PBS had Giant on last night, and although I had seen bits and pieces over the years, I had never seen the who thing. The story involves a Texas rancher (Jordan Benedict, played by Rock Hudson) who marries an East Coast high society girl (Elizabeth Taylor) and brings her out to Texas to live. Jordan has a sister, Luz, who sort of runs their ranch and who clashes with what she sees as a fragile Elizabeth Taylor.
Anyway, one thing of note is that most of the ranch hands are Hispanic, and Rock Hudson and his sister almost always speaks Spanish when conversing with them. In one scene, his sister (Luz) is pointing out how unfit his new wife is to Texas ranch life, and one of the things she says is “She doesn’t even speak Spanish”.
The movie spans several decades, but I think the key ones would be the 1930s and 40s.
So the question is: Was it SOP (standard operating procedure) for Anglo ranchers (I use that term for lack of a better one) in Texas to speak Spanish? And I’m not talking about using a Spanish word here and there. Rock Hudson and his sister speak in full sentences, albeit with horrible gringo accents. My only data point on this IRL is GW Bush, who is pretty proficient in Spanish, but I wouldn’t necessarily call him a rancher, and he’s not from that era anyway.
This is sort of a GQ question, but I’m not sure there is a definitive answer, and it’s based on a movie, so I’m putting it in CS.
It would probably depend on which part of the state you lived in (it’s a fairly diverse state). Spanish is a pretty widespread language in Texas (almost everyone on my mom’s side of the family is fluent in it). If a lot of your neighbors and potential coworkers/employers/employees were Spanish speakers, you’d probably pick up at least some of the language.
That said, it occurs to me that most of the rancher types I’ve known in Texas were hispanic, rather than anglo, so I couldn’t say. Not to mention that I grew up in the age of required foreign languages in high school (not sure when that got started)
IMO, yes. I’m from Texas and it was fairly common for managers of bigger spreads to speak passable Spanish as the majority of the work force was hispanic, especially in the southern part of the state.
My mother grew up on a farm (a small one, not a big ranch) in northern Texas in the '50s and '60s. She’s mentioned that many of the farmhands were Mexicans and that her father at least attempted to speak Spanish to them. However, she has also said that his method of “speaking Spanish” involved a fair amount of just sticking an “o” on the ends of English words.
I remember her saying that she’d been able to manage basic conversational Spanish as a teenager but she’d since forgotten most of it. I’m not sure if she ever had Spanish in school; I know she did take a different foreign language so if she studied Spanish as well it probably wasn’t for very long.
Back to the world of fiction, but the Anglo rancher characters in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) all spoke at least passable Spanish – enough to get by in Mexico for extended periods in the books. The books are set in Alamogordo, NM, as well as El Paso, TX/Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in the late 1940s and early '50s.
McCarthy wouldn’t have put that much Spanish in the books if it was not what was being spoken by real-world Anglo ranchers at the time.
I speak a little Spanish, but there were longer quotes in Cities of the Plain, especially, that I had to guess what was being said by context.
Yep, I’m from Texas and we have a good sized Colorado cattle ranch and passable Spanish is frequently spoken there. The thing is probably five or six of the hands are Spanish and you’re consistently hearing them speak it in conversation with each other so you can’t help but start to pick it up. Also, often times your main hand will have to explain what you told him to other, maybe newer hands that don’t speak English very well. Some don’t speak it at all so the need and opportunity is there to learn it pretty well. One last thing, much of the conversation is repetitious, you’re pointing out the same things that need to be done, so what you learn is what’s germane to ranch and general work, not a full blown conversationalist Spanish that would easily convert to academia, etc.
Saw the same in Oklahoma - mainly around the farmers. All of my FFA friends in high school did well in high school Spanish because they had been speaking their entire life talking to the migrant workers who came in for the harvest.
Often the language spoken between hands and ranchers is more Spanglish than Spanish. Years ago, I came across a book in a little used bookstore in Amarillo called “Spanish for Farmers and Ranchers”. It was a delightful little book and after showing it around it was very popular among my friends in agriculture.
For comparison, there’s a scene in La Bamba where the farm owner is addressing all the migrant workers in English, and his wife is translating into Spanish in a manner that would make Peggy Hill cringe.
mrAru grew up [from about the age of 2 until he left to join the Navy in 1983] on a grape ranch in Kerman CA, and he speaks Mexican dialect Spanish because he used to work in the fields with the migrants.
