I can’t speak to other places (though I’d guess Texas is similar), but Spanish is written in the bones of California. While the sheer number of Spanish speakers has increased, there isn’t an inch of California history that hasn’t been deeply touched by Hispanic communities.
Spain discovered California, Spain colonized it. Spain built the roads and founded the cities. Spain divided and partitioned the land. After independence from Spain, Mexican families dominated the economy. When California became a part of the US, it was purchased from Mexico. While others rushed in with the gold rush, 25,000 latinos also came. Spanish had always been here.
To be fair though, language itself does divide. It is an identifier and boundary to assimilation. I know that sounds like a Borg thing, and we all know respecting and endorsing other cultures is the paramount of a civilized society, but really, human beings are complex enough and the societies they create the more so without the limitations language cause.
I am third generation Pole, while I am proud of that heritage my father was never taught Polish by his parents because of this reason. I think their choice made sense.
Which for pretty useful purposes, is Marion County. Which my numbers reflect.
Well, there you go. You live in the largest Hispanic area of the entire state, let alone the county. Plenty of metro areas have areas of high concentration for various ethnic groups. I’m glad to hear your son’s school does what sounds like a good job of integrating both the Hispanic population as well as the non-Hispanics together.
Bill 101 was a Quebec bill that limited English language on signs. I totally get that Quebec wants to preserve their own culture. Go to Wales and you’ll see Welsh and English on signs, for example.
And yes, agreed, it is a forged combination of colonies.
But official bilingualism across the country is costly and impractical, not to mention totally unnecessary.
Many countries are bilingual . Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and I suppose a bunch of others. The US southwest was part of Mexico for longer than it has been part of the US. People who lived there spoke Spanish. The US should be a bilingual state and Spanish should be mandatory in all schools. It would be good for the famously ignorant white people in the US to learn something about another language which is spoken by hundreds of millions in our hemisphere.
That sounds about right, if you break it down by subgroup Mexicans are higher, Puerto Ricans and Cubans are lower. Mexican-American TFR was 2.9 in 2007, IIRC, but it’s probably dropped more recently because of the recession (same with overall American fertility).
The interesting thing that a lot of people don’t seem to be aware of is how low fertility rates are in Latin America nowadays.
Yes, telling people they are ignorant and forcing them to do something that they don’t want to do and that is also unnecessary is a great strategy to affect policy change.
Again, what problem are we trying to solve here? Second generation Hispanics are assimilating and learning English at the same rate as other immigrants have over the years. In the late 1800s, there were vast areas of the US where German was spoken. Things change.
I agree with Simplicio and others that the USA should not be in the business of telling its citizens what language they must speak.
The whole point of us is that we’re not one ethnic group or one linguistic group or one ancestral culture. Leave that kind of anxiously self-conscious cultural purity to the storied pomp of the ancient lands that most of our ancestors busted their asses to get away from.
Around here, we speak whatever language(s) we speak, and it’s the government’s job to figure out how to communicate with us effectively. It’s not the government’s job to tell us what to speak.
Besides, the natural advantages of a common language are powerful enough in themselves that almost all groups of people who live in close proximity have one or more shared languages to communicate with. At present in the US the common language is English; as historically Spanish-speaking regions and other areas acquire more native Spanish speakers, that may gradually drift into a sort of Spanglish (but I doubt that will happen in the case of formal written English, as we will still have the incentive to remain mutually intelligible with other English-speaking populations).
In any case, if naturally occurring linguistic trends are really strong enough to result in Spanish becoming the dominant language, it’s absurd to think we could reverse them just by passing some laws. The only thing that “English only” or “English officially” laws would do would be to make us Anglophones look like spiteful sore losers for a couple of decades or so until Spanish-speaking legislative representatives became numerous enough to get those laws changed.
Thinking about this a bit more… I think we’d need a constitutional amendment for this to be made the law of the land in the US. Where in the Constitution does Congress get the authority to declare which languages the various states must recognize?
I was thinking something more along the lines of a supreme court decision that over-rode individual states’ declarations of being English-only, that way the court over-rode DOMA and some states’ anti-SSM acts, or back in the 1960s, some states anti-miscegenation laws.
Also, the military is supposed to conduct all business in English, and when I was in, we were told we could be accused of all sorts of things even for just having private conversations in other languages-- not that that stopped people. I remember one women in my basic training unit being really concerned about her mother coming to see her graduate, because her mother didn’t speak English, and she would have to speak Spanish to her, though.
Nope. Following the period of exploration, California was Spanish from 1769 to 1821, then Mexican from 1821 to 1848. It has been U.S. territory since 1848 and a U.S. state since 1850.
It has been part of the U.S. far longer than it was Spanish and Mexican, combined.
Despite references to “famously ignorant white people,” you have made no coherent argument why an official secondary language should be imposed on the entire U.S. that would be in conflict with the secondary languages found elsewhere in the country. (Your argument works just about as well for naming French an official language based on the experience of Michigan as France held that area, establishing roads and development for over 60 years, actually preceding the Spanish colonization of California.)
I am tolerant of the Supreme Court overriding state laws that violate the Constitution. I would never want the Supreme Court to impose new laws on the states. Declaring a secondary official language–when we do not have a primary official language–is a non-starter for the courts.
New Mexico has Spanish as an official language, but they have the history, tradition, and people to support it in a specific region. Expanding that to the entire country simply makes no sense.
In 1910, well over 20% of the U.S. spoke languages other than English. (Not one language, of course.) There was no need to make those languages official, (or to make English official), then, and there is no need, today.
What you say here is true, but neither was the US quite as casual about the integration of minorities as you suggest. The reason for the pledge allegiance to the flag at school was very much an attempt at forced integration into a common American identity. As was the enforced teaching of English at school.
I think its the question of schooling that is one of the main issues here. Do schools continue to enforce a common American identity and language? Or should they in certain localities embrace Spanish in equal measure as English?
Sure, but the obvious distinction here is that Spanish and English do not divide the US the way French and English divide Canada, or the way Dutch and Flemish (?) divide the Netherlands. There is no serious “Spanish-speaking separatist” movement or anything like that.
Right, we could also say that kids in Alaska all have to learn Russian. Dutch will be mandatory in NYC, and the requirements for getting a driver’s license in Louisiana will include an exam in French grammar.