The Language of Common Sense

Monterey Park, six miles east of downtown Los Angeles, was for years an unexceptional suburb of Anglo and Latino families. Now part of its business district is dominated by pagodas, and some of its shop fronts and billboards by graceful Chinese calligraphy--the language of newcomers from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The change stirred resentment among some older residents to the point of sponsoring a ballot initiative declaring English the community’s official language. Predictably, it is dividing Monterey Park.

A Coalition for Harmony group opposes the initiative as a violation of the Constitution, and has persuaded the Monterey Park City Council to put a rival measure on the April ballot. The rival initiative is producing the same predictable result--division and rancor.

Monterey Park is now 40% Asian, 37% Latino, 22% Anglo and 1% black. Some of its citizens are American-born, many are not. None of these statistics have to do with the community’s most serious problem, one that it shares with virtually all others--how to cope with growth. That can come only by uniting the community behind plans to manage construction as well as traffic.

By indulging themselves to the point where all answers to Monterey Park’s future turn on the question of its official language, the community’s more aggressive factions make that kind of unity impossible.

To the non-Asian population, signs in Chinese characters seem symbols of exclusion. They argue that they should not have to be able to read Chinese in order to shop in the city in which they live. Newcomers from China argue that the familiar characters make them feel less like strangers in a strange land.

Making English Monterey Park’s official language won’t solve the problems for either side.

What might help would be for the initiative sponsors to spend the time that they are devoting to division going door-to-door, explaining--through an interpreter, if necessary--that the 60% of Monterey Park’s people who are not Asian cannot patronize shops whose signs mean nothing to them and that a bit of English would be good for business. No matter where he comes from, a merchant seldom has trouble translating a message like that.