[lg policy] The Spanish Lesson I Never Got at School

Tue Nov 15 19:56:00 UTC 2016

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Héctor Tobar <http://www.nytimes.com/column/hector-tobar> NOV. 15, 2016
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Los Angeles — In the deepest reaches of my brain, there is a boy who speaks
Spanish.

He calls his mother and father “Mamá” and “Papá.” One of his favorite
expressions is “qué lindo” (how nice, or how sweet). He’s proud of the
Mexican slang he’s learned: for instance, “no hay pedo,” which means “no
problem,” though its literal translation is “there is no fart.”

California nearly killed that boy.

My parents arrived in Los Angeles as immigrants from Guatemala. We had a
shelf of books in Spanish in our Los Angeles home, including “El Señor
Presidente” by the Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, but
growing up I could not read them.

Like millions of Latino kids educated in California public schools, I never
took a class in Spanish grammar or Spanish literature, nor was I ever asked
to write a single word with an accent or a squiggly tilde over it. In the
’70s, Spanish was the language of poverty and backwardness in the eyes of
some school administrators, and many others.

Supposedly, we got smarter by forgetting Spanish. By the time I was a
teenager, I spoke the language at the level of a second grader. My English
was perfect, but in Spanish I was a nincompoop.

I knew I had lost something priceless to me. A lot of Latino kids who grow
up without Spanish feel this. And last week, even as the Latino-immigrant
basher Donald J. Trump was elected president, many engaged in a successful
collective act of cultural resistance by joining other Californian voters
who overwhelmingly approved
<http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-election-day-2016-proposition-58-bilingual-1478220414-htmlstory.html>
a ballot measure to expand bilingual education
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/us/californians-having-curbed-bilingual-education-may-now-expand-it.html>
in public schools.

Proposition 58 overhauls another ballot initiative that was approved by the
voters in 1998. That measure was born in the early years of the
anti-immigrant movement, before it spread from California across the United
States.

Back then, Spanish had become the de facto second language of California.
Latino immigrant children were filling the underfunded public schools and
not doing very well, while chattering away to one another and to their
teachers in Spanish in their overcrowded classrooms. Ron Unz, the Silicon
Valley entrepreneur who helped lead the anti-bilingual education movement,
argued that educating immigrant kids exclusively in English would improve
our test scores.

No one disputes that every child in this country should learn English. But
the no-Spanish dictate amounted to a form of cultural erasure. It was a
cruel, shortsighted act, born of ignorance and intolerance.

Being literate in the language of your immigrant ancestors (whether that
language is Spanish, Korean, Mandarin or Armenian) makes you wiser and more
powerful. I know this from experience.

It took me two years of college study and a year enrolled abroad at
Mexico’s national university to reboot and upgrade my bilingual brain.
Shakespeare and Cervantes now live in my frontal lobe. Seinfeld and the
Mexican comedian Cantinflas, too. Bob Dylan and the Chilean songwriter
Violeta Parra. I have sought to master the Anglo-Saxon language spoken by
Lincoln and Whitman, and also the Latinate language of Pablo Neruda and of
the Angeleno street vendors.

With Spanish’s endearments and ample use of the subjunctive tense and the
diminutive, I have learned that to know a language is to enter into another
way of being.

My father, for example, is a charming man in English, a language he has
spoken fluently for a half-century. In Spanish, however, his full talents
as a sardonic raconteur are on display; he’s even prone to the occasional
philosophical soliloquy. My mother is a fluent English speaker, but in
Spanish she’s a storyteller with a deeply romantic bent and a flair for the
ironic.

Today, I write books in English, but the roots of my career as a writer lie
in Spanish literacy and Spanish fluency.

Most of my extended family lives in Guatemala and speaks no English. When I
returned to that country as a fluent Spanish speaker, I had my first
grown-up conversations with my grandparents, uncles and cousins. I learned
of village dramas and quiet acts of resistance against Guatemala’s
dictatorship, including my grandfather’s adventures as a bricklayer and
die-hard union man.

It was only as a fluent Spanish speaker that I finally I came to know my
true self. Who I was and where I came from.

Soon enough, I also came to know a Los Angeles I would not have known
otherwise: a city with its own brand of Spanish, a city shaped by the
ceaseless improvisations, reinventions and ambitions of its Spanish
speakers. They became the subjects of my novels.
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For Latino immigrant children, Spanish is the key that unlocks the
untranslatable wisdom of their elders, and that reveals the subtle truths
in their family histories. It’s a source of self-knowledge, a form of
cultural capital. They are smarter, in fact, for each bit of Spanish they
keep alive in their bilingual brains. And they are more likely to see the
absurdity in the rants of xenophobes and racists.

In Europe, most people speak more than one language. Some speak three or
four or more. Multilingualism is a sign of intellectual achievement and
sophistication.

A fourth grader from Guadalajara, Mexico, learning English for the first
time in a Los Angeles classroom needs to know that what she already
possesses is valuable. Teach her English, yes, but also the rules of
Spanish spelling — and give her some Juan Rulfo to read when she gets older.

She’ll most likely see some of herself in the stories of that Mexican
genius. And it might soon dawn on her that she’s a genius, too.

NYTimes November 15, 2016

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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