An International Conference on Spanglish. Amherst College, April 2-3, 2004

Spanglish, Spanish and English

Joaquín Garrido

Instituto Cervantes

To paraphrase Ricardo Otheguy, the notion of Spanglish is a staple in any discussion of Spanish-English contact in the United States. Speaking of loan translations, such as “te doy para atrás” (compare English “to give back”, versus Spanish “devolver”), Otheguy writes that “Anglicization” of the language spoken by U. S. Hispanics is mistaken for “what is simply the Americanization of their culture” (Otheguy, 1993: 21). Here, I will argue that there are two kinds of Spanglish, and that the so-called Spanglish of Spanish speakers in the U. S. should be called adaptive bilingualism, while some of the Spanglish of English speakers is actually a style within U.S. English.

Native speakers of Spanish in the U. S. do not speak Spanglish: they are not taking part in what Ilan Stavans (in the title of his 2003 book) calls “the making of a new American language”. They are adapting, while still speaking Spanish, to a culture and a society where English prevails (see Otheguy, 2001; Garrido, 2003). Their Spanglish is actually adaptive bilingualism. It is not a style, something the speaker chooses, it is a sociolect, the way the speaker speaks in spite of himself. That is, the speaker does not choose between saying “te devuelvo” and “te doy para atrás”. It is not a simplification bilingualism but an adaptative bilingualism. Speakers are adapting to the fact that they live in an English speaking culture, but, as Otheguy argues, they are mostly adapting culturally. Spanish language adaptation follows cultural and social integration. This Spanglish is a variety of Spanish, even if it is situated, as Francisco Moreno Fernández remarks, in its periphery (“El espanglish también entra bajo el concepto diasistemático de «español», aunque se sitúe en la periferia”; Moreno Fernández, 2002: 1).

This is the main difference: for Spanish speakers introducing English loans in their Spanish, this is not a choice. It happens in their adaptation to living in the U.S. On the other hand, for English speakers, using a combination of Spanish and English is a choice. It shows what the speakers think of themselves as English speakers in a culture and society where they belong. They do not have to adapt to it. Like any style choice, using English when speaking Spanish and, mostly, using Spanish when speaking English aims at shaping the relationship between speaker and hearer. This particular style choice tells about belonging to a community within the U. S. society. A New Mexican professor of Spanish dedicates an article to his students in the following words: “Se les dedica este trabajo a todos mis alumnos que piensan que Spanglish is just some street slang” (Villa, 2001: 1). A Massachusetts profesor of Spanish dedicates his book to his students and to his “Spanglished” sons as follows: “To mis estudiantes [...] and to [...] mis beloved hijos espanglishados” (Stavans, 2003). Both professors belong, they are not adapting.

There are thus two sides to Spanglish: one is a style, in English, and the other one is a sociolect, in Spanish. “Educated Hispanics”, writes González Echevarría in 1997 in the “New York Times”, “claim membership in the mainstream” by speaking Spanglish. He argues that, politically, they are surrendering when doing so: “Spanglish is a capitulation”. On the contrary, they are claiming that they belong to the mainstream as a powerful minority. Just like Latinamerica should speak Latin, in the world view of a former U.S. politician, for some people Hispanics in the U. S. should speak Spanglish, the new American language. Actually many are speaking Spanglish: they speak English, with some token Spanish. The Spanish in their English means: you have to accept me as a Hispanic (or Latino, or Chicano, etc.).

What about the others? As Ricardo Otheguy and Ofelia García point out, “Latinos who speak Spanish in a North American context are [...] caught in a mismatch of language and culture” (Otheguy and García, 1993: 150). Ysaura Bernal-Henríquez and Eduardo Hernández Chávez write about “a mixed Spanish-English derogatorily called Spanglish”, “generally not used in situations of educated bilinguism” (“un español-inglés mixto llamado despectivamente Spanglish”; “No tiende a usarse en situaciones de bilingüismo culto”; Bernal-Henríquez and Hernandez Chávez 2003, pages 97 and 102). For Roberto González Echevarría, they are “poor Hispanics, many barely literate”, and they use Spanglish “because they lack the vocabulary and education in Spanish to adapt to the changing culture around them” (González Echevarría, 1997: 1). Or are they “semi-speakers”, “transitional bilinguals” as John Lipski calls them, “whose passive abilities approximate those of native speakers, but who never learned a full form of the language”? (Lipski, 1993: 156). Fear of Spanglish is widespread: “What Spanglish does is threaten the ability of Hispanic Americans to retain standard Spanish”, writes Roger Hernández (2000: 1), commenting on the course offered by Stavan at Amherst College.

Francisco Marcos Marín goes further: “Whoever speaks Spanglish really wants to speak English, [...] trying to drop Spanish” (“Quien habla espanglish lo que quiere es hablar inglés, [...] trata de abandonar el español”; Marcos Marín, 2004: 4). He goes on to argue that “Spanglish and their speakers are not problems of the Spanish language, but of U.S. English” (“El espanglish y sus hablantes no son problemas del español, sino del inglés de los Estados Unidos”, ibid.). For Jon Juaristi, “Spanglish is not a language, but the unsuccessful attempt of Spanish speaker to speak English... that is to say, this is more of a problem for English than for Spanish” (“El espanglish [...]. No es una lengua, sino el resultado frustrado de la tentativa de hablar inglés por parte de hispanohablantes... o sea, que este es más un problema del inglés que del español”; Juaristi 2001: 1.) For the “transitional bilinguals”, as Lipski points out, “There is no strong identification with the Spanish language as a positive component of the Hispanic identity” (p.159).

Being a Hispanic in the U.S. is not a question of language, it is a question of identity. For Hispanics, “Spanish is something desirable and important but not essential”, according to Arnulfo Ramírez (“El español es algo deseable e importante pero no esencial.”; Ramírez, 1992: 77). Carmen Silva-Corvalán writes: “US-born bilinguals do not consider, overall, that the preservation or protection of tradition and group integration is the most important motive to maintain their ancestors’s language” (Silva-Corvalán 1994: 201). To give an example, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists does not include the Spanish language in its mission statement. They do mention “identity” in one of their goals: “To foster a greater understanding of Hispanic media professionals’ special cultural identity, interests, and concerns.” They have a Spanish section in their website, they are selling a style handbook in Spanish that came out in March 2004, but Spanish is not an explicit part of their mission. Identity is: they foster the Hispanic professionals’ “special cultural identity”.

What is this special cultural identity? In the US, identity means minority status, so that a definition for the mainstream becomes also necessary, as shown in the US Census: people belong to ethnic groups, such as “Hispanics or Latinos”, and the “Non-Hispanic Whites” emerge as another group. In the news, Hispanics and Asians are “minority residents”, and the news is that “Whites are likely to cease being a majority around the mid-2050s” (Alonso-Zaldivar, 2004: A1 and A12). There is no mention whatsoever of the Spanish language. It is numbers that count, writes Alonso-Zaldivar: The U.S. population will rise to 420 million in 2050, and Hispanics will be 103 million, from 36 million in 2000, according to the U.S. Census estimates.

Still, language can’t be kept out of the picture. Trying to define Hispanics as an extraterritorial community, Beatriz Pastor mentions the Jewish community as “the most obvious” example in history of “a community that has managed to maintain a community identity without a territorial base, and sometimes even without a linguistic foundation” (“Históricamente tal vez el modelo más obvio de una comunidad que ha logrado mantener una identidad comunitaria sin base territorial, y a veces incluso sin base lingüística, es el de los judíos”; Pastor 2000: 6). Stavans (2003: 44) asks: “Is Spanglish the Yiddish of today? Un poco sí, un poco no...” he goes on to answer. Insisting on her definition of Hispanics, “without territorial borders, as a community”, Pastor adds: “As a bilingual community, but with its own linguistic foundation: the Spanish language” (“al margen de fronteras territoriales, como comunidad. Comunidad bilingüe, pero con una base lingüística propia: el español”; Pastor, 2000: 7). Notice that it is someone writing in Spanish that insists on a community identity for Hispanics in the U.S. based on bilingualism.

When speaking of Spanish in the U.S., Hispanics are often mentioned as an equivalent of Spanish speakers. For Juan Ramón Lodares (2004: 12), “in 2050 the United States will be the first Spanish-speaking country in the world” (“se calcula que en el año 2050 Estados Unidos será el primer país hispanohablante del mundo”). In 1990, acording to the U.S. Census, Spanish was “spoken at home” by 17.3 million (versus 198.6 million of “English only”, out of a total of 230.4 million of population 5 years old and over) or 7.52 percent of the population 5 years and over; in 2000 there were 28.1 million, and more than half of them (14.3) spoke English “very well” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003: table 1, page 4). If we have a 7.5 percent of Spanish speakers, how many of the estimated 103 million Hispanics will effectively speak Spanish in 2050? As the late Fernando Lázaro Carreter (former Director of the Spanish Royal Academy) said in 2001, when asked about the future of Spanglish, “it will depend on the role of Mexico” (“¿Quiere decir que el spanglish terminará por desaparecer? Dependerá del papel de México”; Lázaro Carreter, 2001: 1). In the unfriendly terms of Samuel Huntington: “The United States is now confronted by a massive influx of people from a poor, contiguous country with more than one third the population of the United States”; “Mexican immigrants constituted 27.6 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2000. The next largest contingents, Chinese and Filipinos, amounted to only 4.9 percent and 4.3 percent of the foreign-born population”; “This group [Hispanics] increased by almost 10 percent from 2000 to 2002 and has now become larger than blacks” (Huntington, 2004: 2).

Referring to New Mexico, Mar Vilar writes that 39 percent of its population speaks Spanish (“aquí es hispanófono el 39% de su millón y medio de habitantes”; Vilar, 2000: 12). According to the U.S. Census Bureau (Census 2000 QT-P16. Language Spoken at Home: 2000 New Mexico), 28.7 percent of the population 5 years and over (or 485,681 people) speak “Spanish or Spanish Creole” at home (“Spanish Creole”? Weren’t we talking of Spanglish?), while 67.3 percent of these Spanish-at-home speakers (or 327,052) speak English “very well” and 17.7 percent (or 86,041) speak it “well”

(5.0 percent of Spanish-home-speakers or 24,471 do “not at all” speak English.) In the state with the highest percentage of Hispanics (42.1 versus 44.7 of “white alone”), 28.7 percent does speak Spanish at home, and the majority of them (85.0 percent) speak English well or very well. This half a million Spanish speakers turn out to be good English speakers. How well if ever do they speak Spanish to communicate with public officials, medical personnel, university instructors? The vital point is that Spanish is spoken at home. Business is conducted in English.

Still, many first-generation Spanish speakers adapt to the U.S. culture through the media in Spanish. Their “choice is not just about language”, Laura Wides writes, giving the example of a Nicaraguan living in California: “it’s about reading news she can relate to, whether it’s about immigration laws or Latin pop stars” (Wides 2004: D4). According to Wides, “it is the ties Hispanic immigrants have to their native countries that feed growth in Spanish-language papers”: Knight Ridder owns the 88,000-circulation Nuevo Herald in Miami, Impremedia LLC owns La Opinión in Los Angeles (weekday circulation 125,862) and El Diario/ La Prensa in New York (53,000), while Tribune Co. (owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune) owns Hoy (circulation 94,000 in New York and 18,000 in Chicago, and a Los Angeles edition started in March 2004). The market is growing rapidly, also in the television, cable and radio Spanish-speaking media, where “Spanish is the preferred advertising language for the majority of Hispanic parents and grandparents, heavily influencing [the] under-18 segment”, according to Solomon (2002, slide 6). Notice again: parents and grandparents, Hispanic immigrants. Even if an “international”, “neutral” educated Spanish is a desired goal (Gómez Font, 2002), Spanglish or, rather, “speech modalities mixing Spanish and English (code-switching)” are, according to Amparo Morales, constantly emerging and getting a certain official recognition (“El continuo surgimiento y cierto reconocimiento oficial de modalidades de habla que mezclan español e inglés (code-switching)”; Morales, 2001: 274).

Official recognition: The tide is changing, from the Spanglish of “poor Hispanics” to the Spanglish as “a farewell to the once pervasive inferiority complex that preveailed among Latinos north of the Rio Grande”, in the words of Stavans (2004: 5). English speakers (the so-called “Anglos”) are accepting it: Stavans (page 2) stresses “the number of non-Hispanic groups that use it”. Even Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times “it's probably just pocos minutos away” (March 18, 2004, “Pride and Prejudice”). A radio ad in English promises buyers to be “the winner, número uno”, or says “zero, zip, nada”. And, of course, there is California Governor Schwarzenegger’s, I mean Terminator’s “Hasta la vista, baby!”, also quoted by Stavans. Spanglish is about “living in Spanglish”, “being Spanglish”, for Ed Morales (2002: 31), a sort of literary token of (Chicano) identity (León, 2003). Spanglish is about writing, as a new Pierre Menard, Don Quixote once more, this time in Spanglish: “It is known, pues, que el aformencionado gentleman [...]” (Ilan Stavans, 2003: 253). It is also writing with two voices and two languages, as Ana Lydia Vega (1977) in “Pollito Chicken”. In Spanish, for his voice: “Pide room service en inglés legal pero, cuando la pongo a gozal, abre la boca a grital en boricua: --¡VIVA PUELTO RICO LIBREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” [She asks for room service in legitimate English but, when I’m having sex with her, she opens her mouth and starts screaming in Puerto Rican Spanish: Long live free Puerto Rico!]. And then, in legitimate English, for her voice, while the narrator remains in the no-man’s (no-woman’s) land of the token Spanish or the token English: “I really had a wonderful time, dijo Suzie Bermiúdez a su jefe tan pronto puso un spike-heel en la oficina.” This is vintage Spanglish for Stavans (2003: 11). This Spanglish, the English-speaking one of U.S. bilinguals, is a culture. Or a dream of an eleven-year-old: “I had a dream. My friends from Spain and from the U.S. were together, and they were speaking Spanglish. What is Spanglish, I asked her. Half Spanish and half English, she answered.”

Back to reality. In the “Spanglish as a Second Language” section of “The Hispanic Challenge”, Samuel Huntington writes that “Spanish is joining [English ...] as the language of the United States. If this trends continues, the cultural division between Hispanics and Anglos could replace the racial division between blacks and whites as the most serious cleavage in U.S. society” (Huntington, 2004: 5). Again, language is mistaken for culture: The question is not that Spanish is spoken in the U.S., the question is that people are cast into minorities and mainstream, and that everyone, including the rising numbers of Mexican immigrants that haunt Huntington and speak Spanish, rightly wants to belong to the mainstream. The road there is English, not Spanish, and probably not Spanglish. On the way there, Spanish may help to bridge Huntington’s “split between a predominantly Spanish-speaking United States and an English-speaking United States”, if and only if English speakers want to learn it and use it.

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