School-Sponsored Spanish Must Be Mainstream, Not Dialect

Like everyone who believes that our southern border should be closed to trespassers, I get accused periodically of "racism" by unprincipled slanderers and gullible fools. These latter may be interested to know (the former will not care) that I have also been charged recently with "going soft" on enforcing our national and cultural borders because of my refusal to say that our learning Spanish need not signal a betrayal of our US citizenship.

In fact, I believe that the Spanish language MAY represent a political and cultural threat in two ways. First, those who cannot understand English will obviously be unable to participate properly in mainstream American life--and I refer not to the mainstream of their community, but to that of their adoptive nation. Creating a communal mainstream significantly different from the national mainstream is precisely what will undo us politically and culturally. It isn't a bad idea: it's a disastrous one. To the extent that teaching Spanish favors such insularity, it partakes of this danger. How great is that extent--is Spanish somehow more subversive than traditionally taught foreign languages like Latin and Greek? Well... yes, if the Spanish being offered is a dialect.

Which brings me to my second point: dialects of Spanish which themselves have wandered far from mainstream Castellano cannot even be said to attempt a substitution of one culture for another. The classics of Spanish literature are Castellano classics, for the most part. Juan Rulfo, the man I consider Mexico's greatest short-story writer (and one of the greatest of the Western hemisphere), wrote in dialect when composing conversations or stream-of-consciousness narration--but he would return to mid-stream in other circumstances. If we encourage the teaching of dialects among us, then we will further the fragmentation of the Hispanic world itself as well as that of our predominantly English-speaking nation. An Argentine author like Güiraldes is already very difficult for most educated young Mexicans to comprehend. Every time we take a sledgehammer to culture and exile more and more of its great books and fundamental beliefs to remote islands, are we really to consider the remaining fragments--with their shorthand of street talk and Internet lingo and radio/TV clichés--as so many new cultures, no less legitimate than what preceded them? I'm sure the marketers of movies and pop-music would like us to think so!

We had this debate when I was a kid back in the sixties--over Ebonics. Encouraging African Americans to write and speak their own kind of English was supposed to bestow freedom of expression on them, to liberate them from an oppressive alien style. What it actually did was render them less capable of competing in mainstream society, both economically and culturally--and also politically, except in local politics (where everybody always speaks slang, even if it's as fake as Hillary's Southern accent). I certainly do not gladly tolerate my son's lapses into "he had came" and "he had went", though anyone in the Southeast would know what he meant. I sometimes lose my cool and feel my blood pressure rise. He's not stupid: I want him to learn the right way.

Now I find that the book purchased for his eighth-grade Spanish class is a special "Texas edition". This can mean only one thing: that he is being taught a dialect, not Castellano. He will not learn the language spoken in Spain and her colonies for hundreds of years, and which even today provides the best means of bridging the many regional peculiarities up and down the Western hemisphere: he will learn what immigrants from a certain small region, with no literary tradition of their own, are speaking in the pop-cultural, haphazard gap between English and Castellano. When Mexican kids learn English, do they memorize the past participle of "come" as "came" and of "go" as "went"? I don't think so--I think they learn the right way. Is the intention of the educational establishment to teach him about another culture, or to make him acquiescent in an ongoing fragmentation of cultures? One has to wonder.

This past week, I heard the entirety of a speech delivered by Alejandro Martín to the Mexican Congress. Martín's son was lately killed in a secuestro--a kidnapping--and he was permitted to address legislators as a private citizen whose household has been ravaged by this national plague. He consulted not a note, and looked down from his audience not an instant. I have never heard a man speak so much from the heart, or tap so much of the heart's eloquence so fluidly. I'm glad I can speak a little Spanish, if only because I was able to hear that speech... but the speech was Castellano. What would Martín have been but just another tearful parent filmed after a drive-by if he had not possessed this special eloquence? How would he have struck a blow on his son's behalf by awakening the world to this murder's outrage?

By all means, we should proceed with teaching and learning Spanish--but all of us should learn mainstream Spanish, including those Spanish-speakers who have not mastered it. The objective must be to preserve culture and solidify human ties, not to make the latest arrivals in our midst feel as though they never left home.