Prop. 63 Would Betray State’s Future

In the year when the Congress has declared our national flower to be the rose, California is set to declare English to be our official state language. Pre-election polls suggest that Proposition 63--”the English-language amendment”--will pass by large numbers. Hispanic politicians have brought the vote down on themselves by a careless rhetoric against assimilation. By making California’s future safe for English, though, the majority vote will damage more than it can protect.

California. California. In English, California lies west, notorious worldwide for its blond landscape, its blond vision trained toward a future so bright as to require sun glasses. In Spanish, California es el norte . For the Mexican, California is continuous with Mexico. The American eluded the past as he moved westward. The Mexican could never escape. The Mexican ended up a brooder.

About 20 years ago, when the spotlight of the black civil-rights movement opened to include Mexican-Americans (“America’s forgotten minority”), Chicano activists stepped forward with a linguistic agenda. Whereas blacks had pressed for admission to lunch counters and law schools, Mexican-Americans limited demands for integration with a reluctance to change.

In the years following, Mexican-American politicians succeeded in making Spanish a kind of second language of California’s public life. We find Spanish in the most public institutions of our lives--the schoolroom and the voting booth. What the politicians could not reach, institutional America has bestowed: Spanish has become the second language of the American Catholic Church; businessmen have found profit in espanol with billboards, commercials on Spanish-language TV, million-dollar ad revenues.

I once told a reporter from Time magazine with his pad and pencil poised as if to take my order, that in order for him to understand the Hispanic preoccupation with language, he had to remember the Mexican-American War. The reporter looked up with a skeptical grin. He put his pen down.

In recent years, Mexican-Americans have been compared to black Americans, but Mexicans are preoccupied with memory in ways that make us more like the American Indian. For like the American Indian, the Mexican-American harbors the conviction that his ancestral culture and language were diminished by the “ gringo. “ The Mexican-American and Indian live upon land their ancestors named but which they no longer inherit, except in unrefracted memory.

New California was predicated upon the assumption that this was the land of the setting sun. Those who came from east to west measured the rutted distance from the past and concluded that they had escaped. Western California is thus dedicated to the American Protestant belief in rebirth and discontinuity.

The sun passed over the shoulders of Mexican immigrants from left to right, which meant that the shadows and the slant of the sun, the desert sky, were continuous with what was remembered as home. Mexicans ended up in towns named in Spanish, segregated by discrimination and by diffidence. When employers had had enough of us, Mexicans were deported “home.” The chaos of Mexican politics has left us, in the United States, without much of an interest in politics. An Indian memory within us has made us wary of assimilation, even as we assimilate. So blond California wonders: Why don’t those people want to learn English?

For a long time, I misunderstood. I have argued with middle-class Mexican-Americans; we argued over bilingual education and the American melting pot. Only gradually did it become clear to me that Mexican-Americans are often asking for less, and for more, than they literally say. Bilingualists, for example, do not expect Spanish to become the equal of English in the United States. But they want Spanish to have (if only rhetorically) some equal dignity with English.

As other Californians worry about the economic miracle of Japan and freeway congestion and alimony payments, Mexican-Americans weigh metaphors. There is a search for some alternative to the metaphor of the American melting pot, some new metaphor for American life with a connotation that is not oblivion. In a recent magazine article, a Mexican-American actor suggests the metaphor of a salad; America is a tossed salad. One has also heard: America is a mosaic. A rainbow. What is sought is some image of social union that won’t melt down.

The problem came in making the past a basis for political rally. In public, Mexican-American politicians would bluster on about who could speak better Spanish, while Mexican-Americans have needed things, real things--like street lights and good hospitals and jobs. What Mexican-Americans got from their politicians was a symbol, Spanish. It is now possible in America for the Spanish-speaking to live a quasi-public life without crossing over into English. Of course, the full opportunity of America is thus denied, and the recent immigrant has the most to lose.

Hispanic critics of Proposition 63 charge it is “racist.” Indeed many Californians will vote for this proposition as a way of saying there are too many Hispanics in California. But I think opponents of Proposition 63 comfort themselves too easily by their assumption of racism. Proposition 63 does not simply mask the sting of the WASP. The proposal is led by a Japanese-American; it seeks support and is finding support from all sorts of Californians.

Have Mexican-Americans lost track of the time? In the habit of Mexican-American vocabulary, the non-Hispanic is referred to as an Anglo . (It is the neutral form of the epithet gringo .) As a description of non-Hispanic America, Anglo gives too much of America to Britain. This is an immigrant country. Maybe Hispanic politicians and activists do not realize that many Californians--many children of immigrant parents--have found Hispanic anti-assimilationist rhetoric offensive and ungenerous, a violation of the immigrant’s normal concession to the new land.

Though a part of me is pleased that such rhetoric will be called down, I am not going to vote for Proposition 63. Proposition 63 is bound to be counterproductive. If its aim is social unity, it will fail. Scolded away from Spanish--as they were upon the schoolyards of a generation ago--Hispanics will feel only more inclined to hold onto Spanish. What is denied is desired. The past should tell us this.

What is more disturbing about Proposition 63 is its tone, a note of fear. How can we declare, once and for all, the future language of California to be English, when the whole point of this most western of American states has been openness to change? Who knows what language a future California may use? We may end up speaking Computer Esperanto or Valley Girl. Our only concern should be that we end up speaking a common language.

If we needed to challenge an innovation as dubious as the bilingual voting ballot, it would have been enough to say: There shall be but one public language in California, the language used by the majority. That language, de facto , is English. By specifying English beforehand and ever after, we engage in the dangerous business of asserting the supremacy of one culture over all others.

I prefer to say I speak American. The British tongue we started with 200 years ago has become, over time, vastly richer. Generations of immigrants have come to this country and the language, like the nation, has been remade.

The American language has become the premier language of the world because of money, but also because there is a youthful spirit within it, an openness to the world. What an irony it turns out to be that at the moment when American English is internationally so prominent--in Mexico City you can get along very well in English--in California we rush to protect the language from immigrant contamination.

Think of those Americans who came west in the 19th Century. If they were arrogant in the face of Spanish, there was also that wonderful Yankee pragmatism about them. How could such people, so set on the future, worry about linguistic purity? The new Californians appropriated into English whole vocabularies from Spanish. They borrowed technical words for the occupations of the West, terms essential for ranching and farming and mining. They made English from Spanish words for the weather and the grasses and the shadows of the land. They left the Spanish names on the map.

I see Proposition 63 as a betrayal of California’s tradition of optimism. Proposition 63 is a balding, pot-bellied, frightened, third- or fourth-generation proposition. It is the Mexican immigrant, running under cover of night, that middle-aged California now fears. The Mexican has become the future. Proposition 63 seeks to withdraw the horizon.