Nothing brings more personal satisfaction than being able to traverse the United States, going from civil institution to civil institution, in order to impart a simple directive: “Learn Spanish, or find another job.” From there I envision a very arduous stage of growing pains. Many jobs would indeed be lost; the brain-drain and depletion of other competencies would be immense if not traumatic. But ultimately the result would be well worth price of upheaval. Spanish would be entrenched in our civil and, ultimately, political and cultural life alongside English. There would be balance restored in an otherwise unbalanced society.
This turn of caudillismo is, of course, pure fantasy. I lack the authority to impose such a sweeping reform; but even if I had the authority I could not use it. It would be a comical waste of political and cultural capital. First, because the lower-level civil servants are likely well enough acquainted with Spanish, either because they themselves come from a Spanish-speaking background or because Spanish is a necessary component of their work. Second, the higher-level clerks may know Spanish from a safe remove, combined of paternalism and disdain, but may also be more committed polyglots who can decamp to China, South Korea, upper-Pyrenees Europe, or wherever, rather than be subjected to such indignities.
In truth, every level of the civil service, not to mention the political class, would find the whole policy not a little excessive. Spanish, in terms of pure presence, is already well-entrenched in American society. The United States famously has no official language, and is pragmatically accommodating to any number of minority first languages, especially in those regions with unique immigrant clusters. Only a very embittered American looks more than begrudgingly upon bilingual signage in not just public but private spaces. Incredible strides have been made, moreover, in the normalization of Spanish-language television, Spanish-language music, and even Spanish-language advertising in areas where the English language dominates. Let no one forget the triumph of the screening of Eva Longoria’s testament to Latin American innovation Flamin’ Hot at the White House earlier this summer HBO granting Los Espookys a second season, before cancelling it. And Spanish language education remains an essential component for future advancement.
But it’s that very pragmatism, deeply Anglo-Saxon in nature, that I wish to counter. And no amount of mostly procedural civil service reform will accomplish that. What I intend to put forth is, then, more sweeping than the above yet more necessary and demanding a more careful and time-consuming implementation.
Much of the apparent progress in Spanish language accommodation (I will not use acceptance) is rooted in its apparently subservient role. A second-class status is infused into Spanish in North American society. This is not a simple reflex of individual prejudice, but something that has permeated across the centuries of Anglocentric life. Call it the Armada Effect, the notion that Spanish is a loser’s tongue. Spain alone can count many such devastating, conceivably self-inflicted defeats that have limited its stature even among the Spanish-speaking world.
This has been ingrained, however consciously or not, into the American mind. “The men of Spanish birth,” claims a Philadelphia newspaper in 1889, “are probably less fitted than man of any other white race to become American citizens.” The rule Cuba with “methods which combine bigotry [sic] with tyranny and silly pride with fathomless corruption. The less we have of them the better.” The native Cubans, on the other hand, “are helpless, idle, of defective morals, and unfitted by nature and experience for discharging the obligations of citizenship in a great and free republic.” You find these sentiments echoed even in sympathetic studies. In his rare 1964 biography of Second Republic president Manuel Azaña, Frank Sedwick wrote that “the Spaniard’s egoism … seems to rebel against the co-operative standards of civil affairs so characteristic of the British and American examples of a free society. Anarchism has flourished in Hispanic societies because the Spaniard tends to reject authority exterior to his own.”
These descriptions tell us less about the Spanish or their colonial subjects than they do about the American Anglo-Saxon mindset, wielding as it does an outsized confidence in its own abilities and its ability to contrast other, apparently lesser demographics against theirs. This is not to condemn English on its own, which is a perfectly skeletal language for our social needs. But make it the blood and muscle of that society and see culture take on a very boney comportment. It is literal-minded and boorish, exacting in espousing its own high-standards and impatient with anyone who fails to meet them. It is repressed in every emotion except pride and rage, yet exhaustingly sincere in expressing them. At the same time it places outsized value on consumer goods while it sees cultural artifacts of a deeper meaning in a consumer’s frame of mind to a degree that can only be considered mannerist and performative. Indeed, if Anglo-American English was more personified you’d think it was on the spectrum, and whose merits as such are operable only under the strictest supervision.
I speak an apparent heresy in a time in which English—and American English in particular—still projects global and commercial prestige. I don’t think I contradict that. A boorish attitude is also one that values common sense, and common sense is as good a manner of international dealing as any. But the United States has a unique if not entirely acknowledged sensitivity to that status. Its people take as granted both the English language and American culture as civilizational zeniths. The concrete expressions of this sensitivity are paradoxical. As an American in the Rust Belt or Florida too lazy to get a passport you may, by virtue of your given tongue, see yourself as a global citizen; while as a worldly American at Davos you may be isolationist in your dismissive attitude toward any foreign culture. If every culture exerts in moments of triumph an unavoidable chauvinism, I don’t see any culture embodying it as a first principle as Anglo-Americans do, and so dully and crudely at that.
You may ask, “By that logic, what makes imposing Spanish on English speakers any different? Were the Spaniards not as chauvinistic as the Anglo-Saxons?” It is a difference of degrees. In contrasting the Portuguese colonist, Brazilian social historian Gilberto Freyre highlights “the dramatic orthodoxy of the conquistador” against “the harsh lineaments of the Puritan.” “Without ever achieving the aristocratic refinement of the Castilian,” Freyre continues, “[the Portuguese] anticipated the European bourgeois.” Even so, you are not likely to find much coherence of the Spaniard’s global fingerprints compared to the British. Differences between an Australian, a New Zealander, and a South African neef Brit are so slight that any offense taken from mistaken identity is not worth much concern. Not the case when tracing distinction between Chile and Argentina, Mexico and Peru, or Venezuela and Colombia, all of which demand delicacy.
It doesn’t appear to matter very much anyway. Such cultural eclecticism, and historical shockwaves that make ours seem like storybook fodder, is looked upon with indifference by the America, who feels satisfaction in ownership. You can’t own Spanish culture outside of tourism, and Spanish is certainly taught in our schools with that understanding, so why bother?
Spaniards, for their part, have internalized the blame. “The political decadence of what once was the greatest Empire of modern times has led uninformed people to underestimate, and even to neglect altogether, one of the richest amongst those national essences the synthesis of which we call the European genius.” So lamented Spanish essayist and politician Salvador de Madariaga in 1923. “Yet the Spanish language should be a sufficient sign of [Spain’s] importance.” You don’t need to go that far in embracing Spanish; yet the idea of Spanish as vital in and of itself, not tied to any practical demands, let alone as being an integral part of your North American world is neglected and needs a concerted effort for reminding.
That effort is undertaken in two phases: a soft focus/liberal phase to give it substance and a hard focus/nationalist phase to normalize it. The soft focus phase would work to heal much of the damage done by the predominantly grammarian and pedantic method of Spanish language instruction, which turns Spanish into a kind of puzzle or mathematical formula. The (probably unintended) object being to rationalize Castilian syntax into an accessible English cage. “A language is not a mere mob of words drilled into logical order by means of a grammar,” Madariaga wrote. “It is a living natural phenomenon the evolution of which is determined by the action of inner or psychological forces on outer of philological matter. … [What] is important in a language is its soul, not its body.”
So American students will learn the Spanish soul. Instead of rudimentary lessons on the Conquest of the Aztecs or the Mexican-American War, they will read The Labyrinth of Solitude, appended by Sor Juana and what little is available of Carlos Monsiváis. Instead of combing over The Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, they will read José Martí’s eloquent pleas for Cuban independence and his sensitively observed essays on North American life and culture, as well as the post-Revolution memoirs of Reinaldo Arenas. From there, students are better able to develop a healthier curiosity as to the rhythms of Castilian, to the extent that they actually want to master it. This means going somewhat in reverse and bringing the grammarians out from their dungeon. Thankfully the digital age has lightened the grip of the textbook. Committed Spanish instructors have often suggested watching telenovelas outside of class, of which there are many more today on Netflix than was ever thought possible in the Telemundo era of the ‘90s. Better still is the plethora of Spanish language memes that combine real-world expression with simple cultural context. The bridge between English and Castilian need not be built on high culture and deep history or on linguistic VCR instructions. Rather than carefully portion bites, the young American is fed a heartier, more eclectic, and a little baroque, ropa vieja for the intellect.
But ropa vieja will not make the bridge a sturdy one. The hard focus phase will bring the Anglo-Saxon scaffolding back into play, moreover utilizing its most reliable psychological trait: a susceptibility to being guilt-tripped. No instruction by the standards of the above will be meaningful if it doesn’t instill in a student’s mind that a complete American citizen is one who has adopted Spanish as being at least equal to the default language. This requires a social stratification similar to what is presented in Starship Troopers. Spanish-speakers enjoy the full privileges of American citizenship while non-Spanish-speakers (whether unilingual and multilingual) live under a more restricted civilian status. Harsh (and Saxon) though this seems, this approach allows us to incentivize the acceptance of Castilian-English bilingualism while accommodating those who are unwilling or unable to completely adopt it.
These future civilians need not despair too much by their designation. For I will be there to make it as cozy a status as possible. Is my position a hypocritical one? Only to the Anglo-Saxon mind that neither comprehends nor forgives double-lives and double-thoughts. My position, rather, is Quixotic. Like Emerson, Miguel de Unamuno is probably full of shit in any language, but the Basque sage articulates a frame of mind utterly alien and preferable to that of our apostate Unitarian dreamweaver. “There is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism,” he wrote, “but there is also a Quixotic philosophy.” It is rooted in “foolishness” and a heroism that is “willing to face ridicule.” “[D]id Don Quixote believe in the immediate and visible efficacy of his work?” Unamuno wrote.
It is greatly to be doubted, and at any rate he did not risk putting on the visor he had made to the test by giving it a second blow. And many passages in his history indicate that he did not believe much in the immediate success of his design to restore knight-errantry. … And he must have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his achievement would have another and a higher efficacy—namely that it would go on working in the minds of all those who in the spirit of his devotion read of his exploits.
Provided, of course, my exploits aren’t translated into Castilian.