My friend Carla wrote a really good entry on her blog that I just had to comment on. It turned out I had so much to say I decided to put it up here. I suggest you read it before going on.
From the limited research that I’ve done on [Samuel] Huntington, I know he is a political scientist and Harvard University professor who has gained widespread attention for his position on immigration, which he considers a threat to mainstream U.S. culture.
I think Sam Huntington is full of shit, but even worse, I think is he is purposefully deceitful. He’s made the argument before that Cubans in Miami are a threat ’cause they are too rich and that Mexicans in the Southwest are a threat ’cause they are too poor. Anyone with basic knowledge of logic would be ashamed of such an argument.
What [Mike] Davis refers to as ‘nativist hysteria’ is exactly what Huntington conveys in his article. His isn’t an article of unbiased, straight sociological analysis of the facts but rather a prime example of xenophobia praising Anglo-Protestant identity and the debasing of other cultural-value systems: “There is no Americano Dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”
The man has no credibility. He is a hack. But enough about him. Carla touches on two topics I find fascinating: the semantics of Hispanic/Latino, and language education.
The U.S. Census has tried to create a category that would accurately describe the individuals who share Latin American heritage. Its answer was the word ‘Hispanic’… Hispanic comes from the Latin word for Spain and Latino is Spanish for Latin (or a shortening of latinoamericano, as is sometimes suggested). So if I use Latina to describe myself, given the aforementioned definition, is it because the language of my ancestors is Latin or derived from Latin? If that were the case, what about other cultures/nationalities with Latin as its derivation (i.e. the Romance languages – Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, French etc). Are Italians Latinos? I don’t believe that’s the definition intended by Latino. So what about the term stemming from a shortening of latinoamericano? Then are the Spanish Latino? Certainly not; Hispanic yes, Latino, no. The problem with Hispanic is that it is inclusive of the Spanish and so is associated with European descent. What about the indigenous and African roots in Latin America? That isn’t accounted for in the term Hispanic.
Well then, what about Latinos born in the U.S., are they not fully Latino/fully American? I know from personal experience that some people prefer Hispanic to Latino because, as Davis mentions, it’s more gringo friendly and less threatening whereas Latino is more contentious and empowering to those who use it to describe themselves; the word itself is in Spanish!”
You have a nice semantic question here. So, Hispanic or Latino? I’m going to have to introduce some terminology here: analytic and deductive definitions. An analytic definition is sort of like the dictionary/etymological definition, while a deductive definition is one based on how the word acts, how it’s used in context.
The analytic definition of Hispanic is suggested to be what comes from what the Romans referred to as Hispania, the whole Iberian Peninsula. That would basically include anything derived from Spanish and Portuguese culture. Latino, on the other hand, is suggested to be whatever comes from the Latin language, therefore encompassing much more than Spanish or Portuguese cultures, which you already mentioned (France, Italy, Romania, the people that speak Rumansch in Switzerland).
The deductive definitions are a very different thing. In practice Hispanic and Latino mean almost the same thing, with the exception you pointed out before that Hispanic is inclusive of Spaniards. I believe there was some good logical reasoning when coming up with Hispanic to use in the Census. The problem here is that it only works well in the Census, and nowhere else.
The problem with coining a word for a specific purpose is that for it to survive it has to gain the favor of what (in this case who) it refers to. The Latin American community in the US had already found a term they liked, Latino, which even though is logically inferior in my opinion, is now the marker of cultural pride.
Latino has two distinct advantages over Hispanic that makes it much more likable as a word. It’s in Spanish, therefore much more appealing because that’s the language of the culture. The second is that because it’s in Spanish, it is more morphologically versatile. What do I mean by that? You can express male and female grammatical gender: Latino, Latina. You can’t do that with English ‘cause it has no grammatical gender.
So to conclude that, as much as I like logically sound choices, the sociology of language can be highly illogical at times. People are the carriers of language, therefore they decide what wins.
I tackled one of the topics. Let’s go on to the other one.
Huntington states that ESL courses are not sufficient – not a remedy but a crutch. What he suggests is full English immersion. However, Davis (in Disabling Spanish) argues that ESL does work, but developmental bilingual education (DBE) has proven most successful. What I don’t understand is why Latino children who speak Spanish only are seen to have a handicap. Spanish retention and English proficiency should be seen as favorable. Huntington seems to suggest that only when Spanish is not retained has a child then reached full English proficiency. That’s utterly absurd. Why should we be afraid of bilinguals? Fear that if one isn’t proficient in both Spanish and English he/she will be out of a job is just ridiculous.
As much as I think the man is full of shit, I agree with him on ESL courses. But it’s more complicated than that. First of all, I think ESL as a whole is a piece of shit program and not the way to go at all.
The reasons people give for ESL is that you can’t interrupt a child’s education only to teach them English. “They will fall behind blah blah blah…” They teach the regular classes in Spanish and then spend a little more time in English class, but that’s not enough. This is where I agree and also depart from Huntington’s opinion. The children need full immersion English classes so they can learn it as quickly as possible. But you don’t just stop there. Once the child has a functional proficiency in the language, steps should be taken to preserve Spanish, the first language. That’s where developmental bilingual education may come in. During the whole process they may fall behind a bit, but I think it’s a better alternative than falling behind years on end.
A second language is something highly valuable in the work force. People go through a lot of trouble to learn a second language when they’re older. It’s a scientific fact that it’s much easier to learn a language when younger. Taking away a child’s language just because it’s stigmatized for no good reason is wrong. I would go as far to say that it is immoral.
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