Bilingual in America: Spanish users see more discrimination
Unwelcome glances become open hostility
PHOENIX — Until recently, Lilly Mucarsel has spoken Spanish just about everywhere since arriving in the United States from Ecuador three decades ago: at the library, the movies, the grocery store. She raised three daughters who also speak Spanish and are passing on the tradition to her American-born grandchildren.
These days, the 62-year-old Southern Californian finds herself shifting to English when she attends a baseball game or goes to a restaurant with her husband to prove that yes, she knows that language, too, and to avoid the nasty looks she unfortunately gets while conversing in her native tongue.
“I notice more now with this current government that people are more impatient and there’s more of a lack of understanding,” said Mucarsel, of Anaheim, California. “When you speak Spanish, they automatically judge you thinking you don’t speak English, and that is a huge ignorant idea.”
Being multilingual in the United States brings advantages like job opportunities and social connections. But in some public places a foreign language can draw unwanted attention, as evidenced recently by widely viewed videos of a rant by a New York lawyer against restaurant workers and a Border Patrol agent in Montana questioning people for speaking Spanish.
In that May 16 encounter, the agent told Ana Suda and her friend he wanted to see their IDs because he overheard them conversing in Spanish in a store, suspiciously rare in her hometown of Havre, about 30 miles from the Canadian border. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the episode is under review, but noted that agents have broad discretion to question people.
It’s not just Spanish; native speakers of Arabic, Farsi and many Asian and Indian tongues have long had to make the personal choice of when to stray from English. But some Latinos in particular feel the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric and tougher policies toward immigrants from Mexico and Central America have helped turn unwelcome glances into open hostility.
“The bottom line is anti-immigrant sentiment is now a part of mainstream discourse. It is not only present in barrooms, in the heartland — it is present at press briefings in Washington, D.C.,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
In the United States, one in five people age 5 and over speak a language other than English at home, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In immigrant-friendly Los Angeles, more than half of people do.
About 60 percent of people in the country who speak another language said they also speak English very well.
For most, that language is Spanish. About 40 million people in the United States speak Spanish and surveys have shown that retaining the language is important to Latinos, said Jens Manuel Krogstad, a writer at the Pew Research Center in Washington.
For many, speaking Spanish isn’t an option but a necessity to communicate with immigrant parents, grandparents or friends who don’t know English — or know enough to get by but feel more comfortable in their own language.
For others, it is a choice — sometimes deliberate, and sometimes the barely conscious tug of a language they’ve always known. It’s the language of their first words. Or the language they were taught math in, which makes the task of counting change easier even though their English is flawless.
Or maybe they fell in love in Spanish, and it just doesn’t translate.
Some native speakers might slip into Spanish to evaluate an iffy deal they’re being offered on a car, or to gently reprimand misbehaving children without the rest of the world knowing.
In recent years, schools in states around the U.S. have honored students who graduate high school knowing English and at least one more language. In careers ranging from law enforcement to health care, people said being bilingual has been an advantage.
Diana Olivera said knowing Spanish has proven critical at her job as a pediatric nurse at a Phoenix hospital, where most of her patients’ families speak Spanish.
“The people that I work with, they love it because it’s beneficial to all of us,” she said.