RICHARD RODRIGUEZ ESSAY
Originally broadcast on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (May 9, 2000)
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I was listening the other day to Governor Bush speak fluent Spanish to Hispanic voters when it struck me that Spanish is becoming unofficially, but truly, the second language of the United States. Since the mid-19th century, when America became an immigrant country, the unspoken price of admission has been linguistic uniformity. Those of us who are the children of immigrants, who came to this country speaking a language other than English, remember the loosening hold of a grandmother's Swedish, or Yiddish, or Chinese. (Speaking in Spanish) Secretary of Education Riley recently proposed dual English- Spanish instruction in American classrooms, but here in California, impatient voters undid bilingual education. Many, I think, were suspicious of the public role of Spanish in the institution that traditionally has Americanized the immigrant. (Ricky Martin Music) Even while bilingual education is prohibited from classrooms in California, Spanish is heard everywhere in the nation. Because of the massive migration of Latin Americans northward, the United States has became the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia. And today, Los Angeles-- this city named in 18th-century Spanish, but laconically renamed by Midwesterners as L.A.-- long the nation's largest Hispanic city, Los Angeles has become a Latin American capital, and, truly again, Los Angeles. It's the scale that impresses. Instead of an earlier century's immigrant newspaper, say, on Manhattan's lower East side, today's highest-rated TV and radio stations in Los Angeles are Spanish-speaking. (Music) On Univision, the popular Spanish-language network, headquartered here, on soap operas, the telenovelas imported from Caracas or Mexico City, the faces are blond, not brown. (Spanish commercial) But the commercials are red, white, and blue: McDonald's and Ford and Colgate-Palmolive. Univision's audience is primarily working-class and national. Spanish has, after all, become the language of unskilled, but eager hands, from chicken- plucking southern towns to Alaskan fishing villages, from Hartford to Boise. The genius of America is the way so many foreign phrases and words found their way onto the American tongue, even while the nation assimilated the immigrant. Who can be surprised that so many Spanish words are finding their way into our vocabulary? But vast and the mundane recurrence of Spanish today-- on public signs, on billboards, on the airwaves-- is blurring the linguistic border between the United States and Latin America. What's more, this blurring is happening because of the poor. Normally, we expect great social change to happen the other way: To trickle down from on top, or to be mandated from on high. But Spanish is becoming the unofficial second language of America because of dishwashers and gardeners and logically so: If the laborer speaks Spanish, then the contractor needs to learn Spanish. If the housekeeper speaks Spanish, then the upper-middle class children also begin to hear it and know it. One notices of late on the American tongue a distinctly working-class Spanish, the diction often male, often crude, and funny. Consider, for example, Secretary of State Albright's recent use of the word cojones. We are destined to become a bilingual Belgium or a new Quebec. I predict that the children of today's Latin-American immigrants will come to assume U.S. English as their primary language. But even while they do so, and even while American English remains the language of the world, Americans still come to recognize more and more Spanish: Cojones, la vidaloca, salsa. Hard to imagine a previous generation of Americans quite so easy at the sight of a presidential candidate chattering away in Spanish. In times past, we did not expect our presidents or our Texas governors to speak a foreign tongue. We liked it perhaps when Jackie spoke French. But John Kennedy's tag in Berlin was as much German as we expected him to know.
JOHN KENNEDY: Ich bin einberliner.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Now, that the nannies and gardeners and maids of Beverly Hills speak Spanish, our movie stars do, too.
ARNOLD SCHWARENEGER: Hasta la vista, baby.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I'm Richard Rodriguez.
Transcript of Rodriguez, Richard. “Se HablaEspanol”. 9 May 2000. provided by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions on behalf of PBS NewsHour, which has granted CPALMS permission to upload the essay as a handout for educator use in the classroom.
Original link to the PBS NewsHour transcript: