Worrisome Patois of Black, Latino Students : ‘Jive Spanglish’ Spans 2 Cultures

When asked the whereabouts of his cousin, Fenton Avenue Elementary School student Leonardo Ruvalcaba replied in a combination of black English and barrio slang.

“He done left to ay-say ay-fay ,” the fifth-grader said.

For the uninitiated, Leonardo said his cousin left for the City of San Fernando. Ay-say ay-fay is the Spanish pronunciation of the letters “S F” and in East Valley Latino neighborhoods, ay-say ay-fay is shorthand for San Fernando.

A group of black youths was walking toward Maclay Junior High in Pacoima one recent morning when another black teen-ager stopped the group to tell them some neighborhood news. At the end of his story, the group began giving each other “high five” hand slaps and shouting, “Ojale, hombre!” street Spanish for “All right, man!”

Specialist’s Description

“Cross-cultural communication” is how Jo Bonita Perez, a multicultural education specialist with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, describes the language patterns of Ruvalcaba and the Maclay youths.

“Jive Spanglish” is what teachers, frustrated bilingual educators and amazed parents call this patois.

Spanglish is a combination of English and Spanish that produces words that won’t be found in any dictionary. It is commonly spoken by Latinos living along the U.S.-Mexican border and in Latino neighborhoods of U.S. cities.

There are Spanglish words and phrases for almost every occasion. For example, “jonron” is Spanglish for home run. In Spanglish, the word for “truck” is “troca” instead of the traditional Spanish word “camion.” To say “park” as in park the car, people speaking Spanglish say “parquear.” In Spanish, the correct word is estacionar . Reineando is Spanglish for “raining.” Estar lloviendo is the proper Spanish phrase for raining.

But Jive Spanglish differs even more. Instead of substituting a new word for a Spanish or an English word, speakers of Jive Spanglish combine the grammatical structure of black English with Spanish slang.

“One by one, I could put a black student behind a screen and then a Hispanic student and have each of them talk and I doubt that you could tell the difference,” said Walter Andrew, principal of Fenton Avenue School.

Jive Spanglish is a language few adults ever hear. It is spoken on the playgrounds of elementary schools where the student population is divided evenly between blacks and Latinos.

It can be heard in junior high school hallways where young adolescents constantly tease each others with insults such as “mala madre!” (your mama!) or “your mother is a . . . “ with the final derogatory word or phrase in Spanish.

Jive Spanglish is so new that there has been little research on its origins by linguists or anthropologists. However, teachers and adults who spend time with youngsters attending multiracial schools attest to the vitality and growing use of Jive Spanglish.

Playground Language

At Fenton Avenue, which sits in the in the middle the multiracial, working-class neighborhood of Lake View Terrace, Jive Spanglish is the playground language of choice. But with increasing frequency, the vernacular of the playground is slipping into the language of the classroom.

“I do correct their grammar when they use Spanish and black English in class, but I don’t want them to feel put down,” said Isabelle Wiefel, a fifth-grade teacher at Fenton.

“I tell them that there are many acceptable languages. There is the language that you speak at home, the language that you use with friends and a ‘cash’ language--standard English that you use in the classroom and that you would use to get a job,” Wiefel said.

Classroom Patter

In Leslie Gaudin’s second-grade classroom, Latino youngsters pepper their Spanish with “jammin’ ” and “jivin’, “ while their black classmates add “sientese” (sit down) and “quiete” (be quiet) to their vocabulary.

“The English-speaking kids ask the Hispanic kids how to say something in Spanish, and the Hispanic kids ask the English-speaking kids how to say something in English,” Gaudin said. “For the black children, the Spanish is mostly fun. A few commands, a few words here and there.

“When Hispanic kids do use black dialect in the classroom, it depends on their level if I correct them or not,” Gaudin said. “If they speak very little English, then I let them use the black dialect. At that point I just want them to speak English. If they are at ease with English, then I’ll correct their grammar.”

Making sure that students are facile in standard English is the goal of the Los Angeles school district’s Proficiency in English Program. In the program, language specialists go over vocabulary, proper sentence structure and agreement of tenses with students.

Aid for Blacks

The program was originally established as a way to help black students learn the grammatical and pronunciation differences between black English and standard English. With the advent of Jive Spanglish, PEP has expanded its programs to include Latinos who speak black dialect.

But language specialists are concerned with more than just Latino and black students. “None of our children are as proficient with the language as they were years ago,” said Thelma Duncan, head of PEP.

As examples, she cited the speech patterns of Anglo Valley teen-agers (“Like, that is goin’ to really be, like, a total bummer”) and Anglo beach-area students (“Er, say dude, the tubes are, like, totally rollin’. We gotta hit the sand, like, now.”)

“Kids today speak a peer language more than children ever before,” said Perez of the county Office of Education. “The demise of the family dinner, a reduction in parent-child interaction and slackening on the part of many parents in correcting their children when they use slang have all contributed to children of all races growing up without a good command of standard English.”

Legislation Introduced

Concern about standard English has reached the state Legislature, where Assemblywoman Teresa P. Hughes (D-Los Angeles) and state Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) have both introduced legislation that would require school districts where at least 10% of the student population speaks non-standard English to establish standard English curricula.

Although educators and legislators seem to worry about students who speak non-standard English and Jive Spanglish, parents see their children’s speech patterns as just a phase.

“It’s just Spanish with a soul beat,” said one father with a laugh as he met his daughter in front of Fenton Avenue School one afternoon.

“Hey, really, we survived, you know,” said a 35-year-old Encino woman who grew up in the Valley and now has two teen-age children. “Seriously, I don’t think kids say anything more outrageous than we did. Actually, they say a lot of the same things we did.

“They pick up the speech patterns of their peers. When they get to college, they’ll try to sound like their professors. When they graduate, they’ll sound like the people they work with.”