Fri 22 Sep 2006
Hispanic Decendendants in America – Spanish as a Second Language
Posted by Marcus under Current Events, Freedom / Liberty, Science
[2] Comments
“Lets make English America’s Official Language” is the clarion call for many activists resisting America’s apparent polyglot tendencies. My recent post on what makes America special as a country showed how it is important that each generation of immigrants succeed and also speak English. Over the years politicians and guardians of American heritage have bemoaned that immigrants are not fluent in English. President Teddy Roosevelt said, “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.”
Well, a recent study by Douglas Massey at Princeton University and Ruben Rumbaut along with Frank Bean at the University of California, Irvine have found that this goal may take care of itself! In Southern California, their study shows that the children of Mexican Immigrants have lower Spanish fluency and better English, and their grandchildren mostly speak English as their first language.
“Even in the nation’s largest Spanish-speaking enclave, within a border region that historically belonged to Mexico, Spanish appears to be well on the way to a natural death by the third generation of U.S. residence,” reported the paper, published in the September issue of the journal Population and Development Review.
2 Responses to “ Hispanic Decendendants in America – Spanish as a Second Language ”
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Marcus, you’re forgetting something very crucial about that study– today’s “Third Generation Hispanics” are the products of a social milieu from 30-40 years ago. IOW, the language/cultural state of third-generationers today is a result of the decisions made by their parents and, in particular, their grandparents in which language/cultural features to emphasize, and the state of affairs 30 years ago has changed radically.
I’m a fourth-generation Hispanic (we came over from PR shortly after the Spanish-American War), and I can tell you that 30 years ago, Spanish was seen as a severe hindrance to social advancement and economic self-sufficiency. Hispanic families were falling all over each other to lose Spanish and ensure that their grandkids in particular were English-only. Today, it’s almost the diametric opposite– Spanish is essential for just getting certain jobs to begin with and, frankly, it’s seen as a cultural plus, with everything from reggaeton music to Spanish-language TV grabbing the attention of Hispanics and Anglos alike.
In fact, even Anglos today are desperately trying to get Spanish fluency. My parents actually refused to teach me Spanish, but when talking with my Dad recently, they confessed they now thought that was a terrible mistake. I started re-learning Spanish myself following a very humiliating experience when, at a job fair, an Anglo applicant was able to pass a mini-oral exam speaking perfect Spanish, while I knew only a few street terms (needlessly to say, he got hired– I didn’t). As you can guess, my children are growing up fluent in Spanish and English both, and our nanny from Honduras has been critical in this.
Obviously, most of us are also learning English, but my point is, people read far too damn much into these studies about what 3rd- and 4th-generation Hispanics are doing– what you see is the product of forces in play many decades ago, long before the great wave of Latino immigration and the fundamental changes in the cultural, economic and demographic landscape.
I’m obviously in favor of my kids and other Hispanic kids knowing English, but I’m also in favor of them knowing Spanish. I don’t see any problem with that– they’re very similar languages and Spanish has long been established in the US Southwest and in Miami. In fact, following the US-Mexico War, the treaties and the legislatures gave all kinds of explicit guarantees to respect the rights of the population to use Spanish in the public domain, even in places like offices, clinics and schools. There was a bitter nativist movement in the 1870’s that tried to suppress this but they never succeeded. IOW, in a large and very economically vibrant part of the country, Spanish has a longstanding historical and legal as well as economic tradition.
Again, I don’t see any problem with this– people there (I’m from Indiana myself) tend to know both English and Spanish, and nobody makes a big deal out of it. I just find all this fretting about the language people use to be characteristic about the insecure French, why in the world seemingly confident Americans get all nervous about it, doesn’t make one bit of sense to me.
Hi Braddock
You make very interesting points! My personal concern is that Americans have a common language for discourse.
I am worried that folks who don’t understand the language of another group won’t be able to work out their differences.