Of Language and Labels
I'm so glad I am not living in Florida right now. I'd be bursting a blood vessel on so many levels. Yet, to a certain extent, if Philandering Swamp Creature had only phrased his "language of prosperity/language of the ghetto" another way, he would have made a valid point.
My father already knew English when he got here with my mother (and me on the way). He could not find work in Miami, so they arrived in New York. They stayed at first at the home of his retired English teacher in Summit, NJ, my father found a job in the city, they found an apartment in Queens, and stayed for the next 14 years, only moving to a bigger apartment a block away when I turned 12 and it was deemed my little brother and I needed our own rooms. My mother started learning English in earnest when my brother and I started going to school. She read Doctor Seuss to us before bedtime. (This explains much, doesn't it?) The first full length novel in English that she finished was Gone With the Wind. I believe Taylor Caldwell's The Captains and the Kings was next. Her first non-fiction reading was the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which she fell into with a will when she was studying for her citizenship test. Franklin was her favorite among the Founding Fathers as a result.
When it looked as though my brother and I were forgetting Spanish, we were obligated to speak Spanish in the home, but mother in particular always told us that if even one person in a crowded room did not speak Spanish, we should speak English. That's buenos modales, good manners, after all.
When I first filled out job applications in New York after leaving Florida in 1992, I noticed that in some applications there were sections that asked for the applicant's race, on a voluntary basis, if you please, for purposes of equal opportunity hiring. I was annoyed at that. If I was not the best person for the job, but a quota needed filling, I was going to be patronized. That was my impression of that section's purpose, and it still is. I wrote on the side, "Why can't I be white and Hispanic? One can be both, you know." I did not mark the check boxes. I did not get an interview, either. Enough folks must have made similar comments, because now I see the words "race/ethnicity" on electronic applications. Still patronizing, folks. I find that about as distasteful as being directly put down the way Newt Gingrich did in his speech, and far less honest.
Swampie only said what I had heard once before from Dame Edna, only s/he termed Spanish as "the language of the help." I must be getting older/wiser/too damned tired to blow up the way I used to. I can only sigh, shake my head, and reply, "The language of Garcilaso de la Vega. The language of Miguel de Cervantes and of Lope de Vega. The language of Federico Garcia Lorca and of Nilo Cruz." Well, Nilo writes his plays in English to give him a wider audience, but his plays translated to Spanish are just as beautiful and moving.
Cubans in the US adapted, and they prospered, as other groups have done before them and will do after. They refused to think of themselves as a minority or as inferior, and they refused to be patronized. They have given back by being productive; it galls certain people that they tend to vote conservative, but that is another discussion, one that could get politically heated, so I won't digress further.
My parents' generation adapted once they accepted they were never going home again. To survive and prosper, one adapts. If speaking another language will get you a better job, earn you a better living, it would benefit you to do your best to learn it. Not to mention the doors into other ways of thinking, other cultures that are suddenly open to you. That is the point that should have been made.
Que carai.