In South Florida, Spanish isn't what it used to be

[Harold Schiffman]

Published: 03.16.2008

In South Florida, Spanish isn't what it used to be

By Enrique Fernandez
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

MIAMI — John Echevarria, president of Miami-based Universal Music
Latino, had high expectations of the young Cuban American executive
assistant he hired a few years ago.
"Professionally, she was very good," Echevarria says. "But she was
almost incapable of writing Spanish." So until he replaced her with a
fully bilingual Puerto Rican secretary, the Spanish-language record
executive typed much of his own business correspondence. Experiences
like that convince Echevarria, a Spaniard, that the city "is losing an
asset." You have to wonder about its future as "the capital of Latin
America," he says. The quandary: Children and grandchildren of the
immigrants who made Miami a vibrant international center lack the
Spanish skills on which much of the city's success and identity are
built.  "Miami grew as a city along with the Spanish language and
bilingualism," says University of Miami linguist Andrew Lynch.
"Bilingualism was the foundation of Miami as a global city."

That foundation is showing cracks. The question is whether it can be
shored up — whether Miami, where fully 69 percent of the population
(61 percent in Miami-Dade County) is Hispanic, can remain the robustly
bilingual city it has become. Miami's transformation began, of course,
with Fidel Castro, whose 1959 revolution sent nearly a quarter of a
million Cuban exiles to South Florida shores in its first six years
and more than 640,000 by 1974. (To date, more than 900,000 Cubans have
come to the United States.)
"This was a sleepy Jim Crow town with a Jewish appendage until the
bourgeoisie of this important small country moved here lock, stock and
barrel." says cultural critic David Rieff, author of two books on
Miami.

It was members of that bourgeoisie, many with bilingual skills
acquired from U.S. schooling and business associations, who laid the
foundation in the 1960s and `70s for the international city Miami is
today. A latter-day influx of expatriate professionals and
entrepreneurs from throughout Latin America has brought capital as
well as talent and drive to town, cementing Miami's place as the hub
of business between north and south of the border. There is no single
barometer of bilingual business activity here, but there is every
indication that it is vast and vital. South Florida is home to nearly
1,200 multinational corporations with a combined revenue of more than
$200 billion, according to a survey by WorldCity Business Magazine
released in January. Our 20 largest multinationals account for 180,000
local jobs, and employ another 600,000 people abroad, largely in Latin
America, said WorldCity president Ken Roberts.

"We have no hard data, but we can extrapolate from anecdotal evidence
that when the people here are talking to the people there, they are
doing so mostly in Spanish," Roberts said.
The magazine's findings echoed a 2004 doctoral thesis at Florida
International University by Douglas McGuirk. "Spanish ... has
established itself as the preferred language of trade in Miami-Dade
County," McGuirk wrote. "Miami-Dade is the U.S. leader in Latin
American-owned businesses and has more company headquarters that trade
with Latin America than other U.S. cities."
Spanish-language entertainment is a highly visible part of that
commerce. Media giants like Univision and Telemundo have major
operations here, attracting a celebrity set — Juanes, Alejandro Sanz,
Paulina Rubio and Carlos Vives, to drop a few names — that has made
Miami the L.A. of Latin America.
Banking is another major component. "The bulk of financial
institutions in Miami are from Latin America and from Europe, and many
of the European banks are here to do business with Latin America,"
notes economist Manuel Lasaga, president of the Coral Gables
consulting firm StratInfo.
And yet Florida International University researcher McGuirk found that
of nearly 250 Miami-Dade businesses that responded to survey questions
about language issues, `almost a quarter ... indicated that they
needed more bilingual employees, and more than a quarter indicated
that their employees' Spanish language skills needed improvement."
Benigno Aguirre, senior vice president of human resources at Ocean
Bank, says the challenge is greatest in areas like international
banking that require sophisticated language skills.
"We can find tellers who are bilingual, but all they need to do is
communicate with someone who comes in to cash a check," he says. "They
don't need to interpret a contract."
Whereas Ocean Bank started a language-training program in 1980 to
upgrade the English skills of a mainly Cuban-born workforce, it has
for the past five years offered Spanish classes that "fill up right
away."
Aguirre, who was 4 when his family came here from Cuba, has taken the
classes himself. "My vocabulary has grown," he says, "and that helped
me minimize my Spanglish."
Tony Rodriguez, a senior vice president at Smith Barney in Miami, says
he realized early in his career that the Spanish he had spoken at home
since coming to the United States from Cuba as a teenager was not
sufficient for his professional aims. He has never taken classes, but
he takes advantage of every opportunity to speak Spanish.
On frequent business trips to Latin America, for example, he does not
allow himself to switch into English. "When I don't know a word, I
simply explain what I want to say," he says, in fluent Spanish. "It's
not easy for me to give presentations in Spanish, but I get the job
done."
Researchers such as the University of Miami's Lynch, who specializes
in language use and education, have a term for what's happening to
Spanish in Miami.
"In linguistics we don't call it `language loss' but `incomplete
acquisition,"' he says, "because the new generations can't lose what
they never had."
"Kitchen Spanish" is one term for what many second- and
third-generation Hispanics speak — good enough to ask abuela for a
galleta but not to conduct business.
Bridging that gap is a mission of Coral Way Bilingual K-8 Center, home
of Miami-Dade County Public Schools' oldest and most extensive
Spanish-English education program.
Located in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood, Coral Way appeals
especially to "the middle generation" of immigrant families who never
mastered Spanish themselves and now want to make sure their children
do, says Eduardo Carballo, the school's international governmental
liaison.
They are children like eighth-grader Alexander Alvarez, whose keen ear
— he taught himself to play the congas by listening to CDs — has
helped to make him a fluent Spanish speaker at Coral Way, where 40
percent of the instruction, across the curriculum, is in that
language.
"In my home we didn't speak it because my mom and my brother were all
born here," says Alexander, 13, whose dad is from Cuba. "In school I
started reading Spanish, and then it was all easier for me."
His mother, Barbara Alvarez, says she grew up speaking Spanish only
with her Cuban grandmother, who knew no English. Her own mother,
U.S.-born, spoke English at home.
"My brother and sister speak very bad Spanish," she says, "and they
can't read or write it."
Having Alexander at Coral Way — and his 16-year-old brother before him
in a bilingual program at Kensington Park Elementary — has given her
an edge.
"My kids would come home with homework in Spanish. And I have gotten
better because I had to help them," Alvarez says. "They have become
more proud of their heritage, and even I have learned things."
The school system's Division of Bilingual Education and World
Languages estimates that 19,200 students are enrolled in some sort of
bilingual program, mostly English-Spanish, at 109 Miami-Dade schools.
(By comparison, Broward County has about 240 students at two
elementary schools enrolled in what it calls dual education, according
to world-languages curriculum specialist Blanca Gerra.)
"We're prepping students for a global society," says Liliana Piedra,
lead teacher at Sunset Elementary, home of South Florida's oldest
international studies magnet program.
Be that as it may, `bilingual education programs in the U.S. most
definitely fall short of actually producing `bilingual' students, and
Miami is no exception." says Lynch, who has studied the issue
extensively.
The reason, he says, is that U.S. schools focus their efforts
primarily on the elementary grades and on bringing foreign-born
students into the mainstream, "making English the dominant language,
not bilingualism."
Even when the opportunity exists for high-level Spanish instruction,
it's not always enough. Rigorous International Baccalaureate programs
at four Miami-Dade public high schools offer Spanish, and a fully
bilingual public high school is scheduled to open in Coral Gables in
2009-10, but students themselves often choose other paths.
Both Sunset's Piedra and Coral Way's Carballo say that after the
eighth grade, many of their best students head off to prestigious
magnet programs like those at MAST Academy and Design and Architecture
Senior High.
"And that's when they lose it (Spanish)," Carballo says.
Not everyone is keen on bilingualism. Dade County may have rescinded
an English-only ordinance in 1993, but English remains the "official
language" of the state of Florida.
"In the rest of the country, concern about immigration has revived the
English-Only movement, which was moribund from 1996 to 2006," says
James Crawford, president of the Institute for Language and Education
Policy and author of "War With Diversity: U.S. Language Policy in an
Age of Anxiety" (Multilingual Matters, 2000).
Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma won passage in 2006 of a "national
language" amendment to an ultimately unsuccessful immigration reform
bill. In December, his fellow Republican, Sen. Lamar Alexander of
Tennessee, introduced a "Protecting English in the Workplace Act" that
would allow employers to ban foreign-language use.
"Miami is one of the few places in the U.S. where Spanish has a high
status," Crawford says.
And if one values the global city Miami has become — with its
attendant pleasures of fine dining, film festivals and a glamour
factor that is the envy of folk from Bangkok to Beverly Hills — a
bilingual workforce is essential.
One source of replenishment — what recording executive Echevarria
calls "the constant flow of immigration that brings people who know
correct Spanish" — is unpredictable and uncontrollable, subject to the
vagaries of U.S. immigration policy and Latin American politics.
Domestic economic forces are another huge unknowable, says Lynch. "If
there's a recession and the government gets tough on immigration and
cuts funding for bilingual education, it does not bode well for
Spanish."
And then, the linguist says, there is the big question of Miami's past
half-century: "What happens in Cuba."
Cultural critic Rieff is more to the point, if given to hyperbole:
"Fidel dies and a million people are going to show up here."
Rieff believes Latin America, with its history of political and
economic woes, is righting itself, and that its growing strength and
stability will influence not just Miami but the nation.
"In Los Angeles and Houston it won't be kitchen Spanish any more," he
says. "Spanish will be the language of success."


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