Spanglish (was nucular and Latino)

[James A. Landau]

Whenever I hear an example of Spanglish, I am immediately reminded of my
first Spanish teacher, Sen~or Guillen, a Cuban who would wax quite sarcastic
if any student committed an example of what he called "Espenglish".  (Most
common offense was to pronounce a terminal -e English style as a long "e",
e.g. saying "Chile" to rhyme with "freely".)  However, he had long given up
trying to get norteamericanos to say his last name correctly and pronounced
it to rhyme with "chillin' '?

That is, I prefer to avoid Spanglish due to Sen~or Guillen's prescriptivism.

However, I once met a man named "Lazaro Hernandez", who was I think a migrant
farm laborer before being drafted into the Army.  He spoke a rather broken
English with a Spanish accent.  So I tried speaking to him in Spanish, to
discover that his Spanish was not all that much better than his English.  I
never did find out what his native language was.  Some Tex-Mex border dialect?

       - Jim Landau