In a national speech, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said, in rough translation, “Where there is a Mexican, it is Mexico.” Much of the rest of his speech was critical of the ‘securing’ of the border that is such a huge concern in American politics. International politics aside, the issue of cross-border culture raises some interesting issues that manifest themselves rather strangely in America.
What is consistently forgotten, both in the US and internationally, is the individual immigrant. The issue arises occasionally when, say, the US allows illegal immigrants to be tried by international court for the rape and murder of a US citizen instead of forcing American prosecution, but for the most part the individual lives and languages of these immigrants
are meaningless.
President Calderon’s statement implies that most of the Southwestern United States is culturally and economically a part of Mexico. There are thriving Spanish-speaking communities everywhere in America, but national pundits will say that these are harmful incursions on American culture and drains on the national economy. Despite the need to address the growing Mexican populations, xenophobic attempts at denying their influence are often made. The many stereotypes about Chicano English (that its speakers are all gang members or that it is mostly just incorrect English) are more indicative of the American ideologies about the Chicano and Mexican communities than they are of anything these communities represent. ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ is funny because it is a stereotype, and a pejorative one at that.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the oft-arising English Only debates—to make English the only language of America.
“We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house,”
Theodore Roosevelt spoke the crux of the issue. Do we as Americans have the right to force our language upon those who willingly gave up their homes to immigrate? Do we as Americans need to symbolically enforce what is already a paradigm? Is it hypocrisy to attempt this in a nation where language is as caustic an issue as any?
Any immigrant who comes to America for economic purposes has one thing in mind: work. America is a land of labor, of opportunity, of enterprise. The English language has nothing to do with labor, opportunity, or enterprise; it is merely the language spoken by those whose country has the means to provide employment for millions. Seeking labor is not the same as seeking language and culture; speaking English is a means to an end. The stereotypes mentioned earlier seem more a threat to the people they exemplify than these people could possibly be to America.
Americans speak English. This goes without saying. Legislation making it officially the only real American language fails, as it did in 2006, every time it arises in Congress. English is so ingrained in America (air-traffic control, law, literature, media, science) that not even a Spanish, Mexican, or even Colombian-drug-funded Armada could possibly lessen its importance. A Spanish-speaking immigrant who is told, “English is the only official language in America, so you can’t speak Spanish,” would be baffled. They would probably respond (in Spanish), “Don’t you all speak English? We all speak Spanish in Mexico. I’m going to work here and speak Spanish because people will pay me to work jobs that don’t require me to speak English.”
Speaking English is not requisite to being American; speaking English can range from speaking like a New Yorker to speaking like Texan and everywhere in between. Standard American English is not even something that everyone can agree upon: is it Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings? So saying political unity comes from a single language belittles the varieties that exist. We can’t even agree on what and how these immigrants should learn to speak. That the laws do not always pass speaks volumes; we don’t really care that the immigrants don’t speak English.
Felipe Calderon may not have been entirely right about the border, but he hit on a key issue. Ideology toward Mexicans and Spanish plays more of a role in their social stigma than anything they have ever done, anything their language may ‘lack,’ and anything English could ever ‘add’ to their experience in America.