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<a class="gmail-byline-column-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/column/hector-tobar">Héctor Tobar</a>
<time class="gmail-dateline" datetime="2016-11-15T12:18:46-05:00">NOV. 15, 2016</time>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Los Angeles — In the deepest reaches of my brain, there is a boy who speaks Spanish.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">California nearly killed that boy.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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 <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-election-day-2016-proposition-58-bilingual-1478220414-htmlstory.html">approved</a> a ballot measure to expand <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/us/californians-having-curbed-bilingual-education-may-now-expand-it.html">bilingual education</a> in public schools.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-1">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Today, I write books in English, but the roots of my career as a writer lie in Spanish literacy and Spanish fluency.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-2">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><div class="gmail-newsletter-signup gmail-original-newsletter-module gmail-dropzone-17 gmail-ab-test-newsletter-buffet gmail-buffet-test" id="gmail-newsletter-promo">
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">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.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">NYTimes November 15, 2016<br></p><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Eharoldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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