Spanglish @ Amherst College:

Spanglish: A User’s Manifesto
Ilan Stavans

Quick, here’s a set of questions: What’s the word Cuban-Americans use in Miami for traitor? Kennedito. And how do Nuyoricans refer to their habitat in the Lower East Side? La Loisaida. And how do Mexicans in East L.A. call an Uncle Tom: a burrito.
As any lexicographer will tell you, none of these words, at least in the sense mentioned in the above paragraph, makes an appearance in a standard Spanish lexicon. And they are nowhere to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary either. Instead, they are a measurement of the rapidly growing vocabulary of Spanglish, a jazzy, hybrid language, part English and part Spanish, audible almost everywhere in the United States today.
Wait a minute, you might say: Is Spanglish a “language”? In people’s view, it is nothing but a broken parlance, an interim step in the process of assimilation of Latinos into La Cazuela, e.g., the Melting Pot. A language has its academies and its concordances and other reference tools, just like Spanish and English. Finally, a language is capable of being expressing complex emotions and to be understood by a wide range of speakers.
Or is it? In defining Yiddish, the tongue of Eastern European Jews from the 13th century to the Holocaust and beyond, linguist Max Weinreich once famously said that the difference between a language and a dialect is that the former has an army and a navy behind. By this approach, Yiddish was never a language: it spurred no national anthem, and never had a president or primer minister to speak it in official functions. And yet, an array of masterpieces in Yiddish is still enjoyed worldwide, from Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman to the work of the 1978 Nobel laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer. At one point in a not too distant past, four fifths of the globe’s Jewish population spoke Yiddish.
Spanglish also lacks an army and a dignitary. It is yet to reach the level of standardization that Yiddish achieved at the end of the 19th century. But if our present predicament is any indication, its status is only likely to ripen. There are approximately 37 million Latinos in the United States, according to the latest US census data, an astonishing number by all accounts, especially when one considers that Canada as a country has an overall population of 36 million. Countless Hispanics north of the Rio Grande speak Spanish and English—and they speak Spanglish.
Is this a fully trilingual minority? Not quite. Many people speak only one of the three tongues, and therein the challenge. For its detractors, Spanglish is an unacceptable middle ground—a trap, really. Bilingual Education hasn’t fulfilled its mission. Proof of it is the half-baked English-language fluency of scores of Latinos. This view is only moderately true, though. In one state after another, Hispanics have voted en bloque against Bilingual Education programs. Under the circumstances (how does one teach verbal skills to millions of recent arrivals every year?), the acquisition of English in the community is fast and solid. But Spanglish isn’t going away along the way. Instead, it’s finding momentum.
How to explain this phenomenon? First, it is necessary to remember that Spanglish isn’t only a hot Latino property. Stop at your local music store to browse through the rap and hip-hop sections. You’ll be surprised by the number of non-Hispanic groups that use it. Then surf your cable channels to watch The Brothers García and The George López Show. Or better, ask permission to enter the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant or the backroom of a flower shop. The moment you hear expressions like “Washea los dishes, por favor,” uttered by one staff person, a Korean, to another, a Salvadoran, you’ll know automatically what I mean. Plus, as a vehicle of communication of global proportions, Spanglish is present across the hemisphere, from Buenos Aires to Santo Domingo, where, thanks to American fashion and sports and obviously Hollywood movies, it has become de rigueur for people of all backgrounds.
Spanglish speakers use different strategies to make themselves understood: they switch codes from English to Spanish and back; they create a syntactic hodgepodge; and they never cease to adapt words from one language to another and are constantly coining fresh terms. As is expected, puritans hate it, especially those sitting in the pristine chambers of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid. For them the jerga loca, as people call it, has a stink to it and is further evidence that the barbarians are at the gate. Everyone knows that Spaniards have never been fully happy with the way Latin Americans treat their language. Of course, now that Hispanics in the U.S. are such a political and economic force, the threat is acquiring renewed power. How often have I been told by a purista: Well, if any Spanish lexicon records the word techo to describe a roof, why on earth should Latinos use roofa? So as to make things easy, the answer they give to themselves is that Spanglish is the result of pereza: laziness. They forget that the majority of Latino homes in Gringolandia don’t have a dictionary. In fact, other than the Bible, they are scarce on book. They fail to recognize that unfortunately dictionaries don’t tell people how to speak. Rather, it’s the other way around.
Since the fifties, Spanglish has been compared—unequally—to Ebonics, known as Black English, the dialect spoken by African-American youngsters in the inner city. For starters, Spanglish reaches across class. You’ll find it among business executives in Tallahassee, fashion designers in Dallas, baseball players in the Bronx, and migrant workers near Portland, all of whom use it with equal ease. The catch is that there isn’t one Spanglish but many, so it isn’t class but age, nationality and geographical background the factors that define it. A type of Dominicanish is spoken by Dominican-Americans in Washington Heights, different from the Pachuco spoken by Mexicans in El Paso and the Cubonics used by Cubans in Union City.
Is there a common thread? No doubt there is. In effect, that thread might be the reason why a pushing toward some sort of standardization is being felt in some circles. Thanks to radio, TV, newspapers, and particularly the Internet—nothing travels faster than Spanglish en la Web—, universal words are understood from coast to coast and beyond our borders. This has prompted corporations and advertising firms to squeeze as much benefit as possible from the linguistic jumble. Not long ago, Hallmark inaugurated a new line of greeting cards and Colgate has launched a campaign of commercials in Spanglish. Clearly, they’ve come late to the game. Think of Taco Bell’s Chihuahua in the nineties. Even the military has indulged in the strategy before. In my office, I have a sepia poster of a mestizo mother and cadet son. The ad reads: Yo soy el Army!
One might add that the different between a language and a dialect is that the later one appears not to have a tangible memory. But again, it’s all a matter of appearances, of course. The common yet mistaken perception is that Spanglish is a new phenomenon, one that literally appeared out of the blue just about yesterday, the consequence of an unprecedented demographic explosion that has pushed the economically undeveloped and politically unstable South to empty itself on the shores of the booming North. In truth, it has been around, first in gestation and then in development, at least for over one hundred and fifty years, ever since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, transferred two thirds of Mexico’s territory—what is nowadays the Southwest—to the Anglos. From one day to another, dwellers in those territories ceased to be mexicanos, at least officially, and became Gringos. Or at least, that was the perception. Actually, the process was far less straightforward. Many of the aboriginals in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and other tangential regions retained their customs and language, adapting them to their novel condition. The outcome was a juxtaposition of identities, known as mestizaje.
A typical definition of mestizo in your average English thesaurus is “a person from Latin America with a mix background: half Indian and half European.” That division marks his worldview, described by the contentious philosopher José Vasconcelos as “using miscegenation not has an obstacle but as a springboard for widespread dissemination.” Yes, Spanglish is also a mestizo language, not exactly of the kind envisioned by Vasconcelos but an assortment nonetheless: it neither here with Cervantes nor there with Shakespeare… yet it is everywhere these days, at once a clash and a consolidation of the Hispanic and Anglo selves.
And since the Latino minority in the U.S. exemplifies to perfection the dictum e pluribus unum, the cradle of Spanglish is as much the 19th-century Southwest as it is Puerto Rico in the 20th, a commonwealth that isn’t a state, nor is it a free, autonomous nation. Yes, Spanglish is a commonwealth too: always on the road to independence… or maybe not.
This ethereal state is crucial, indeed. For decades Spanglish has made a splash in literary circles and Puerto Rican authors have been at the lead in this revolution. The poetry of Miguel Algarín and Tato Laviera and the prose of Piri Thomas, Luis Rafael Sánchez and Giannina Braschi—especially her novel Yo-Yo Boing!—testify to it, as does the polemical short story “Pollito Chicken” by Ana Lydia Vega, in which the author dissects the vernacular of Nuyoricans as well as their loose connection to the Caribbean homeland. Whoever said that Spanglish is incapable of articulating complex emotions should take a trip to the library and think again.
I’m often asked: But does a regular Spanish or English reader understand these poems and stories? The answer is no. The same happens with a conversation in fluent Spanglish: non-speakers are at a total loss. This means that, as it happens with other tongues, translation needs to be employed in order to make Spanglish accessible to outsiders. Thus, out of curiosity and playfulness, last year I translated the first chapter of Don Quixote of La Mancha into Spanglish. It was published in newspapers in Spain and throughout the Americas. The translation starts:
In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para la dinner, un omelet pa’ los Sábados, lentil pa’ los Viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa’ los Domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income.
For me the experience was riveting. Likewise, it was wholeheartedly liberating... The explanation is simple: for millions of Latinos, Spanglish is more than a tongue and a marketing tool—it’s a political stand and an I.D. card. Salamander-like creatures in a constant state of mutation, we’re happy in the no (wo)man’s land, as is our language. “English is broken here!” used to be the stigma attached to our neighborhoods. We’ve finally realized that, paraphrasing one of Richard Nixon’s cabinet members, if it ain’t broken, no lo fixées!
Inspired by their predecessors, a young generation of Latino artists and intellectuals is coming to terms with Spanglish. Instead of renouncing it while English is acquired and Spanish remains a tangible alternative, they are giving a farewell to the once pervasive inferiority complex that prevailed among Latinos north of the Rio Grande by invoking the illustrious line uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s the ever-ready Terminator: Hasta la vista, Baby!
So—is Spanglish a language or a dialect? It depends on the dictionary at your disposal. And what kind of future will it have? It is difficult to say. What matters, though, I the present: in that realm, it is firmly rooteado.
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Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His new book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (HarperCollins), which includes a lexicon of thousands of Spanglish terms plus the Spanglish translation of chapter one of Don Quixote, will be in stores in September.