The land of rebirth

No visitor to southern California can avoid noticing that this is essentially a bilingual country. All public information is written in both English and Spanish, and most police officers, ticket sellers and various types of functionaries as well as store clerks and waitstaff switch without a problem between the languages. The old place-names still used today are almost exclusively Spanish. San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco and so on were all founded during the second half of the 18th century by Spanish missionaries, who were the first who dared venture into the as yet unexplored California and created missionary stations where they converted the local Indian population to Christianity.

There are a number of old Latino identities in the US, but Chicanos are probably the oldest. Their self-image is based to a large extent on how they, like African-Americans, did not immigrate and, it can be said, became Americans “against their will”. During the 19th century, the US rapidly expanded both west and south, and as former Mexican states like Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona were incorporated in various ways into the United States, the country acquired a good-sized native Spanish-speaking population in the bargain. Enrique Morones, who has become known as an advocate of Spanish-speaking people and in particular the rights of illegal immigrants, cogently summarises their view of the situation: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”

In conjunction with the census carried out in the US in 2000, various figures were published which shocked many people. It was calculated then that there were 40 million Spanish-speaking people in the country, 22 million of these Mexicans. An estimated nine million illegal immigrants were to be added to that. So it emerged that, for the first time, there were more Latinos than African-Americans. In some parts of the country that had previously not had a sizeable population, the number had increased so rapidly and substantially that there was talk of hypergrowth. For instance, the Latino population in Atlanta rose by 1,000 per cent between 1980 and 2000. Today, only Mexico has a larger Spanish-speaking population than the US.

Latinos are the group that is growing fastest in urban areas, but they are also an immigrant group characterised to a relatively large extent as agricultural labourers and living in rural areas. There are hardly any other immigrants that even settle in the countryside. States that border Mexico are dominated by illegal immigrants, young, single Latinos with little education in what has become as a rule a proletariat of agricultural labourers. They live without any legal protection and with wages far below average. Despite the scope of this immigration, blacks are still the largest minority in the countryside. Cities exert the greatest pull, and even Latinos who began life as agricultural labourers tend to gradually head to urban areas.

According to reports, there seem to be Spanish-speaking TV channels in practically every American city, including Minneapolis and Salt Lake City, where there had once been hardly any Latinos at all. Similarly, there are entirely Spanish-speaking radio stations across the country. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who himself has a world-famous accent when he speaks English, said in a speech in which he addressed the problem of integration and language straight on: “Turn off the Spanish television.” In Arizona, people experimented for a while with banning instruction in Spanish in elementary schools – English became Arizona’s official language as recently as 2006 – but after Spanish-speaking children quickly fell behind, the decision was overturned. It turns out that it is more important to get children’s reading and writing skills developing early on than exactly which language this occurs in. Spanish-speaking pupils that were able to get help in home-language instruction later had fewer problems learning adequate English.

Around 29 per cent of Arizona residents are Latinos, and there are estimated to be some 460,000 illegal immigrants. That is not the state with the worst problems, but it seems to be the one with the greatest difficulties managing the situation in a constructive way. A new state law entitles police officers to demand identification from anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant – which means in practice that anyone who “looks Latin American” can be stopped by the police and deported if they turn out not to have valid papers. This law has been condemned at the federal level as well as by civil rights groups, and it is noted that the law fans racism, makes other police work with crime more difficult and denies American citizens – that is, the majority of Latinos in Arizona – the individual liberty that each American is entitled to assume to be self-evident.

However, those in Arizona who support the law say that the federal government has abandoned them and that people elsewhere in the US do not understand the pressure illegal immigration puts on the state’s resources. But illegal immigrants are also consumers; their money contributes to the economy – and there is hardly any cheaper labour to be found. Would it really be a major advantage for Arizona if they were to lose them?

While only five per cent of residents of Latin American origin say that they cannot speak any Spanish at all, at least 60 per cent of third-generation Latinos in the US speak only English at home. At the local donut shop where I used to take a coffee break during my years in San Diego, I chatted with the manager, who was so happy now because, even though her own children did not want to speak Spanish, it seems her grandchildren were interested, and she is teaching them old Mexican songs she learned when she was little.

Still, it is perhaps not that strange that some people feel threatened by the rapid rise in this population. Mexicans in particular, with their historical claims on the entire southwestern US, are viewed by many conservative politicians and commentators with great suspicion. There are fears that this will create a Spanish-speaking Quebec in those parts of the US where Spanish is already on par with English, perhaps a movement that demands autonomy, or even (re)annexation to Mexico.

Samuel P. Huntington’s final book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), attracted considerable attention. In it, he emphasises the rapid rise in Spanish-speaking people as a threat to American unity and the Anglo-Protestant spirit that he believes created the unique American mindset. Huntington thinks that Spanish speakers’ unwillingness to integrate, which is underpinned by the availability in Spanish of so much information and so many social services as well as entertainment and instruction, means that the US is changing from a country with one spirit into a splintered country with two languages and two cultures.

But according to a number of surveys, Latinos are largely conservative. They believe in the family, go to church and work hard. Some of Huntington’s critics also note the irony that the religious and family-centred values of Latinos are closer to the traditional Anglo-Protestant ethic than are those of many other people in the US today. Nor is it true that Latinos would isolate themselves, because third-generation Latinos in the US at least prefer English to Spanish – although relatively many keep Spanish as a second language – and they marry outside their own group to a larger extent than do, for instance, African-Americans.

Today Latinos are closer to the national mainstream culturally and in other ways than were immigrant groups like Catholic Italians and Irish or Eastern European Jews when they arrived in centuries past. In the 1860s, signs were posted in shops saying no Irish allowed; during large parts of the 19th century, there were warnings of a “papal invasion”, in which Italians and Irish were seen as spies and fifth columnists who would betray the country to the enemy, for instance Catholic Spain, which after all still had colonies in the Caribbean. In California, there were also lynchings of Chinese, and different kinds of immigrant camps were used to limit the flow of undesirable immigrant groups far into the 20th century.

Today, there is probably no one who views any of these groups as foreign. That is also the strength of the US, especially in times when economic growth will actually require even greater immigration. People can in fact become American, regardless of their place of birth, origin or religion, as long as they respect the law and pledge allegiance to the flag and the Constitution. The only country in Europe that has a similar attitude, at least in theory, is France – which after all now has a president with a Hungarian surname, who in Sweden would be called a “second-generation immigrant” but who there is considered without hesitation to be French.

To be a bit crass, one can also note that the fact that Latinos generate economic benefits in all likelihood means that the Latin problem will turn out to be relatively easy to handle, that it will dissolve. Because no one really gains from the notion that fundamental differences and conflicts are a clash of civilizations, an idea that in all likelihood has no future. Naturally, it is not possible to reduce ideological differences to economic problems.

But it is still most likely the case that the much decried American materialism also provides a rather neutral fundamental value, so to speak, which gives anyone who wants to work hard a chance to become part of the community. As Francis Fukuyama expressed it in his polemic against Huntington: “The real Protestants are those Korean grocery-store owners, or Indian entrepreneurs, or Taiwanese engineers, or Russian cab drivers working two or three jobs in America’s free and relatively unregulated labor market.”

According to statistics compiled by the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, in 2007 Latinos in the US consumed an amount equal to 928 billion dollars. This figure had already increased by 200 billion in just two years, and it is expected to pass the trillion dollar mark more or less as this is being written. The American dream seems perfectly able to include Latinos as well, regardless of which language they dream in.

But what are Latinos really as a group? The very idea that there should be some kind of Latino identity is indeed truly American. In the US, Cubans, Mexican, Puerto Ricans, Argentines and so forth go from having specific national identities to being lumped together as “Latinos”. There are also some contrasts in this group – for instance most Latinos categorise themselves as white – and some mechanisms of exclusion have made the situation more difficult for darker-skinned or black Latinos, for example, from the Caribbean.

One of the key literary works to depict the African-Latino experience in the US, Down These Mean Streets (1967) by Piri Thomas, shows among other things just how this sense of being an outsider feels for black Latinos, for whom it is not clear whether they belong with either African-Americans or Latinos. This type of dual “outsiderness” is not as unusual as one might normally think, the same being true of immigrants in Sweden. But as in most minority groups, there are also Latinos who demand solidarity and representativeness among group members. This is an example of something that permeates the American belief that it is the individual that counts, and that each and every person is entitled to shape her own life and pursue happiness.

One occasion where these different views were really put to a test was when President George W Bush appointed Miguel Estrada to one of the country’s highest courts. Estrada was born in Honduras in 1961 and arrived in the US at the age of 17 without knowing much English. Within ten years of his arrival, he had earned law degrees at both Columbia and Harvard, and when he had not yet turned thirty he became a Supreme Court clerk in Washington. When Bush wanted to appoint a judge to the appellate court in the District of Columbia, however, he was met with strong protests, in part because Estrada was not considered representative of Latinos in the US – things had gone a little too well for him.

The Democrats successfully blocked his nomination with a filibuster, involving lengthy speeches that obstructed the decision-making process, even though the Republicans at the time had a majority in the Senate. There was not the same kind of opposition in 2009 when Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, of Puerto Rican heritage, to the Supreme Court. It was seen as a breakthrough for Latinos in the US. But the person who paved the way for these new opportunities was nonetheless George W Bush.

The US also has considerable cultural, economic and political influence in Latin America. Just as command of Spanish is an advantage to one’s career in San Diego as well as Miami, command of English is imperative in order to succeed at higher levels in Mexico. The elites in Latin American countries have cable and watch American television with the same ease that Latinos in the US can watch Spanish-language programmes. It is an exchange that goes in both directions. The Chilean author Alfredo Fuguet, who grew up in California, has stated that the great success for Latin American stars in Hollywood has also led to a new impetus for the local film industry in a number of Latin American countries.

Nowadays Latino stars like Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Ricky Martin are in the American mainstream, and the Latin Grammy Awards in Miami are the continent’s most important manifestation of music that can be said to have Latin roots – even though the best known variety, salsa, was actually created decades ago by, indeed, Latinos in the US.

Professor Lyn Di Iorio Sandín at New York University believes that Latinos, or Hispanics as they are also called, as a whole constitute a zone halfway between whites and blacks. In her exceptionally interesting collection of essays Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity (2004), she analyses a few of the key literary works that reflect the Latino experience in the US. It is worth noting that this is also a very vigorous and interesting area in linguistic and literary terms. American literature is predicated to a large extent on the possibilities of bilingualism. If one can say, together with Professor Di Iorio Sandín, that Latinos constitute a “grey zone” between blacks and whites with respect to ethnicity and status, the same is true of literature, which exploits and enriches both English and Spanish with particular vitality. A good example, which has also been translated into Swedish, is Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (in Swedish, Oscar Waos korta förunderliga liv, 2009), which depicts the complex relation between origin and residence, belonging and outsiderness, for a studious New York Dominican, who has not really succeeded in finding his place in the American ghetto or his parent’s home country, the Dominican Republic.

Spanglish, as the blend of Spanish and English is known, is today a growing new global language. It has been compared by some to Yiddish, which developed during the Middle Ages from a mix of German and Hebrew into a language of its own. Spanish influences in the American vocabulary include classic cowboy terms, like ‘lasso’, ‘wrangler’, ‘buckaroo’ and ‘rodeo’, but the playfulness with language seen in the irreverently vigorous Spanglish now flourishing is something completely new. Many of the words are simply English ones pronounced in Spanish, like dogibag (‘doggy bag’), friki (‘freaky’) or jonron (‘home run’), whereas others are a kind of in-between linguistic wordplay, like culear, which means ‘to be cool’, but can also mean ‘to be afraid’. In the first case, the word is derived from the English ‘cool’, whereas in the second, it has to do with the Spanish culo, ‘butt’.

The Mexican-Jewish immigrant Ilan Stavans, a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, has made a name for himself as an expert in Spanglish, and in 2003 he published the book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. It is hardly a coincidence that this is a person who is a minority within a minority who chooses to specialise in and begin to codify this modern linguistic hybrid, which can actually be said to be the first entirely native American language since the Indians’.

The highlight of Professor Stavan’s book is his concluding translation of the first chapter of Don Quixote into Spanglish. It provides a hint that Latinos need not simply wallow in nostalgia and dream themselves back to their roots, just as they need not relinquish their heritage. They can in fact be something different and new in a US which seems to have an amazing ability to come back to life and rediscover itself, generation after generation. This is how Don Quixote begins in Spanglish:

In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para la dinner, un omelet pa’ los Sábados, lentil pa’ los Viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa’ los Domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income. El resto lo employaba en una coat de broadcloth y en soketes de velvetín pa’ los holidays, with sus slippers pa’ combinar, while los otros días de la semana él cut a figura de los más finos cloths.