Touché!

My slightly snarky joke about San Antonio (I’d said you ALMOST heard as much English as in Cancún) elicited a thoughtful, on-target response — heck a whole Pocho Manifesto — from Jimmy at “kenburnshatesmexicans.com”.

Now, I realize this vato never spent time in my third period High School Spanish II class, where dudes named Hernandez and Garcia regularly butchered certain simple verb conjugations, but his assumption that every Brown person in the United States spoke Spanish and could read Octavio Paz was fundamentally wrong. I was reminded of this every time I struggled in speaking to my grandmother.

What actually does bind us all, I submit, is not a shared knowledge of the mother tongue but instead a reckoning with the language. Not all of Brown folks in the U.S. speak Spanish, especially as the generation number accumulates, and those that do speak Spanish do it at various levels of ease and ability.

“My soul frets in the shadow of his language,” the original Pocho James Joyce wrote. Having his raza’s OG mother tongue of Irish Gaelic subjugated by the conquering English, Joyce had the final laugh by mastering his oppressor’s language and writing Finnegan’s Wake, which to this day puzzles Oxford deans.

Of course, Jimmy is right. The loss of the “mother tongue” should be no surprise to anyone: no one expects Rudolf Giuliani or Nancy Pelosi to speak fluent Italian. Despite my family name, I have no interest in learning, or speaking, German. It’s of absolutely no use to me, though Spanglish and Spanish are. The wonder isn’t that Charlie Gonzales has trouble with the language of his distinguished forefathers… the wonder is that it’s held on at all. It’s to Chalie Gonzales’ credit that he’s going to the trouble of learning the family tongue. Too bad the same can’t be said for Anglo George W. Bush.

Most of this site’s original readers are folks interested in Mexican travel… and a lot of them make just the assumption Jimmy objects to. It’s funny, but I hear from travel snobs who complain that Mexicans speak too much English. The would be “off the tourist trail” traveler is always disappointed that they’ve gone to the trouble to learn Spanish, and then find themselves answered by some guy who spent a couple of years washing dishes in Chicago.

The Real Academia Español is still arguing (last I heard) on whether Spanglish is a dialect of Spanish, or one of English. Or its own language. I tend to think the latter. It has a grammar and literature of its own. And, there’s no rule that says a language can’t combine two wildly different roots — English throws Germanic and Romance languages together somehow). I once heard it said that “a dialect is a language without a country,” but then again, “Texas is a whole other country,” too.