RICHARD RODRIGUEZ ESSAY
Originally broadcast on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (May 9, 2000)
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I was listening the other day to Governor Bush speak fluent
Spanish to Hispanic voters when it struck me that Spanish is becoming unofficially, but
truly, the second language of the United States. Since the mid-19th century, when
America became an immigrant country, the unspoken price of admission has been
linguistic uniformity. Those of us who are the children of immigrants, who came to this
country speaking a language other than English, remember the loosening hold of a
grandmother's Swedish, or Yiddish, or Chinese. (Speaking in Spanish) Secretary of
Education Riley recently proposed dual English- Spanish instruction in American
classrooms, but here in California, impatient voters undid bilingual education. Many, I
think, were suspicious of the public role of Spanish in the institution that traditionally
has Americanized the immigrant. (Ricky Martin Music) Even while bilingual education is
prohibited from classrooms in California, Spanish is heard everywhere in the nation.
Because of the massive migration of Latin Americans northward, the United States has
became the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico, Spain,
Argentina, and Colombia. And today, Los Angeles-- this city named in 18th-century
Spanish, but laconically renamed by Midwesterners as L.A.-- long the nation's largest
Hispanic city, Los Angeles has become a Latin American capital, and, truly again, Los
Angeles. It's the scale that impresses. Instead of an earlier century's immigrant
newspaper, say, on Manhattan's lower East side, today's highest-rated TV and radio
stations in Los Angeles are Spanish-speaking. (Music) On Univision, the popular
Spanish-language network, headquartered here, on soap operas, the telenovelas
imported from Caracas or Mexico City, the faces are blond, not brown. (Spanish
commercial) But the commercials are red, white, and blue: McDonald's and Ford and
Colgate-Palmolive. Univision's audience is primarily working-class and national. Spanish
has, after all, become the language of unskilled, but eager hands, from chickenplucking southern towns to Alaskan fishing villages, from Hartford to Boise. The genius
of America is the way so many foreign phrases and words found their way onto the
American tongue, even while the nation assimilated the immigrant. Who can be
surprised that so many Spanish words are finding their way into our vocabulary? But
vast and the mundane recurrence of Spanish today-- on public signs, on billboards, on
the airwaves-- is blurring the linguistic border between the United States and Latin
America. What's more, this blurring is happening because of the poor. Normally, we
expect great social change to happen the other way: To trickle down from on top, or to
be mandated from on high. But Spanish is becoming the unofficial second language of
America because of dishwashers and gardeners and logically so: If the laborer speaks
Spanish, then the contractor needs to learn Spanish. If the housekeeper speaks Spanish,
then the upper-middle class children also begin to hear it and know it. One notices of
late on the American tongue a distinctly working-class Spanish, the diction often male,
often crude, and funny. Consider, for example, Secretary of State Albright's recent use
of the word cojones. We are destined to become a bilingual Belgium or a new Quebec. I
predict that the children of today's Latin-American immigrants will come to assume U.S.
English as their primary language. But even while they do so, and even while American
English remains the language of the world, Americans still come to recognize more and
more Spanish: Cojones, la vida loca, salsa. Hard to imagine a previous generation of
Americans quite so easy at the sight of a presidential candidate chattering away in
Spanish. In times past, we did not expect our presidents or our Texas governors to
speak a foreign tongue. We liked it perhaps when Jackie spoke French. But John
Kennedy's tag in Berlin was as much German as we expected him to know.
JOHN KENNEDY: Ich bin ein berliner.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Now, that the nannies and gardeners and maids of Beverly Hills
speak Spanish, our movie stars do, too.
ARNOLD SCHWARENEGER: Hasta la vista, baby.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I'm Richard Rodriguez.
Transcript of Rodriguez, Richard. “Se Habla Espanol”. 9 May 2000. provided by MacNeil/Lehrer
Productions on behalf of PBS NewsHour, which has granted CPALMS permission to upload the essay as a
handout for educator use in the classroom.
Original link to the PBS NewsHour transcript:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/may00/rodriguez_5-9.html