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Navarrette on Bilingualism, Citizenship & Politics
Ruben Navarrette Jr. Commentary: Mixed messages on Hispanics – CNN.com
Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) gives all Americans the chance to gain insight into the nation’s largest minority.
You might as well give it a try. There are more than 44 million Hispanics in the United States, and the Census Bureau estimates that — by 2050 — we’ll represent one in four Americans.
And despite efforts by nativists to keep out both legal and illegal immigrants in a desperate attempt to turn back the demographic clock, Hispanics aren’t going anywhere. Why should we? In many cases, we were here first.
6 Responses to “Navarrette on Bilingualism, Citizenship & Politics”
[...] wrote an interesting post today on Navarrette on Bilingualism, Citizenship & PoliticsHere’s a quick [...]
A couple of comments.
Most Hispancis are not bilingural. There Spanish speaking ability is extremely limited and very few Hipsanics are capable of reading or writing in Spanish. What most Hispanics speak is “spanglish” or “tex-mex”
Spanglish is a tool of rudeness. Every ango living in places like Texas has multiple stories of the Hispanics speaking spanish in front of them as a method of excluding the white from the conversation and of talking about people behind their back. The quickest method of ensuring Spanish in not spoken around you is to let Hispanic know that you understand what they are saying.
[...] Original post by Holly in Cincinnati [...]
All I can say is that I know plenty of Hispanics who speak English without an accent, who aren’t limited to their dialect (rather than a blend of English and Spanish) but who know English well.
That includes my cute, sweet pal from my years in Phoenix, who is Tex-Mex, and whom I’ll surprise again with a dozen yellow roses someday soon.
In the meantime I speak a few kind words in Spanish to Hispanics I encounter who are trying to learn English acknowledging that it is difficult to learn and wishing them continued good luck. The words are appreciated — I got hugs from a couple of folks when I made a visit to the East Coast recently, including where I lived in upstate NY.
Somehow I doubt I’ll encounter anywhere in the Southwest or the rest of the USA what I’ve seen in the Eastern Townships (Cantons-de-l’Est), where couples would converse with each other not blending, but switching and selecting, English and French at will depending on what they were seeking to express at any instant.
Most Hispanics are trying to learn English. The activists and anti-assimilationists are no more true representatives than Reconquista activism like this, which few respect.
I don’t buy the ‘Mexicans were here first’ argument.
Going down that path would lead to Native Americans throwing everyone else out.
We would need to find descendents of Babylonians and Phoenicians to return parts of the ME to.
I do agree, however, with the idea that we can’t stop the clock. Change will come, whether we like it or not. If everyone would just calm down, that change could come peacefully and porductively, and we could all be enriched by it.
Unfortuanttely, this wave of immigration debates comes in the middle of national turbulence on a host of other fronts: the Iraq war, terrorism, changing economy, class and political warfare. Emotions run so high, and rational thinking is trampled.
If we could just calm down……
If
Many will say we stole the land from Mexico (we wrenched it from Mexico, after suppressing their resistence to our taking it), but in fact Mexico was losing control of much of it more than it ever could have been said to have been losing control of Texas (in eastern Texas, it was more a demographic wave of US citizens that was changing things there eventually to lead to annexation by the USA). There were independence movements in California, for example. There was no certainty Mexico would have retained all its lands if the USA hadn’t taken them.
Note that we didn’t take all that expansionists sought.
Some will say that the current demographic wave (of immigration and immigrant natality) is a non-violent form of reconquest, and yes, it is seen that way by many in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America (I can no longer find the link to the Venezuelan story about this, that discusses how Mexicans are “recovering their lands” through immigration), but the picture is actually more complicated because California, for example, also is home to Asian immigrants, not to mention people from India and elsewhere (even western Europe!).