Spanish speakers attracting more hate since 2016 election
Encounters in viral videos show Spanish is still polarising opinion in the United States, reports Brittny Mejia, of the Los Angeles Times.
NATALIA Meneses was shopping at a Walmart in Georgia this year when her 3yearold daughter began a conversation that triggered an ugly experience.
The little girl did not blurt out a profanity or say anything else inappropriate. She simply pointed out flower hair clips to her mother: ‘‘Mira, Mami!’’.
Overhearing the conversation that ensued in Spanish between mother and child, a woman snapped at Meneses, a United States citizen who was born in Colombia.
‘‘You need to teach this kid to speak English, because this is America and kids need to learn English,’’ the woman said.
‘‘If not, you need to get out of this country.’’
An angry Meneses responded that she and her daughter were American and spoke English.
Spanish, the first European language to take root in North America, has established itself as perhaps the most relentlessly polarising language in the US. Two decades ago it sparked an emotional debate in California about banning bilingual education, a topic that divided even Latino families. During heavy immigration into California and other border states, Spanish was the language of choice in entire neighborhoods.
Now, the presidency of Donald Trump has reignited the linguistic divide. Trump has railed against illegal immigration, attacked the character of those who cross the border and once said ‘‘this is a country where we speak English, not Spanish’’.
At the same time, Spanish is making inroads in American pop culture. Luis Fonsi’s global hit Despacito broke numerous records on the pop charts and became the first YouTube video to hit 5 billion views.
‘‘When we’re living in a world where symbols become dividing lines, language can be one of those,’’ said Brian Levin, director for the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism at
California State University, San Bernardino.
In this environment, two recent incidents seared themselves into the long tradition of people being berated for speaking Spanish, while also illustrating the power of video and social media to launch a counterattack.
In one case, New York attorney Aaron Schlossberg yelled at Latino restaurant workers at a Fresh Kitchen in Manhattan for speaking Spanish and threatened to report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
‘‘My guess is they are not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country,’’ Schlossberg said in the recorded incident.
‘‘I pay for their welfare. I pay for their ability to be here. The least they can do . . . is speak English.’’
After intense media interest and a barrage of criticism that included a serenade from a mariachi band, Schlossberg apologised on Twitter and said he was not racist.
The same week as the New York incident, a Border Patrol agent was recorded stopping two women in Montana and asking them for identification.
‘‘Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here, and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,’’ the agent can be heard saying in the video.
A US Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the incident was ‘‘being reviewed to ensure that all appropriate policies were followed’’.
It is hard to know whether there has been an increase in confrontations over the speaking of Spanish. Such incidents have been reported for decades, and the share of Latinos who can speak Spanish has declined over the past decade, with 73% of Latinos speaking Spanish at home in 2015, down from 78% in 2006, according to a Pew Research Centre analysis of Census Bureau data. Many Latinos grew up in households where only English was spoken.
Since the presidential election, dozens of Latinos have reported verbal assaults for speaking Spanish through Documenting Hate, a project that tracks bias incidents and hate crimes around the country. The reported incidents include insults over a truck driver radio channel, a confrontation in a cinema and at a hotel pool.
‘‘The prejudice against
Spanish is not about Spanish the language; it’s about the people who speak Spanish,’’ said
Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College in Claremont.
‘‘Who tend to be people of colour, who tend to be people from a lower socioeconomic background and who, not always but sometimes, are immigrants and are in the centre of a lot of negative targeting in the political arena.’’
Although English is spoken by most people in the US, there is no official language for the country. There are at least 350 languages spoken in homes around the nation.
There were 40 million US residents who spoke Spanish at home in 2016, according to census data. More than half — 57.5% of Latino Spanish speakers — spoke English ‘‘very well’’.
Spanish has long inspired contradictory impulses. On the one hand, many middleclass and affluent whites have enrolled their children in bilingual charter schools so they could learn Spanish, believing it could give them a leg up in the job market. But the language has also inspired Englishonly initiatives across the country.
Republican strategist Ana Navarro wrote on Twitter: ‘‘Let me get this straight. Just a few months ago, everybody in America — and the rest of the world — was going around singing every word of Despacito. But now, they want to berate us and detain us when they hear us say a few words in Spanish?’’
Since the election, there has been a rise in hate crimes and the emergence of bigotry in public spaces, captured and widely shared on social media.
The attitude towards Spanish is reflective of the feelings towards German in the 19th and 20th centuries, when Germans were criticised for supposedly not assimilating. In some states, such as Nebraska and Iowa, laws were enacted to ban German in public schools.
Ana Suda cannot remember what she and her friend were discussing as they walked around a store in Havre, Montana, when the Border Patrol agent asked them where they were born.
After he took their IDs, Suda recorded a video asking the agent why he had asked for their identification.
Suda asked whether they were being racially profiled. The agent said no.
‘‘It has nothing to do with that,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s the fact that it has to do with you guys speaking Spanish in the store, in a state where it’s predominantly Englishspeaking.’’
Suda, who was born in El Paso and raised in Juarez, Mexico, said she often spoke Spanish in the town without incident. She speaks Spanish with her two children so they can communicate with family in Mexico.
After her 7yearold daughter watched video of the interaction, she approached Suda with a look of sadness.
‘‘Mommy, I can’t speak Spanish any more?’’ she asked.
‘‘Of course you can,’’ Suda said. ‘‘You need to be proud. You speak two languages. You’re smart.’’ — TNS
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Just a few months ago, everybody in America — and the rest of the world — was going around singing every word of
Despacito. But now, they want to berate us
and detain us when they hear us say a few
words in Spanish