five

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?

The character of Texas owes a lot to its colorful history and to the wars with Mexico, through which not only Texas but New Mexico, Arizona, and California became American. That period of conquest (1829-48) was fired by the idea that it was America's Manifest Destiny to control the continent, and it increased U.S. territory by one-third. The legacy today is a two-thousand-mile border between two nations with the largest income gap of any adjoining countries in the world, with con­tinuing tensions over migration and, for some Americans, over lan­guage.

When Spain ceded Florida by treaty in 1819, the United States re­nounced all claims to the Mexican province of Texas, but soon Ameri­cans began setting on the San Antonio River. In 1829, the United States tried to buy Texas, but the Mexicans refused. In December 1835, Texas declared itself independent; in February 1836, Mexico sent a large army under General Santa Anna to put down the rebellion. The Texas force, reduced to 187 men, retreated to an old Spanish mission in San Antonio called the Alamo. They scorned Santa Anna's call for surrender and, epically, resisted for twelve days until all were dead. In April, Santa Anna captured three hundred Texas soldiers and executed them all by firing squad. Enraged Texas forces under General Sam

Houston pursued and routed the Mexican army at San Jacinto. Santa Anna was forced to surrender all his forces and accept the independ­ence of Texas. Sam Houston was elected president, and a struggle be­gan for annexation by the United States, an idea resisted by antislavery forces in the U.S. Congress. Santa Anna, now president of Mexico, said that annexation would be an act of war. In 1845, President Polk tried to negotiate the annexation of Texas and to bargain for New Mexico and California. Again, no deal. The next year, U.S. troops moved to the Rio Grande, well inside what Mexico considered its border. Mexicans attacked, and President Polk declared war.

The antiwar protests that arose at home have a familiar ring in mod­ern times. Whigs and abolitionists in the North claimed the war was contrived by Southerners to acquire another slave state. Former presi­dent John Quincy Adams denounced it as "a most unjust war." Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail as a protest against having his taxes used to support the war.

After two years of fighting and thirteen thousand American deaths, U.S. marines entered Mexico City and "added *the Halls of Montezuma" to the Marine Corps hymn. A minor State Department offi­cial, Nicholas Trist, negotiated the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Washington paid $15 million for most of \^hat is now the Southwestern United States.

Ever since, the theme of reconquista, or reconquest, has surfaced period­ically in romantic Mexican rhetoric. In 2001, the popular Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska declared that, thanks to immigration, Mexico is recovering the territories it lost to the United States in the nineteenth century. "The common people, the poor, the dirty, the lice-ridden, the cockroaches are advancing on the United States, a country that needs to speak Spanish because it has 33.5 million Hispanics who are impos­ing their culture," she said.

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The idea of reconquest was deftly satirized by Jim Lehrer in the 1966 novel Viva Max, made into a film with Peter Ustinov, which imag­ined a bored Mexican general marching troops to San Antonio and re­taking the Alamo. A delicious fuss ensues with much political huffing and posturing, all hilarious in the 1960s, when Mexican immigration was slight compared with today's numbers.

Today, talk of reconquest infuriates some Americans, who are wor­ried about immigration and die Mexification of the Southwest: they hear more and more Spanish, and they fear that English is threatened. Others take a calmer view. The writer Richard Rodriguez says that His­panic immigrants "are forcing us to see America within the Americas," and the result is that "Spanish is, unofficially, the second language of the United States, apparent on signs all over the city."

Rodriguez's city is San Francisco, but his observation is just as true in New York, whose subway riders might have been amused by die ref­erence to cockroaches, cucarachas, as they read bilingual ads about how to fight the ultimate New York survivor with the Roach Motel. Its slo­gan: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out!" Cucaracha is old Mex­ican slang for poor and despised. "La Cucaracha" was a song created by followers of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, ridiculing die gov­ernment forces they said couldn't fight without smoking marijuana. Then it became one of die first popular Latin songs to break through into the American market. Recently La Cucaracha has emerged as die title and chief character, a human-size cockroach, of a satirical cartoon strip syndicated in more-than sixty American newspapers. The comic La Cucaracha is shocking to many and draws plenty of hate mail because it ridicules Hispanic icons as readily as it mocks U.S. politics—evidence that the Latino presence in the United States has evolved to a level with many nuances.

Today, 27 percent of New York's population of eight million are His­panic; in the Bronx it is 48 percent. At City Hall, of fifty-one council members, eleven are Latino. In Manhattan, when you take the Broad-

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way subway uptown on weekday afternoons, the cars rapidly fill up with teenagers released from high schools on the West Side. Pale-skinned or very dark, most of them will be energetically speaking Spanish. If you take the crosstown bus on 125th Street traveling east, block by block you feel the English language disappearing as more and more liquor billboards and shop signs become Spanish.

We visited Spanish Harlem on a hot afternoon when rainy weather did nothing to dampen the fiesta spirit as Hispanics of many origins—Mexican, Latin and Central American, and Caribbean—got ready for the biggest annual Latino event, the Puerto Rican Day parade up Fifth Avenue. In New York, Puerto Ricans are the predominant and oldest of the Hispanic groups. Also, because of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status, one step below statehood, they are not quite immigrants in the way Mexicans are. In streets already festooned with Puerto Rican and a few Mexican flags, vendors were selling more flags and people were grabbing them to wave as they danced to the pulsing rhythms of salsa music blaring from shops and boom boxes. From the food stalls lining the streets wafted tantalizing odors of fried bananas, roast pig, octopus, and chicken with rice. Everywhere around us, the language spoken, sung, shouted, squawked over bullhorns was Spanish. It was as though we were not in an English-speaking country.                         j

Large numbers of police officers in yellow rain slickers were on duty, because a Puerto Rican parade a few years before had ended in a riot when youths ran amok in Central Park, harassing and groping women. We asked the cops whedier they could communicate with this large His­panic population. Most of them said they spoke only a few words of Spanish but had no trouble being understood.

"Most people speak English. When there's a language barrier, I know a couple of Spanisttwords and manage to get by. But I haven't had a problem." That was said by a police captain whose father came from Chile and had never learned English. But the captain related this in an accent unmistakably from Brooklyn, where he grew up. So, in his

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case, the force of the city culture and schools had overridden his her­itage. That has been the traditional immigrant pattern over the gener­ations, when wave after wave of immigrants poured into New York as the gateway to the American Dream. Each tide has enriched American English with new words and expressions:

From the Dutch, who owned New York before the British bought Manhattan, came blunderbuss, scow, sleigh, stoop, span, coleslaw, boss, bed­spread, cookie, waffle, dunderhead, Santa Clans, and Yankee.

From the millions of Irish immigrants came smithereens, lollapalooza, speakeasy, and hooligan. But the very American way of putting a definite article before institutions and conditions gave us to the hospital, whereas the British go to hospital. The president sends a message to the Congress, the British monarch sends one to Parliament.

Very few words came from the Scandinavian immigrants—-gravlax, smorgasbord—but their speech heavily influenced the accents in Wiscon­sin and Minnesota.

Italians gave us names of food: spaghetti, pasta, macaroni, ravioli, pizza, formaggio, mozzarella, lasagna, espresso, cannelloni, minestrone, Parmesan, broc­coli, zucchini, and cappuccino.

The linguistic imprint on American English of German and its Jew­ish relative, Yiddish, is on an altogether different scale. From German came sauerkraut, pretzel, dumb, to /oo/and loafer, ouch, bub, pumpernickel, kinder­garten, nix, shyster, hoodlum, delicatessen, kaput, funk, hockshop, scram, bummer, check, cookbook, ecology, fresh, rifle, spiel, and the suffix -fest on words like songfest,foodfest, slug fest, talkfest. German also gave us literal translations that became very popular in American English: and how, no way, can be, will do. Yiddish culture, which brought so much creativity to Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, gave us to kibbitz, schmaltz, schlock, nosh, phooey, schmo, schnozzle, to schkp, chutzpah, shiksa, bagel, pastrami, glitch, and expressions such as / should live so long, I should worry, Get lost, I'm coming already, I need it like I need a hole in the head.

There were many German settlers in Pennsylvania before the Revolu-

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?   *    93

tion, so many that there were early claims that the large numbers of Ger­man speakers threatened the primacy of English. Benjamin Franklin, whose print shop had published in German, wrote in 1751 that Pennsyl­vania "will in a few years become a German Colony: Instead of their learning our language, we must learn their's [sic], or live as in a foreign country." He also complained that Germans worked for lower wages, thereby taking jobs away from English workers—a note that would be sounded often over the centuries. But to win the Germans over, the Con­tinental Congress printed German translations of some of its delibera­tions, including the Articles of Confederation, and German Americans did support the Revolution.

After 1776, seven million more Germans arrived, mostly to settle in cities such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Buffalo, and New York, as well as Texas. Many of the Germans were ed­ucated, middle-class people who quickly made a cultural impact. There were twenty-eight German-language newspapers by 1860, and German achievements in music, literature, and science gave these immigrants a prominent and welcome place in American society—until World War I. At the turn of the century, one American in ten was speaking German, almost exactly the percentage who are currently speaking Spanish. In Texas the percentage was much higher, for the broad belt of German settlement ran from just west of Houston through San Antonio to Fred-ericksburg. Many of the most prominent American families were of German stock: the Astors, Budweisers, Eisenhowers, Fricks, Heinzes, Rockefellers, Singers, Steinways, and Westinghouses.

But when a German submarine torpedoed the Cunard liner Lusita-nia in May 1915, killing 1,195 of the 1,959 people on board, it outraged the American public and helped create the climate for Washington's declaration of war in 1917»The Germans became Huns, Boche, or Jerry, as Americans borrowed British and French epithets. In this atmosphere, many changed obviously German names—for example, Stein to Stone.

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Frankfurters became hot dogs, and to some Americans sauerkraut became liberty cabbage (as our generation tried making French fries into freedom fries to punish France for not joining the 2003 invasion of Iraq).

In the new climate, one state after another banned German instruc­tion from its schools. In 1918, when the New York City School Board did so, the New York Times applauded; dropping German was "a matter of polity, of patriotism, of Americanism." German was "suspect and taboo," a poignant judgment for a newspaper published by Adolph S. Ochs, who grew up in a German-speaking home.

Ironically, given today's linguistic anxieties, in the same editorial the Times suggested that, if a second language was needed at all, Spanish would be more useful for business. As the war fever spread, all foreign languages became suspect, and Washington made it illegal to mail non-English written matter if it mentioned the U.S. government or the war. The governor of Iowa banned the use of any foreign language in the schools, in public, or on the telephone.

Immediately after the war, a wave of Americanization swept the na­tion's schools, including a "Good English Makes Good Americans" campaign. Children earned points for snitching to teachers on the lan­guage errors of their classmates. These campaigns produced loyalty oaths such as the "Pledge for Children" of the Chicago Woman's Club American Speech Committee:

I love the United States of America. I love my country's flag. I love my country's language. I promise:

1.   That I will not dishonor my country's speech by leaving off the last syllables of words.

2.   That I will say a good American "yes" and "no" in place of an Indian grunt "um-hum" and "nup-um" or a foreign "ya," or "yeh" and "nope."

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3. That I will do my best to improve American speech by avoiding loud, rough tones, by enunciating distinctly, and by speaking pleasantly, clearly, and sincerely.

4.   That I will learn to articulate correctly as many words as possible during the year.

Although Congress cut off most immigration in 1924, this wave of linguistic discrimination, or paranoia, passed. By the 1930s, the federal government was explaining the New Deal in every language spoken in the country.

With immigration resumed after World War II, New York again be­came its doorway, and remains so to this day. In the 1990s, New York gained population but lost half a million white people; all of the gain in population came from minority-group immigrants. The ethnic com­plexion of New York neighborhoods continues to shift, like the nation­alities of taxi drivers. In a Manhattan taxi, we met Dave Pollack, one of the few American-born cabbies, who grew up in the Bronx. His grand-

V

father came from Russia and also drove a cab. "This is where you start," he said. "Actually, driving a cab is a great way to start earning money. But years ago it was the Irish, people from Italy, people from the Ukraine, many parts of Europe. Today the countries ire Pakistan, In­dia, and Bangladesh, but they're going through exactly what my grand­father did almost a hundred years ago."

An ad in the New York subway claims, "There are more than 250 languages spoken in New York City. How many should you speak?" The 2000 census showed large increases nationally from 1990 in many immigrant languages people said they spoke at home. The number of those who spoke Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, and Arabic almost doubled, the largest group of these, Chinese speakers, growing from 1.2 million to two million. But far and away the non-English language most people said they spoke at home was Spanish, an increase from seven­teen million to twenty-eight million in the same decade.

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That statistic raisea the question, Will the traditional pattern of assimilation by the second and third generations repeat itself widi Spanish-speaking immigrants today, or are their concentrated numbers too large? By July 2002, the Census Bureau reported that all together there were 38.8 million Hispanics or Latinos (the bureau uses both terms) in the United States, 60 percent of them born here. The His­panic population had doubled since 1980, because of a high birthrate and high levels of immigration, legal and illegal. Two-thirds were of Mexican origin. Given this growth rate, one in five residents of the United States is expected to be Hispanic by 2020.

There are large districts of major American cities—New York, Los Angeles, Miami—and many smaller cities where it is possible to live and never speak English. In Harlem, we talked to a woman named Rosa selling shaved ice flavored with syrup. She had lived in the United States for nineteen years but spoke no English. She explained that she was always too busy working to learn.

This ability to survive within an all-Spanish community has been en­hanced by the growth of Spanish-language media. Between 1990 and 2002, the number of Spanish-language newspapers published in the United States grew from 355 to 652. Many are published by well-respected English-language papers—such as the Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal—both to make up for the continuing loss of English-language circulation and to attract advertisers to the surging Hispanic market.

Gilbert Ballon, president and editor of the Dallas Morning News, said the Spanish-language Al Dia was created to reach a growing number of people in the market who are primary Spanish speakers. "These people are neither reading nor consuming our advertising in the way we would like, and really need, for the future of this company to grow." He said there was a good editorial reason as well: "You can go on the web and read lots of papers around the world, but they can't tell you what the school lunch menu is, or are the roads closed, or when I can vote in Dal-

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las, Texas, or San Antonio, Texas, because it's just not there in Span­ish."

It is the same story in broadcasting. By 2002, there were 664 Hispanic radio stations and 252 TV stations served by twenty-six Spanish-language TV networks. The big network Univision claims to reach 98 percent of U.S. Hispanic households through its Spanish-language tele­vision network and 73 percent with its radio network. Its rival Tele-mundo, owned by General Electric and managed by NEC, is viewed in 118 markets and says it reaches 91 percent of Hispanic TV-owning households.

In surprising places like Raleigh, North Carolina (a state that saw a fivefold increase in Hispanic population in the 1990s), Spanish TV ri­vals and sometimes attracts larger audiences than the network outlets of NEC, CBS, and ABC. Interestingly, a new dialect has been emerging in North Carolina, where Hispanic migrants have mixed Spanish with Southern rural speech and created, in Walt Wolfram's terms, "an His­panic Southern variety of English." Yet among the products frequently advertised on Univision television and Spanish-language radio are English-study kits on CDs or cassette tapes.

The 2000 census showed the states with the largest Hispanic immi­grant concentrations (based on number of persons who; speak Spanish at home) to be New Mexico with 29 percent; Texas, 27 percent; Cali­fornia, 26 percent; Arizona, 20 percent; Florida, 16 percent; Nevada, 16 percent; New York, 14 percent; New Jersey, 12 percent; and Illinois and Colorado, each 11 percent.

The city with the highest percentage of people speaking Spanish at home was Hialeah, Florida, with 92 percent. Number two, with 91 per­cent, was Laredo, Texas, right on the Mexican border, and we traveled there to understand the coficerns and tensions the language situation provokes.

And it was there that we heard the word reconquest. Reconquest is real

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to Allan Wall, a language teacher we met who is married to a Mexican and lives in Mexico with his wife and children. Every morning it is rush hour on the international bridge across the Rio Grande from Neuvo Laredo. Traffic crawled so slowly our first morning that it was quicker for Wall to park his car and walk across to the United States. Wall is an American so alarmed by the spread of Spanish that he wants English made our official language. He offers the classic reasons: "It's a great advantage for us to have a common language. It's good for immigrants to learn English. It opens up to the mainstream of the American soci­ety and economy. It's also an important part of our common citizen­ship; the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the judicial precedents, all these are in English." Wall sees tol­erance for Spanish as a threat to the linguistic unity of America, to our common civic language, which could lead to a linguistic Balkanization of the United States.

In Laredo, Spanish is effectively the city's language. In the local su­permarket, the loudspeaker announcements of specials are in Spanish. The local newspaper, the Laredo Morning Times, publishes editions in both Spanish and English. The city editor, Robert Garcia, noted that major newspapers across the United States were switching some of their sections to Spanish, "because they need to get to those folks, to communicate with those folks." He himself works with both language populations, "so I am constantly switching back and forth, you know, but I'm used to that: I'm from the area."

To see how the Spanish language had reasserted itself in the border area, we went to a small town southeast of Laredo, called El Cenizo, Texas. In Spanish, el cenizo means the place where there are ashes, which could suggest a town rising phoenixlike from a destructive past or a town still in mourning. In view of the extreme poverty and underdevelopment, and the rather depressed appearance of the town, the latter in­terpretation was not unkind. We had an appointment to see the mayor

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?   *    99

of El Cenizo but found she was in Laredo, at a meeting to secure funds to start a library. Town officials have set aside a small room in the cinder-block town hall, but it had no books when we visited.

In 1999, the previous mayor put El Cenizo on the map, and in the gun sights of English-firsters, by declaring Spanish the town's official language. The rationale was democratic, to make their town govern­ment more accessible to the nine hundred residents, few of whom spoke English, including the mayor himself. If residents understood the town business, they might be willing to pay their taxes, which conspicuously they were not, to pave local roads and improve facilities for their chil­dren. But El Cenizo found itself at the center of a national furor.

Newspaper editor Robert Garcia said, "It was ugly. They got calls, threats, people telling them, 'You're in America, what are you doing speaking Spanish as an official language?' " He showed us a pile of hos­tile editorials and stories from as far away as Boston and Florida, with the headlines "No Ingles!"; "Banning English Divisive Measure"; "Hot in Any Language"; "Town's Ordinance a Step Backwards"; "Small Town News Can Grow Big and Ugly"; "Texas Town Makes Spanish Official, Stirs War of Words." A lot of other nearby towns wanted to do the same, but after the reaction to El Cenizo they backed off.

El Cenizo compounded the affront by passing an ordinance that no town official (there were two at the time) had to collaborate with U.S.. Immigration authorities or the Border Patrol. The next mayor of El Cenizo, Oralia Reyes, hastily reversed both policies.

El Cenizo's main street runs past shabby trailer homes planted in neglected lots down to the Rio Grande. Here the river border with Mexico is one of the most-traveled crossing points for illegal immi­grants. The river is about a hundred yards wide at this point, the banks masked on both sides by trees and bushes. On the El Cenizo bank we found discarded inner tubes, used to float people across by night, along with the wet clothes they had abandoned and the black plastic bags that had carried the dry clothes they changed into. Because it is so fre-

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quently used, this area is heavily watched by the Border Patrol, and we spent a day seeing how they track illegals, the new official term, replac­ing wetbacks, the now derogatory name for Mexicans who swam the Rio Grande to reach the United States. But informally, among themselves, the agents say wets, as one did with us: "You want to chase wets? We'll chase wets."

The U.S. government estimates that there are eight million illegal immigrants in the country, of whom 70 percent probably came across the Mexican border. The Border Patrol has been given increased re­sources to reduce that flow, but readily admits that it cannot come close to stopping it.

The agency's effort in this area begins with electronic sensors (called bugs) installed near the riverbanks. Agents then patrol stretches of open bush country a few miles inland from the river. This includes the un-paved roads the illegals have to cross to move farther inland to ren­dezvous with trucks organized by their coyotes—the people who make a living smuggling Mexicans across the border and helping them escape into the U.S. interior. The places the illegals habitually cross are dragged each day, to erase old footprints. When the electronic sensors are tripped (or the bugs go off, as the agents say), indicating a fresh cross­ing at a certain point, the patrol drives along the dirt track searching for new footprints. They are easy to spot, unless the crossers used a branch to sweep the earth behind them, as some do, or sneaked through the oc­casional drainage culvert. When the agents see fresh footprints, they can follow the tracks on foot and radio for a helicopter to search ahead. They call it sign cutting, following tracks or signs, while the helicopter cuts in ahead. Sometimes the agents will put toilet paper on bushes so the helicopter can see where they have been. "You can't cut just one per­son," an agent says, meaning you need a group to make the tracks evi­dent, and the coyotes usually bring the IA (illegal aliens) in groups, often sending scouts across first to reconnoiter the route. If alarmed, the coy­otes will halt a group under bushes in a gully during the day, to move

Hispanic Immigration: Reconguest of Assimilation?   *    101

them on by night. It is not pleasant terrain. The sandy earth is thickly covered with brush—mesquite, some cactus, and bushes with sharp thorns, which easily tear clothes or flesh, especially in the dark. During certain seasons, diere are snakes—black indigos, rattlesnakes, corals, and water moccasins. There are other dangers, including, in some bor­der areas, border-zone vigilantes reportedly going out to shoot and kill illegals. Federal and state authorities have tried to find and stop such people, without success. In the desert areas farther west, many illegals die of thirst each year, because they run out of water before they can get across. The Border Patrol has taken to setting bottles of water along frequently used routes to prevent that.

Despite the dangers, the Mexicans keep coming. The Border Patrol agents we accompanied believe they get about 40 to 50 percent of the people who cross in this area, but overall the percentage is perhaps only 10 percent.

This unit caught a dozen immigrants late that afternoon. A woman agent spotted their tracks and alerted the helicopter, which buzzed in a few feet above the brush and found the Mexicans, crouched in a hollow in the shadow of the bushes. We could hear the helicopter pilot's ex­cited voice on the radio: "Bodies! Bodies!" When the agent made the arrest, the Mexicans offered no resistance, and no one attempted to run away. A bus was sent in, and they were driven off to be fingerprinted and checked for any criminal records. If there was evidence that they were coyotes or mules (drug carriers), they would be arrested. Those who had simply come across the border would be delivered back to Mexico. They usually try again, and frequently, because the odds of getting away with it are good.

Allan Wall, the teacher, said that living in Mexico had given him a dif­ferent perspective on the inroads of Spanish in America. He recalled a Congress of the Spanish Language in Madrid in 2001. One of the speak­ers was Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico, who commented that Mex-

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ican immigrants who continue to speak Spanish in the United States are doing their patriotic duty to Mexico. Another speaker was Carlos Fuentes, perhaps the leading literary figure in Mexico. "He said that there is a silent monquista, a reconquest of the United States. He didn't even limit it to the Southwest, as many do; he just said 'of the United States.' "

To prevent this, Wall wants immigration reduced, to give legal immi­grants time to assimilate. He not only wants English made the official U.S. language, but wants all government business to be in English. If people don't understand English, they will be motivated to learn, he be­lieves, because some Hispanics are "impeded" from learning by U.S. government policies, such as the translation of documents, bilingual ed­ucation, and bilingual election ballots. He sees American politicians pandering by speaking Spanish themselves to woo Hispanic voters— one of these George W. Bush. Wall faulted Bush, as governor of Texas, for not taking action, like cutting off state funds, after the El Cenizo or­dinance. He also noted that Bush, as president, was on record as oppos­ing the English Language Amendment.

The growing Latino presence has created tensions. In the Maryland and Virginia areas that are part of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, designated one of hypergrowth for Hispanics, there have been clashes over issuing drivers' licenses and offering the reduced in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants. Steven Gamarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies (which wants immigration lim­ited), said the numbers raise a troubling question: "Is the level of immi­gration so high that it's overwhelming the assimilation process?"

Immigrant is a word coined in America, for migrants who came in, rather than went out, the meaning of emigrant, which was how Europe saw it. But despite living in a nation built on immigration, Americans already here have always had ambivalent feelings about those just arriv­ing. In his study of the history of immigration and language, The English-Only Question, Dennis Baron wrote:

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Settled Americans have been reluctant to accept newcomers, regarding them as socially, economically, and racially inferior, more insistent on special concessions like bilingual ballots, and on government handouts, and less willing to assimilate than earlier generations had been. These negative attitudes find their focus in attacks on minority languages, which are all too obviously badges of ethnicity.

Recently Hispanic immigration has raised new expressions of anxiety in that vein. Victor Davis Hanson, a fifth-generation Californian, argues that continuation of the status quo—with virtually open borders, and multiculturalism in the schools—would mean a general breakdown of the old assimilationist model. If so, we would end up with Mexifornia—he has written a book with this title—a "hybrid civilization," in which "Spanish has equal status with English and there is little Americanization."

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, claims that "the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico." In a book entitled Who Are We? Huntington says that Mexican immigration is unique and contradicts the tradition of assimilation. He summarized his argument in Foreign. Policy magazine. Previous ethnic groups arrived in waves that began and ended, giving time for the immigrants to be assimilated, whereas the Mexican wave is continuous. Mexicans, he argues, do not assimilate and become truly American, because they do not embrace American values and ideals: they do not share the work ethic inherited from America's Anglo-Protestant culture; they do not have the same hunger for education; proportionately fewer go to college; fewer have incomes above $50,000 a year; fewer hold managerial positions. Moreover, he claims, 'As their numbers increase, Mexican Americans feel increas­ingly comfortable with their own culture and often contemptuous of

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American culture." Hispanic people, finding strength in numbers, cre­ate a growing Latin influence in entertainment, advertising, and poli­tics. One index foretells the future: "In 1998, Jose replaced Michael as the most popular name for newborn boys in both California and Texas." Further, the Mexican fertility rate is higher than for other Americans, "a characteristic of developing countries."

This assault brought instant rebuttal. David Brooks, a columnist in the New York Times, wrote that the most persuasive evidence is against Huntington, because "Mexicans are assimilating." He quotes the book Remaking the American Mainstream, by Richard Alba of the State University of New York at Albany and Victor Nee of Cornell: "Although there are some border neighborhoods where immigrants are slow to learn Eng­lish, Mexicans nationwide know they must learn it to get ahead. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican-American children speak only English at home." Objecting to Huntington's use of the term "Anglo-Protestant" to describe American culture, Brooks argues, "There are no significant differences between Mexican-American lifestyles and other American lifestyles. They serve in the military—and die for this na­tion—at comparable rates."

Anxieties/perils/visions like Huntington's are not new, but since 1981 they have been driving a national movement to make English the official language of the United States. It surprises many people to know that English has never had any constitutional privilege. The movement to change was supported by such prominent people as the late Alistair Cooke and Senator S. I. Hayakawa. Cooke wrote, "The day that the immigrant's tongue becomes the first language of any community or— God forbid—a state, the American experiment will be in serious jeop­ardy of falling apart." Hayakawa, the noted semantics professor who became a senator, introduced the English Language Amendment to the constitution in 1981 and helped found the organization U.S. English, to promote it nationally. He wrote, "In order for us to cooperate most fully with our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and fellow citizens, we

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?   •*•    105

must not only have a language; we must have a common language. If we do not, our future holds a terrifying potential for conflict." The movement sees efforts at bilingual education in schools and government concessions to non-English speakers, such as election ballots in foreign languages, as wrongheaded, because they slow the acquisition of Eng­lish and hence assimilation.

For some there is also an immigration reform agenda. The U.S. Eng­lish organization suffered a public-relations disaster in 1988, when Dr. John Tanton, another founder, advocated forced sterilization as a means of population and immigration control. Several noted support­ers, including Walter Cronkite and Linda Chavez, an influential His­panic Republican, resigned in protest.

The English Language Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, al­though frequently reintroduced, has gone nowhere. In 1988, Congress held one day of hearings. Dennis Baron wrote that the hearings reiter­ated the two arguments that have informed such discussions for two centuries: an insistence that English is the glue holding an ethnically di­verse America together, and a fear that official-language legislation masks racial discrimination—in this case against Hispanic Americans. Claims that English is die key to an understanding of American ideals are balanced against warnings that voters will be disenfranchised and the public safety endangered by restrictions on government use of lan­guages other dian English.

There has been more action in the states, about half of which have enacted official-language laws, although the demand for such action has quieted down recently. In the late 1990s, Colorado, Florida, and Arizona passed laws, though only Arizona's had teeth: it said that no public official could communicate in any language other than English. But federal law administered by state officials often required translation into other languages. State employees, saying they had to obey federal law, sued and won. The law was overturned by a U.S. circuit court, and

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the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. Now the movement has descended to the municipal level, with a town here or there passing an English-only ordinance, which has little effect.

The impracticality of such laws is obvious, given the American econ­omy's apparent need for millions of Hispanic immigrants. Though gen­erations of educated Hispanics have advanced in all areas of American life, the recent arrivals from poor villages in Mexico do much of the menial work in this country. Predominantly in the Southwest, but all over the country, Latino men and women wash restaurant dishes, make motel beds, care for children, clean hospital rooms, mow lawns and trim hedges, and do small construction projects. They also cultivate and pick the fruit and vegetables that fill our supermarkets. They do these tasks for wages lower than non-Hispanic Americans will accept, often below minimum wage, and although it is illegal, they can be exploited by employers—blackmailed, in effect—for being undocumented aliens. The jobs they fill cannot be exported directly to the Third World, but these low-wage workers are imported from it, and the effect on the global economy is the same.

More recently, President Bush proposed granting legal status to some of the eight million workers in the country employed illegally, giving them renewable work visas. But eventually the illegals would have to re­turn to Mexico, or wherever they came from. Democrats criticized that plan for not helping such immigrants move toward citizenship; some Republicans felt it did not do enough to slow down the flow of Mexi­cans across the border.

To what extent is the fear of reconquest justified?

Certainly, in one mundane part of our culture, Mexico has "con­quered" a portion of the American food market. The OED recently noted the growing popularity of Mexican food by adding huevos rancheros (eggs on a tortilla with sausage, beans, and salsa). In the mid-1990s, a taste milestone was passed when sales of salsa exceeded those of

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?   *    107

ketchup. Food terms such as taco, enchilada, chili, burrito, ceviche, empanada, guacamole, jalapeno, and tamale are common in the American vocabulary from the proliferation of Tex-Mex and Mexican restaurants, and super­markets as far away as New England offer large sections with Mexican ingredients. But that is broadening American tastes. Reconquest, taken literally in the linguistic sense, would mean the replacement of English by Spanish—the whole enchilada, so to speak. In cities like Laredo it might appear that this is happening, but there is contrary evidence. For exam­ple, Spanish appears to be losing ground in San Antonio, where the very old Hispanic population has now been in large part assimilated into the Anglo community.

To pursue this question, we traveled to California, another part of the former Spanish overseas empire, to explore the degree to which Span­ish is "reconquering" the country's most populous state.

"^ What is evident is that when Spanish and English rub against each

other intimately they produce hybrids. Our first stop was a television sta­tion in Los Angeles, and a program called Mex 2 the Max, starring Patricia Lopez, a former fashion model, who has a new career is a VJ, or video jockey. With a lot of brio, Patty introduces Latino and salsa videos and an­swers e-mails from fans. The language she uses is Spanglish, half English, half Spanish, breaking from one to the other in the course of a sentence. Here's how her show kicked off on the day we visited the studios of LATV

patty lopez:   Que horn es? Es la horn de la buena musica aqui en Mex,2"the Max. That's right, baby. I hope you guys are sittin' down, because we have an hour—a fun-filled hour for you guys. Ten-emos a la scena de La Chica Sexy con los Chi-canos de Tyuana de esta noche.

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[What's die time? It's time for good music here on Mex 2 the Max. That's right, baby. I hope you guys are sittin' down, because we have an hour—a fun-filled hour for you guys. We have the video of The Sexy Chick along with the Tijuana Boys for tonight.]

In one of the regular features of Mex 2 the Max Patty Lopez reads out e-mails from fans and viewers who want to request a special song. This one came from someone called Angel:

angel's e-mail:   Estaba cambiando las canaks,y mire supro-grama y se me hizo muy interesante. I would like to ask you to play "El Gavilan" se llama Ricardo Cerda. Thanks and good luck. Love ya always, Angel. [While channel surfing, I saw your program and found it very interesting. I would like to ask you to play "The Spar­row," sung by Ricardo Cerda. Thanks and good luck. Love ya always, Angel.]

Patty says a lot of Latin people come to the States—"I mean we are everywhere!"—who might not feel comfortable speaking English, and "we are putting it out there for them." She says, "I think it's going to be mandatory for people to have to learn Spanish, because it's going to be the second language of the States." Her father is seventy-two and doesn't speak English, "because you know that you can get by not speak­ing it here."

We left Patty plugging La Chica Sexy, the mildest of erotic videos, in which buffoonish men leered at a woman prancing about in a bikini and got bopped by their wives.

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?   *    10V

Spanglish is not the only Spanish-English hybrid. Linguist Carmen Fought has been studying Chicano, one of the street talks in Latino Los Angeles. She says, "Chicano English is a dialect of English that grew out of the historical contact between English and Spanish in the Southwest. You get articles written that say that Chicano English is just a step on the way to mastery of English. And that's not true at all. Chicano English is now its own vibrant, thriving dialect. It's not going anywhere."

There is also a Chicano Spanish, Spanish with heavy and literal bor­rowings from English. Te llamar para tras is a literal translation of the English phrase /'// call you back, which Carmen described as very awk­ward Spanish that would not be used by Spanish speakers elsewhere. Her research has concentrated on Chicano English, much of it among high-school students who had Spanish-speaking parents.

Carmen says that the way Chicano English developed tells us some­thing about language, cognition, and the human brain. Mexican immi­grants learned English as a second language, an accented variety that included sounds and other patterns from their first language, Spanish. Their children, however, grew up speaking both languages. They used the "learner English" of their parents as a basis for developing a new, native dialect of English. Carmen Fought believes that the emergence of Chi­cano is similar in some ways to the development of pidgins and Creoles.

She took us to a nearby park, to watch some kids playing touch foot­ball in the sunshine of a late afternoon and to listen to the conversation of two boys who were watching from a park bench. At first they were im­possible to understand, their voices rising and falling in a way that was unmistakably Hispanic. The -word fool sounded like fooh, and the word hotness was pronounced like highness. But after a while our ears grew more attuned to Michael (interestingly, not Jose) and Jesse. Here is a sample:

michael:   So wassup, dawg? What's cracking, dawg?

What's crackin' tomorrow? jesse:         Barbecue.

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michael:   Yeah. Wassup, man? We gonna throw a party?

Wassup?

jesse:         What girls you gonna have over there? michael:   Man, all I'm saying, all I know is that there's

gonna be a bunch of primas there. jesse:         What about the, what about the party you took

Mark to? Mark Ramirez. michael:   Southgate? jesse:        Yeah, Southgate. michael:   That's his family, fool. jesse:         Nah, you serious? michael:   There's a bunch of hotness over there. jesse:         Nah.

Carmen said words like wassup and some other features are shared by Chicano and African American English. The Chicano term hotness means good-looking girls.

jesse:         What about these fools? Think they're gonna grow up to be some real football or what?

michael:   Man, that little short fool with cutoff sleeves, he's my cousin, dawg. He might probably be something.

Carmen said the use of fool is very common, and occasionally when she was doing fieldwork "they would actually call me fool. You know, just kind of slipping it in there the same way we might use man or guy." Many people believe that Chicano is spoken by people whose first lan­guage is Spanish and who don't speak English. But Jesse doesn't in fact speak Spanish. "Only enough to throw in a few words, and those words actually tend to be taboo or swear words usually, when kids just know a few Spanish words."

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?   *    111

This is the classic pattern, that the first generation born in the United States will often retain the home language, but by the second generation born here the home language is very often lost.

Carmen vigorously refutes the claim by Vicente Fox and Garlos Fuentes that Latinos are achieving a linguistic reconquest of America. Fuentes may be a great writer, she says, but neither he nor Vicente Fox has done research on language spread and change. They are not expert son the subject. She says that all of the linguists who have studied the sub­ject, without exception, say that by the second generation born here of  Mexican-born ancestors, Spanish is 50 percent gone. By the third gen­eration, Spanish is 100 percent gone. People are misled into thinking that Spanish is becoming dominant because, unlike immigration by other groups, which came in waves that began and ended, the Hispanic migration is a continuous flow. So there are always newly arrived Span­ish speakers who give the impression of dominating a region or part o fa city. In fact, they are assimilating at the same generational rate as other language groups.          

She said it was fascinating to see a young man who looks Mexi­can, looks very much like someone who people will think speaks Span­ish, and who speaks in a rhythm that sounds as though he speaks Spanish, but who, when you ask, will say he knows no Spanish—not even enough to order a burrito in a takeout-food place.

In her research, Carmen found that speakers in the Mexican Amer­ican community were losing Spanish very rapidly. Some of them were disappointed about that, but many had come into school when they were five or six years old, speaking Spanish only; by high school, when they were seventeen or eighteen, they had lost it completely. English was completely dominant.

"So," Carmen concluded, "I don't think that Spanish is a threat to English in any way. I think, if anything, it's Spanish that is in danger and that we might want to look out for."

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Although other factors may be involved, the census data from 1990 and 2000 appear to document what she observes. Take three cities with large Hispanic populations in Texas:

In San Antonio, in 1990, among children five to seventeen years old, 108,885 said they "speak only English." By 2000, that group had grown by 36 percent, to 148,596. Of Spanish speakers of the same ages, in 1990, 48,188 said they "speak English very well." By 2000, the figure was 54,230, an increase of 12 percent.

For people in San Antonio aged eighteen to sixty-four, there was sim­ilar growth in English speaking over the decade. Thus, across a large range of ages, the number of people who spoke only English increased in a decade, as did the numbers of Spanish speakers who spoke English very well.

Dallas and Houston receive more fresh Mexican immigrants than San Antonio, but the census data from those cities do not show dra­matic gains for Spanish. In Dallas the number of people under seven­teen who spoke only English fell by 2 percent from 1990 to 2000, but in Houston that number rose by 6 percent. Spanish speakers who spoke English "very well" increased in Dallas by 79 percent, in Houston by 58 percent. Among people aged eighteen to sixty-four, the number of those who spoke only English fell by 6 percent in Dallas over the decade, in Houston by 2 percent. But among older people who spoke Spanish at home but spoke English "very well," the figures favored En­glish, increasing in Dallas by 58 percent and in Houston by 51 percent. So the census data do not provide evidence of a massive shift away from English acquisition, the first step in becoming assimilated.

Let us return to La Cucaracha, the nationally syndicated comic strip cre­ated by Lalo Alcaraz, a thirty-eight-year-old resident of Los Angeles, who says he carries a "huge chip on his shoulder" from his pocho up-

Hispanic Immigration: Reconquest or Assimilation?   *    113

bringing. Pocho means a Mexican born in the United States and consid­ered by real Mexicans to be so assimilated that they call him "Ameri­can." Alcaraz says he's not Mexican enough for his relatives in Mexico, and not American enough for some in the United States. But there is a certain symbolism in the fact that he writes the sharp dialogue for his young Latino cartoon characters not in Spanish, or Spanglish, or Chicano, but mostly standard American English, and that to access past news stories about the cartoon on the Internet you are instructed to "Click aki."

Whatever the disagreements between the political scientists and the lin­guists, one statistic is indisputable. In 2003, Hispanics passed African Americans as the largest minority in the country. Given rates of immi­gration and natural increase, that disparity is likely to grow. As Hispan­ics become more influential culturally, economically, and politically, what will the consequences be for America's blacks* who still face their own challenges and discrimination over language?

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