In 1846, the United States began a territorial war with Mexico; the US was the aggressor. Its attack was well organized and amazingly well executed; by the time a peace treaty was signed the Americans had taken over a vast portion of northern Mexico, including the much-coveted Alta California, plus some new territory south of Texas.
The offensive continues.
Nowadays it is a cultural war rather than a military one, and the battle takes place within the borders, now viciously expanded, of the United States. As before, the US is the aggressor. Or at least, white Anglos in the US.
It would not be too much to say that there is an ongoing struggle to exterminate Latino culture within the United States by destroying the Spanish language everywhere north of the Río Grande. The English exclusivist attitude permeates white society: after all, virtually all white Americans are descendants of people who did not speak English - Germans, Irishmen, Swedes, Poles - and so, apparently unaware of the irony, people argue: "My ancestors had to learn English, and you can too." My ancestors were force-fed a language alien to them, so you should be too.
So why should Spanish speakers be given special privileges, above and beyond those received by other American linguistic minorities?
You may as well ask why the English should have been given those privileges. If things had gone ever so slightly differently in American history, German might be the principal language in Pennsylvania; Dutch in New York; Swedish in New Jersey; Welsh in Virginia. It just so happened that the English managed to culturally exterminate these large linguistic minorities (thereby robbing them of their distinct heritage and identity), and assimilate them to a mass-produced English culture. There is nothing quintessentially American about the English language or culture that took hold (as people in England will hasten to tell you), nor indeed anything quintessentially English about America. The prevailing myth of America as a nation founded on open-mindedness, pluralism, and toleration, actually masks an incredible intolerance for allegedly un-American cultures and groups. If you come here, people will let you exist as an individual, but you must not dare try and bring your culture with you, or attempt to establish your own community. In this country you have to make an effort to cling to your ancestors' culture; it has to be done individually, and in defiance of the universal, assimilationist and downright intolerant ethic of the Anglo-Saxon melting pot. There is no question of maintaining permanent, distinctive local cultures with their own languages and sense of community, as part of an effort to preserve our cultural richness and diversity, rather than attempting to destroy it.
People don't just come to the US because of individual persecution, on political or religious grounds. They also come because of persecution of their communities, of their local cultures, languages and identities. Truly it is a rude awakening they receive when they arrive.
So why single out Spanish? Why devote so much time and effort to maintaining bilingual policies, just so Spanish speakers can avoid using the language that every other American linguistic community is and has been assimilated to?
My answer is twofold, and quite simple: the immensity of the Spanish speaking population, and the unique historical claim Mexican and Latino culture has on such a vast area of United States territory.
In 1995 Spanish-speaking people comprised some 7% of the American population. That's more than any other linguistic minority; in fact, it's larger than all other linguistic minorities combined. But this 7% still looks like a very small figure - English monoglots were 86% of the population - unless you remember that the US is the third most populous country on earth. Seven percent of such an enormous population is really a huge number of people: 16 million Americans, no less. To give you some perspective, this is over half the population of Venezuela or Cuba, significantly larger than the population of Chile, three times the population of Honduras, and five times the population of Uruguay: all of them countries where Spanish is the sole official language. In absolute figures, the number of actively Spanish-speaking people in the US is simply breathtaking.
The second part of my argument is that Spanish speakers have been in much of the US for far longer than English speakers have. It is practically a heresy to point this out nowadays, but here it is: a huge swath of the west and southwest was traditionally part and parcel of Mexico, as was Texas in its entirety; Florida, plus adjacent bits of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, used to be a colony of Spain; even the Louisiana Territory was a Spanish possession for thirty-eight years. Of the 3,011,836 square miles of the continental USA, over 1,033,239 square miles (34.3%) were once Mexican or Spanish, and that's excluding the sparsely colonized Louisiana Territory.
I could list a third aspect of the argument for Spanish, one that ties the first two together: American Spanish is regionally concentrated as practically no other linguistic minority in this country is. The vast majority of American Spanish speakers live either in the four states bordering Mexico - California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico -, or in Florida (convenient for immigrants from Cuba), or in urban areas like Chicago or metropolitan New York and New Jersey. This regional concentration is vital to understanding that there is a geographic network of hispanophone communities within the United States, and a relatively dense one at that. As it happens, Latinos from these areas of concentration may take their cultural and linguistic distinctness as part of a unique regional/ethnic identity, as in the Chicano identity of the American Southwest (Aztlán) which is in some ways distinct from both Mexican and Anglo identity. English exclusivism can now be seen to take on a darker dimension: it becomes an organized attempt to smash a cultural network of communities linked by a common Latino heritage. That's cultural persecution. That's a form of genocide.
Spanish, therefore, boasts (1) an enormous corpus of native speakers, far greater than any other linguistic minority in the United States (greater than all others combined, as it happens); (2) a long and venerable history throughout much of the United States; and (3) continued regional concentration, with consequent establishment of a regional identity through the medium of the language.
In addition, no genuine argument can be made that Spanish is incompatible with modern industrialized Western society or that it is incapable of expressing technical concepts, and hence, is destined to keep those who speak it under the hatches. This is the argument made time and again against minority languages, but in the case of Spanish it simply will not hold. I offer only three words in refutation of this argument, namely: (1) Argentina. (2) Spain. (3) Mexico. All of them countries that have been centers of culture and learning for centuries, and each of them now important industrial centers.
It is clear that Spanish is a "language of wider communication", as are English, French, Arabic, Swahili etc; knowledge of Spanish is not a limitation on anybody's potential. As it happens, bilingualism is never be a limitation on one's ability to achieve. One can pick up a second language without, as is the common fear, endangering one's proficiency in the first. Conversely the knowledge of two languages and cultures can be of enormous importance in developing cultural and social maturity. The question of Spanish limiting one's abilities can be heartily dismissed.
There is, however, one further aspect of this discussion: the matter of "language rights". This is an expression you never hear in the United States; but it's all the rage in other parts of the world. The idea is that people have a right to speak their own languages; to participate in the cultures that those languages are the vehicle of; to be treated with dignity and respect regarding those linguistic and cultural identities; and to ensure that their children will have the right to possess those languages and cultures as well. The principle has usually been applied to indigenous linguistic groups rather than to 'immigrant' languages (in Europe, for example, to languages like Catalan or Welsh, rather than Arabic or Turkish that are spoken primarily by recent newcomers). I contend that Spanish is every bit as 'indigenous' to America as English is (that is, not very!), and that the present wave of Spanish speaking immigrants no more discredits Spanish as an 'immigrant' language than a flood of English speaking immigrants from Canada or Britain would discredit English.
My proposal, therefore, is to declare English and Spanish the joint official languages of the United States of America. This would entail (1) equal validity in the law - in the courts, in Congress, and for use in official documents, census forms, etc; (2) equal validity in the school system, with some measure of dual-medium education provided for students of both language backgrounds, and most urgently in the Southwest, Florida, and the Chicago and New York metropolitan areas; and (3) the appearance of both languages on American passports, road signs, and currency.
There is a vital principle at stake here: for if you destroy a language you destroy a culture; and cultural diversity is and must be central to the American ethic of freedom, toleration, and respect for the individual as a social being. To destroy that ethic is to destroy the American ideal. In the name of preserving American culture, we would destroy all that is noble in it.
B. Iorwerth Cook 1997