Some years ago, people mercilessly criticized President Enrique Peña Nieto when he attempted to speak in English at a public event and mangled the language. Last week, at the first Democratic primary debate, several candidates tried to say a few sentences in Spanish that made many in the Latino communities cringe. The overall reaction, however, was not criticism but praise.
The reaction in both cases reveals a lot about how Americans and Mexicans view the use of Spanish and English in their respective societies.
Mexicans who jumped all over Peña Nieto in the news and social media did so because most of them are probably bilingual. This should not be surprising, since, in Mexico, middle and upper-class students learn English from elementary school through high school. Speaking English has become an identity marker that sets these “mexicanos” apart in class terms. They drop foreign phrases and words here and there in their Spanish to signal this distinction.
@democraticdebateSo, when Mexicans criticized Peña Nieto for mangling Shakespeare’s tongue, they did so because it embarrassed them: he was supposed to be one of them, but he lacked the linguistic distinction that made him a member of the middle or upper class. For this, he was derided as a bad student is made fun of in school, the butt of every joke. The distance between the President and bilingual Mexicans became insurmountable that day.
Americans, on the other hand, do not learn Spanish to mark their social status. Students are encouraged to learn it because it can give them an advantage when applying for a job in regions with large numbers of Spanish speakers. The fact is, though, that most Americans have an aversion to learning a second language because, well, they still are able to get pretty good paying jobs without speaking a second language.
There is, however, a big Latino population in the USA, many of whom are bilingual in different degrees. For these bilingual people, Spanish does play a role in identity formation, in particular for the second generation born and raised in the USA. Speaking some form of Spanish or Spanglish gains them inclusion, not in a social class but in an ethnic group, and the more competency they have in the language the more they feel accepted as part of the group.
@peopleforbetoThe politicians at the Democratic debate were pandering to these bilingual Americans when they spoke awkwardly in Spanish. Beto O’Rourke’s and Cory Booker’s skills were not much better than that of a basic Spanish student full of grammar errors and horrible pronunciation, and Julián Castro spoke good Spanglish. None of them spoke Spanish.
Yet, the reaction to this linguistic fiasco wasn’t critical. English monolinguals didn’t care one way or the other since they don’t understand Spanish other than some food words. Spanish monolinguals may have cringed, but they are used to hearing their language get twisted, and most in the second generation probably didn’t notice the mistakes, since these are common in their use of Spanglish.
The news media, with the exception of Fox News, lauded the efforts of these politicians to reach out to the Latino community in their language. I was surprised, however, that Latino and Latina political pundits, who are supposedly bilingual, didn’t point out the bad Spanish being thrown around. But then, again, they probably thought it was great because that’s the level of Spanish they also speak.
Cover picture @juliancastrotx
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