Yo No Sabo

Last July in Los Angeles, El Tri, the Mexican National soccer team, won the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the men's Pan-American Championship. The final game was covered by ESPN Deportes, the Spanish language branch of the cable sports network. After the game, one of their reporters, José del Valle, sought out Mexican fans celebrating their team's victory and came upon a young boy wearing the El Tri jersey. The reporter introduced the child to his audience as "the future of Mexico", but when he began asking questions, it was clear the boy was not a fluent Spanish speaker. To which the reporters in the studio lamented that the boy belongs to a generation that no longer speaks Spanish. 

So much for the future of a Spanish speaking Mexico I guess was the message of the moment.

The video of the incident posted on YouTube went viral with comments shaming the boy, his parents, and Latin American parents in the United States who do not teach their children Spanish.

Since then, the media, social and otherwise have been flooded with articles and reports asking the question: "is Spanish fluency an essential part of being Hispanic?"  

There are two words that can best describe the situation: it's complicated.

I have an opinion which I'll share at the end of this post. As I'm not a member of that community, my opinion is irrelevant. However, as a child of an immigrant whose native language was not English, as a parent, and as a passionate, yet challenged language learner myself, I do have a bit of perspective.

So here's my story:

My father immigrated to this country from Czechoslovakia in 1955. He moved to Chicago and met my mother in the fall of 1957. After a brief romance, they married in January 1958 and later that year, I was born. That's how it was done in those days I guess.

Anyway, my dad had his heart set on teaching his only son his native language, which he began to do. An audio tape of a two year old me once existed where I was speaking perfect two year old Czech. When I heard the tape perhaps ten years later, I asked what had happened, why was my Czech so much better then than it was now? I can't remember what my dad's response was but knowing him, he probably blamed it on me. 

Years later after having children of my own, it makes perfect sense. My dad married a woman who was not Czech so obviously, Czech was not spoken at home between my parents. While my dad valiantly tried to speak to me in Czech from the outset, he, a man of little patience, must have given up at some point when it became obvious that I was more interested speaking the language that was all around me, English, rather than Czech. 

Which is too bad because boy how I wished I could speak Czech, especially when I worked for my father in his paint store and got stares of incredulity from his Czech customers when I had to tell them "Nemluvím česky", "I don't speak Czech."  "What's wrong with that kid?" my mind's ear could hear them say to themselves, in Czech of course.

And boy do I wish I spoke Czech now.

So in a way I can identify with the "no sabo kids", a derogatory term for Hispanic-Americans who speak either broken or no Spanish. "No sabo" incidentally is grammatically incorrect Spanish for "I don't know", making the put down doubly insulting.

I don't blame my father one bit. I have friends who successfully taught their kids to be bi-lingual from the get-go without the help of their spouses, and understand the commitment it took on their part, both parent and child. I especially appreciate it when I think back on all the things I wanted to do for my own children but didn't, simply because life got in the way.

No Pop, it wasn't your or anybody else's fault that I didn't turn out speaking Czech, although I haven't given up hope that one day...

I said I can identify with the no sabos "in a way" because the issue is vastly more complicated for Latin American people than it was for me. 

Here are some thoughts:

With the exception of Anglo Saxons, every racial/ethnic group in the United States has experienced marginalization and discrimination to a degree, some obviously more than others. With some groups, once members became culturally integrated into the population, usually one or two generations after family members first arrived on these shores, successfully assimilated children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants transformed from being the marginalized into being the marginalizers. Assimilation historically involved losing the traits that define the culture from which one's ancestors came, or at least sublimating them to a degree where they don't interfere with the traits that once defined a "typical" American. 

Being a "typical" American, even as recently as a half century ago, meant fulfilling certain well-defined requirements. It meant having values such as personal liberty, upward mobility, and owning a home. A typical American may or may not have been a church goer, but usually identified him or herself as Protestant Christian of one denomination or other. A typical American spoke Standard American English without a trace of a foreign accent and above all, a typical American was white.  

You can see this for yourself in popular culture by watching movies from an earlier era. Even a film with "progressive" sympathies such as the 1947 classic It's a Wonderful Life, presented its vision of that wonderful life as centering around a small town, (another typical American value) populated by White Anglo Saxon Protestants. The handful of people in the film that did not fit that description were Annie the black housekeeper, Mr. Martini, the Italian bar owner, and the nameless immigrant residents of the housing development on the outskirts of town, made possible by the honorable and humble Building and Loan at the center of the story. 

These "ethnic" characters while treated with a modicum of respect by the filmmakers (unusual for the time), were outsiders looking to land themselves a piece of that wonderful life, the so-called "American Dream." One of the implied messages of the movie is if the people in the projects kept their noses to the grindstone and strove to achieve those requirements and maintained the values mentioned above, they too could one day be welcomed into the town proper as full-fledged members. Martini, with his strong Italian accent may never quite reach that promised land, but his children, whom we assume would have lost the accent, might. 

But what about Annie's offspring? Well, they would still be black and at least in the Bedford Falls we see in the movie, there are no black people other than servants, whom we assume lived in their own section on the outskirts of the town proper. Their skin color meant there would be no assimilation for them, therefore no membership in the promised land.

1947, the year It's a Wonderful Lif e was made, was a watershed year in American history. It was the year the color barrier was broken in "organized baseball", a milestone in the history of race relations in the United States. 1947 was the year things began to change in this country, albeit drop by drop. 

Much has been written about the modern Civil Rights movement coming to life after World War II when black veterans after serving their country with distinction, came home to find they were still treated as second class citizens.

The same was true for Hispanic veterans. 

Discrimination against and the marginalization of Latinos in the United States may have taken different forms, but both have been as pervasive and have existed at least as long as the discrimination and marginalization of black people in this country. The two groups are intrinsically connected by their subjection to racism, exploitation, segregation, rejection, and even by the issue of slavery.

In an article published in August 2019 in the Washington Post titled A History of Anti-Hispanic Bigotry in the United States, responding to the idea that resentment against Hispanics has increased since the rise of vile rhetoric on the part of the ultra-right, the article's author Maria Arana assures us that:

It has not. These are long-held resentments. For centuries they have been fed by ignorance, racism and a stubborn unwillingness to understand a population whose ancestors were here by the millions — long before the first pilgrim set foot on Plymouth Rock.

A pivotal moment for Americans of Mexican descent was the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. The westward expansion of the United States all the way to the Pacific Ocean was considered by many, to be the will of God. This was expressed by the term "Manifest Destiny" which was coined in 1845 by a columnist named John L. O'Sullivan who wrote the following in the New York Morning News:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The chief obstacle to U.S. Manifest Destiny was Mexico which at the time included what is now California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. Texas, once also part of Mexico, declared its independence in 1836. However, Mexico refused to recognize that independence even after Texas U.S. statehood was declared in 1845.  

The high-minded expansion of democracy and liberty from the Atlantic to the Pacific was not all that drove the United States to eventually go to war with Mexico. Southern politicians were eager to gain territory for political reasons, chiefly to expand slavery into potentially future states. Increasing the number of slave states would add like-minded representatives to Congress to strengthen their standing against the free states of the North. 

Efforts to purchase land from Mexico were unfruitful leading the United States to send troops to disputed parts of Texas. When Mexican forces repelled the U.S. forces, Congress declared war against Mexico. 

The war was short lived; in a little over one year of fighting, U.S. forces marched into Mexico City.

The U.S. government was at odds over the terms of settlement, some going so far as to advocate for complete U.S. annexation of Mexico.  

Annexing land that once was Mexico's was met with opposition by South Carolina senator and former vice president John C. Calhoun whose words would be reflected in the attitudes of generations of Americans to follow:

We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race--the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.... We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged ... that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake.

The following year Mexico and the United States came to peace terms with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which saw Mexico ceding 55 percent of its territory to the United States, and the establishment of the U.S. /Mexico border which exists to this day.

Along with land, the U.S. inherited the people who lived there. 

Here again is Maria Arana:

...that victory came with hostages: the Mexican American people. That grudging population was not easy to exterminate; not by war, nor by verdict. There were too many to be herded down trails of tears or consigned to faraway exile, and they were useful, if vexatious. They knew the land, worked the land and could be put to work for white overlords.

The people living in the lands ceded by Mexico to the United States were automatically granted U.S. citizenship. But much like the rights (including property rights), granted to former enslaved people after the Civil War by the Reconstruction amendments, the legal status of these new American citizens was largely ignored. 

As Maria Arana suggests, so long as Mexicans proved useful as a reliable source of labor, often doing work other Americans refused, they were tolerated. Once that usefulness faded, Mexican U.S. citizens were shunned, blamed for taking jobs away from "real" Americans, and were often the victims of segregation, forced replacement to Mexico, violence and even lynch mobs. 

Most related to the subject at hand, despite there never having been an official language of the United States, speaking Spanish in public in parts of the country was strongly discouraged and even outlawed. 

And so, the die was cast for the next century and half of Americans of Mexican descent living as foreigners in their own country, much as Martin Luther King said of Black people in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Of course, people with ties to the Spanish speaking nations of the Americas living in the United States are not limited to Mexicans. Hispanic people come from the Caribbean, Central and South America, all with distinct cultures, reasons for being here, and legal status. Latinos are an ethnically and racially diverse group, their ancestry is African, Indigenous American, European, Asian, and all possible combinations of those.   

Chicago alone has two major groups representing nearly 85 percent of the city's Hispanic population, one from Mexico, the other from Puerto Rico, two countries with vastly different cultures. The remaining Hispanic population of the city has representatives from Central and South America and other Caribbean island nations, each with its distinct culture. Many things make up a culture, history, tradition, religion, values, art, music, cuisine, sports, dress and of course language, just to name a few. The one and perhaps only thing all these cultures have in common is the Spanish language.

Several years ago, well before the 2016 presidential election, I got into a conversation with a white guy during a long train ride. We got along well until the subject of language came up. He mentioned that there were people seriously studying Klingon, a pretend language invented for the Star Trek movies. I suggested that perhaps their time would be better spent learning a real language such as Spanish. He reacted almost as if I had made a disparaging remark about his mother. 

Showing his discontent with Hispanic people and his disapproval of the amount of Spanish he was subjected to on a daily basis he said:  "If only these people would learn to assimilate and speak English..." although I don't think he said it quite so politely. 

Fortunately, we had just about reached our destination and soon parted ways.

Unfortunately, many Americans are under the mistaken impression that the majority of Hispanic people in the U.S. do not speak English and have not adequately integrated themselves into American society.

Here's a link from the Pew Research Center that proves otherwise. 

Here's another.

Having said that, I realize the impossible position Latinos find themselves in this country. For generations they have been pilloried for not speaking English well enough, and now the ones that do are shamed for not speaking Spanish well enough. 

I guess you just can't win.

But there is another factor involved, race. To illustrate I'll use another example from popular culture of the past. 

 

Lucille Ball was already a star before the creation of the television show that bore her name: I Love Lucy, perhaps the most successful program in television history. The show was created to be the TV version of the radio program, "My Favorite Husband" where Ball played alongside Richard Denning as her eponymous husband.

For the TV version, Ball insisted that Denning's roll be played by her real-life husband, Cuban American bandleader Desi Arnaz. CBS, the network that was to produce the program, balked at the idea of presenting a show featuring the mixed marriage of an "all American girl", and a "Latin man". Despite the network's objections, Ball and Arnaz were able to convince the sponsors, the tobacco company Phillip Morris, that the idea of pairing two individuals from different backgrounds could fly on broadcast TV.

I Love Lucy was groundbreaking for several reasons, not the least of which was its depiction of a cross-cultural marriage, a subject barely touched upon in popular culture at the time, even though it was becoming more and more a reality in American life, my parents being an example. The show also played a role in popularizing Latin American culture with the general American public. 

Of course, Desi Arnaz was white.

Were he black like the great Cuban bandleader and singer Benny Moré, or of mixed heritage, the show would never have gotten off the ground. That kind of pairing in popular culture would have to wait another decade and even to this day, the issue still fraught with unease and difficulty, at least in some circles.

The truth is, it's all about race. 

 

Again from the Pew Research Center: 

A majority (62%) of Hispanic adults say having a darker skin color hurts Hispanics’ ability to get ahead in the United States today at least a little. A similar share (59%) say having a lighter skin color helps Hispanics get ahead. And 57% say skin color shapes their daily life experiences a lot or some, with about half saying discrimination based on race or skin color is a “very big problem” in the U.S. today, according to Pew Research Center’s National Survey of Latinos, a bilingual, national survey of 3,375 Hispanic U.S. adults conducted in March 2021.

Latinos in this country also face discrimination from other Latinos:

 About a quarter of Latino adults say they have personally experienced discrimination or unfair treatment from other Latinos. Having darker skin and being born outside the United States are associated with an increased chance of experiencing this type of discrimination, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2021. At the same time, Latinos say they are as likely to experience discrimination or unfair treatment from non-Latinos as from fellow Latinos, regardless of skin color or their country of birth.

Racial discrimination and the poverty stemming from the lack of opportunities for people of color is not unique to the United States, this from the United Nations Chronicle:

What is rarely mentioned is that most (Latin American) nations still confront deeply seated racial inequality and discrimination that impacts all aspects of economic and social life...

 

Data illustrates that race continues to be one of the most persistent predictors of poverty in the Americas, which is particularly troubling because African descendant populations tend to speak their nation's language as their mother tongues -- whether it is Spanish or Portuguese -- and are in close proximity to urban, coastal, port or mining areas, which tend to be centres for employment and economic growth opportunities. 

A few years ago, I told a Latina friend that I had resumed studying Spanish forty years after I took it in high school. She gave me a sly look and said: "Spanish is the language of the colonizers, what you really should be studying is Quechua", one of the languages of the Inca civilization.

Romantic and wildly impractical to be sure, especially given my lack of language learning acumen, but my friend brings up a good point.

If helping preserve a heritage is your intent, why learn Spanish? Spanish, just like English, Portuguese and French, is merely one of the lingua francas of the Americas, languages of power, authority and subjugation. The majority of people in North and South America can trace their own heritage, (not very far back in some cases like my own), to people who had no connection to any of those languages. 

 

Great cultures existed in this hemisphere before the arrival of the Europeans who did everything in their power to wipe them out. They mostly succeeded.

Fortunately, they couldn't wipe out the people, many of whom in addition to facing discrimination of their own, are struggling today to preserve the remnants of their Pre-Columbian cultures, the most tangible symbol of which is their language. Sadly, thousands of indigenous languages have become extinct and most of those that survive are in danger of the same fate.

On the other hand, the last time I checked, testimony to the tremendous success of, second only to Great Britain's, Spain's rapacious appetite for conquest: 

• Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world. 
• Just behind Spain itself, the United States ranks number five in the world's nations in the number of Spanish speakers. 
• Mexico is number one.
• 75 percent of Latin Americans in the United States claim to be at least somewhat fluent in the Spanish language. 
• The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that the Hispanic population of the United States will reach 111.2 million, nearly double that of the Hispanic population of the last census. 

In other words, Spanish is not an endangered language by a long shot, not in the United States, not in the rest of the world, and especially not in Mexico.

 

So it would appear the appropriate response to the anchors over at ESPN Deportes who were so bothered by the young Mexican fan of El Tri not speaking Spanish well enough is the following:

No se preocupen chicos, ¡siempre tendremos español!

As promised at the top of this post, here is my entirely irrelevant opinion:

Should Latin American parents living in the United States teach their children Spanish? 

Of course they should! 

If they want to that is.

Should no sabo kids learn the language of their ancestors?

Definitely!

If they would like to.

Should Hispanic people be shamed for not speaking Spanish?

Absolutely not. 

Period. 

After all, south of the Rio Grande and in the nations of the Caribbean, you won't hear people referring to themselves as "Hispanic" or "Latino" or any of its derivatives, as those categories have U.S. origins.

Instead you will hear "mexicano", "boriqua", "guatemalteco", "venezolano", and other Spanish and indigenous words (properly not capitalized here), adjectives describing the people and cultures of Latin America.*

 

What this means is that Hispanic, or if you prefer, Latino culture, is primarily an American** and Canadian culture.

What THAT means is that Latino culture is a mixture of the cultures of ALL of Latin America (including the non-Spanish speaking parts), on top of the already diverse cultures of the U.S. and Canada. Would you call that diversity squared or diversity cubed?

That to me is wonderfully mind-blowing.

Even more exciting is that Hispanic/Latino culture is a work in progress, evolving before our very eyes. 

It may not be to everyone's liking but fortunately, at least for me, the "typical" white bread America of Leave it to Beaver (to use another pop culture reference), doesn't exist anymore, if it ever did. 

We are a diverse lot and that is something to embrace, not to fear. Of all the groups who call our country and Canada home, (hopefully no one objects to me conflating the two), by far the most diverse is el pueblo Latino. 

What diversity means, or should mean, is that everybody gets the chance to be him or herself, ideally without being judged. That kind of liberty is still the great promise of U.S. and Canadian culture. We may still be a long way from there, but despite the recent hiccups, that's the trajectory we've been heading in for quite some time. 

As the most diverse community in an already diverse culture, in my humble opinion, el pueblo latino should and usually does lead the way as far as embracing its heritage(s) ALONG WITH the diversity of its people, including their language(s) of preference whether they be Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, one or more of the plethora of indigenous languages, or any combination therein.

That is indeed something to celebrate. 

¡Feliz Mes de la Herencia Hispana!

CODA

* There are Latin American people in this country who still refer to themselves by their or their ancestors' country of origin, yet the generic terms of "Hispanic" and "Latino" are becoming more common, thanks largely to the U.S. Census Bureau. Answering the call for the government to provide more resources for Americans of Latin American descent, in 1980 the bureau decided to create a new race category on their forms, adding to their previous list which was then limited to "black", "white", and the ever popular, "other".

Thus, the category "Hispanic" was born. As one might guess, the term Hispanic is problematic as the word implies people who speak Spanish, therefore it is not inclusive of all the people from Latin America, which is not exclusively Spanish speaking. Brazil is an example, Haiti another.

Enter the term "Latino" which was adopted by the U.S. government in 1997 to be inclusive of all people with Latin American connections regardless of language spoken, even presumably the hundreds of indigenous languages that have absolutely nothing to do with Latin, the origin of the colonial languages of Latin America.

But Latino has its problems too. Spanish is a highly gender binary language where all nouns including inanimate objects are assigned a gender. So, in traditional Spanish we would refer to men as Latino and women, Latina. Infuriating to modern sensibilities, a mixed group of men and women, even if there are many women and only one man, defaults to the masculine Latino. There are also people who do not wish to be identified by any gender. 

One way to address this issue is the introduction of the non-binary term "Latinx" (pronounced "Latin - ex") which has become accepted in some circles. However, Latinx is a word that would never occur in the Spanish language, consequently it is offensive to the sensibilities of many native Spanish speakers who accuse users of it as culturally appropriating Spanish by anglicizing the word. The more Spanish sounding Latine has been proposed but it hasn't really caught on. Likewise Latin@ (not quite sure how to pronounce that one), which looks like it was taken from standard Martian.

As there is no consensus in the community regarding the best word to describe itself, I decided in this post to use the terms Latin American, Hispanic and Latino(a) interchangeably.

** By "American" here I'm referring to the United States of America, another topic of controversy. People from Latin America understandably object to the adjective "American" specifically pertaining to the United States. After all, they live in America too. Unfortunately, in English we don't have any other adjective describing the U.S. Spanish does, the rather awkward  estadounidense, which translates literally to United Statesian. What do you think?

The argument for keeping American to describe a person living in the United States is that this is the only country in all of the Americas, with the word America in its official name. For that reason, I use it whenever necessary.