Hispanic Magazine.com - June-July 2006 - Panorama: Up Front: When it comes to language, a lot of Hispanics become so emotional that they can’t think clearly.
For instance, they sometimes let the fact that they were once upon a time discouraged from speaking Spanish—even to the point of being punished in school—fuel their support of bilingual education for the students of today. They’ve also been known to make fellow Hispanics who don’t speak Spanish feel as if they aren’t Hispanic enough.
I know this from experience. When the time came to take the E.L.T. (Ethnic Litmus Test), I flunked the verbal—the section dealing with language. As a second- generation Mexican American, I speak English. What I don’t speak well—at least not as well as many of my fellow Hispanics would like—is Spanish.
For that, I offer no apologies. This is the United States and this is how it is supposed to be. Assimilation happens.
But if Hispanics are a little weird about language, so are other Americans. Many of the native-born feverishly insist that the United States is an English-speaking country and that anyone who lives here ought to speak, well, you know. And yet they turn a blind eye to the billions of dollars that U.S. companies spend in Spanishlanguage advertising each year in the hopes of grabbing a slice of the nearly $1 trillion that Hispanics have in annual
buying power.
