forces more Americans to do what most of the world already does — learn a second language — it won’t be a bad thing.

You are glossing over one aspect of all this, something on which conservatives invariably pounce: the contemporary effort to make schools, voting, etc. accessible to everyone regardless of language. Partly it’s the cost they object to; much of it, I assume, is still bigotry (“we got here, why can’t they?”). But the fact is that adds something new.

The first major waves of immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. When the Germans and the Scandinavians arrived they really did melt into the existing culture. So did the early (potato famine) Irish. Katie Scarlett O’Hara was as at home in Tara as were the Germans settling areas of Texas or the Scandinavians in Minnesota. As Frederick Jackson Turner theorized, the frontier turned all these foreigners into frontiersmen, leaving their ethnicity and language largely behind.

As the cities grew, later waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe did not “melt” so easily. They settled into “Little Polands” and “Little Italys”. Urban Catholics saw shop windows with “Help Wanted / No Irish Need Apply” and boarding houses with “Rooms To Let / No Democrats”. These people found solace in their ethnic clubs and churches, but their children in the public schools had to learn English, and most were denied voting rights unless they could read an English language newspaper.

Hispanics are now the largest and most rapidly growing foreign language group, but there are dozens of others, too. Governments and schools scramble to accommodate most of these language differences. It’s an “investment in human capital” which should be worth it in the long run. But it does make you wonder who is doing whom a favor here and at what cost.

Often overlooked in the long, sorry history of immigration and acculturation in this country are the peoples of Asia. Aside from hostile popular uprisings (pogroms really) in some western cities, the federal government singled them out for official discrimination, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and extending on through the “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1907) which excluded further Japanese entry, and finally, to the Asian Exclusion Act (1917) – which excluded all Asians (except the Filipinos the Navy wanted to import for its officers mess).

The Quota Laws (1921 and 1924) limited the flow of Europeans, and they built in prejudices favoring Northern and Western Europeans. Truman insisted on removing these barriers but his veto was over-ridden. It took LBJ’s legislative skills finally remove them. But quots laws didn’t exclude whole classes of foreign nationals like the Asian.

There is no comparable official bigotry shown toward any other area of the world. Even today Asians (and Jews, for that matter) are seldom acknowledged in discussions (or fights) over Affirmative Action and related policies. They simply succeed, through family emphyasis on hard work and education.

The Democratic Party I worked for a half century ago in San Francisco devoted an enormous amount of effort toward mobilizing ethnic communities and meeting their needs through city services. Now the party seems more interested in fund-raising and bland focus groups and, perhaps, ethnicity in the abstract. I don’t know why.

I agree with you about the virtue of learning language. Latin, Greek and Spanish in high school taught me much more about my own language than I ever learned in English classes. I made stabs and French and German, too, in college. At the moment I’m enjoying an introduction to Italian. But there is a real difference between us and your Hispanic neighbors: for them learning English is a necessity; for us, for now, language is at most a hobby.

  • I’ve got no problem with advertisers doing what they like. I suspect that while they may win over some Spanish-speaking customers, they’re likely to lose some annoyed customers who only speak English and will drop the ploy soon.

    But I’m not so sanguine about public safety messages delivered in Spanish but not in English. It used to really piss me off to be in a subway car in New York where sometimes the only posted messages telling you what to do in an emergency were in Spanish. I think most other countries know to make signs that display both the native language and at the same time any other languages they think might be helpful. When I used to live in NYC, they had yet to learn that.

  • I find Thomas Friedman and his free-market globalist ilk excreable, but in this case they have a point: here’s an example of the “free market” acting as an effective democratic equaliser. Go fig.

    Greed is evil in a lot of ways, but to its credit it is often quite blind to prejudice and racism. Black, white, or brown don’t matter too much if what you want is that green stuff.

    That said, I hope they sell a shitload of cars and make a tidy profit– and attract imitators.

  • I’m a first generation, Argentine, born in the U.S., and I’m glad to be able to speak fluent spanish. But sadly, much of this “learn english or leave” has polluted many of my other Spanish-speaking peoples from Mexico and Central America, especially the “tejanos” and east-LA’ers who have lost their spanish speaking, but maintian their ethnic identity.

    not really prevalent, but just a side not

  • I say get over it. Take some Spanish lessons. You might learn something.

    A couple jokes I heard when living in Europe for a couple years that reflect common European opinion about Americans and language:

    What do you call someone who speaks more than two languages? Polyglot
    What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual
    What do you call someone who speaks one language? American
    [Insert George Bush joke here]
    —————————————
    Two Americans are sitting on a bench in a European city. A car pulls up and the driver leans over and opens his window, addressing the two guys:

    “Excusez-moi. Parlez-vous français ?”
    The guys give him a blank stare. The driver tries again:

    “Sprechen Sie Deutsche?”
    No sign of comprehension. The driver hesitates a minute, then says:

    “Con permiso, pero habla español?”
    The two Americans look at each other, befuddled. Frustrated, the driver rolls up his window and drives away.

    The one American turns to his buddy and says, “You know, maybe we should try learning another language sometime.”

    His friend replies matter-of-factly, “How come? It didn’t do him any good.”

  • I live in a Balkan country and can only speak the local language when utterly forced to (bars, taxis, shops, bars, etc). I’ve been here a year and feel like a real shit because of it. But it’s hard, you get older and your brain just can’t remember every new word. People are generally nice to me and don’t take too much insult if I try. They just accept the fact that Americans and Brits are dumb and can’t learn new languages.

    One of the great things about America though is that in most big cities you can take an English class for about twenty bucks at a community or city college. Open the City College of San Francisco course catalog and the first 10 pages are printed in 10 languages from Mandarin to Cantonese to Spanish to Tagalog. ESL classes cost 8 dollars for the semester, books are another 20 or 30. How cool is that?

  • Your assumption, Morbo, that English as the primary language of the America is going to decline and “increasingly share the stage” with Spanish is unsubstantiated, and probably wrong.

    Two points:

    (1) What linguists refer to as the ‘3-generation language shift’, is holding just as true with latino immigrants as with every other immigrant group in the history of our nation. 1st generation (born elsewhere): native speaker other language, bilingual in English; 2nd generation (born here): Native speaker English, bilingual or passively bilingual in parents native tongue; 3rd generation: Native speaker English, passively bilingual or no grandparent’s language.

    The percentage of Americans who are native speakers of any other single language besides English is smaller today than it has been in the past. There are fewer native speakers of Spanish as a percentage of the population today (10%) than there were of Germans at the turn of the 20th Century (12.5%). There were bilingual schools, German newspapers, German advertising, etc. And yet American Germans have completely assimilated today.

    The hew and cry about English Only! a hundred years ago when the fear was Germans was as silly as it is today. I know you agree with the silliness of the fear, but I urge you to question the mistaken assumption that underlies the fear, namely, that “we” will be “taken over.” Watch the 3-generation language shift. If you meet 3rd generation immigrants who are even fully native-language-equivalent bilingual (not even monolingual Spanish or Chinese) then times have changed. Until then expect English will continue to nuke every other language it comes in contact with (ditto for Australia, Canada, England, etc.)

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