Is Spanish Wrong Signal to Latinos?

Michael S. Dukakis has discovered the Latino vote and is pursuing it with a vengeance. No wonder. Latinos make up a large percentage of the population in some key electoral states: 21% in Texas, 19% in California, 9% in Florida. Presumably Dukakis was aiming at those voters when he broke into Spanish in the middle of his acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention.

Politicians routinely bow to the culture and heritage of specific ethnic groups during election time. But Dukakis appears to be going further. He’s using Spanish so extensively on the campaign trail that one television producer quipped, “We’re going to have to hire a translator. This is like covering El Salvador.”

The Democratic governor of Kentucky, Wallace Wilkinson, thinks that Dukakis’ frequent use of Spanish is a mistake. “You know,” Wilkinson said, “back home, Bubba still thinks we ought to just speak English in this country.”

Whether he meant to or not, Dukakis has put himself in the middle of a fierce debate about whether Latinos should follow in the footsteps of previous groups of immigrants and adapt to English.

On one side of the debate are some Latino politicians like former Miami mayor Maurice Ferre, who told the Tampa Tribune in 1982 that “within 10 years there will not be a word of English spoken--English is not Miami’s official language--one day residents will learn Spanish or leave.” On the other side are millions of Americans (including a lot of Latinos) who believe that there is value in maintaining a common language, even in this racially and ethnically diverse nation of ours.

California voters had the opportunity to voice their opinion on the issue in 1986 when an initiative appeared on the ballot to make English the official language of the state. The measure passed overwhelmingly with 73% of the vote. This year similar measures face the voters in Arizona, Colorado and Florida. Polls in those states indicate that the initiatives will pass easily (by 61% in Arizona, 64% in Colorado, 86% in Florida).

The vast majority of Latinos are caught in the middle of this debate. Native-born Mexican-Americans by and large know English--95% of them according to a recent RAND Corp. study. A majority of second-generation Mexican-Americans speak only one language: English. So the debate about whether Latinos should speak English is already settled for them. Ironically, these English-speaking Latinos--the ones to whom Michael Dukakis is speaking Spanish--are the ones most likely to vote.

Recent Latino immigrants, on the other hand, don’t yet know English. Barely more than one-quarter of Mexican immigrants who had been in the United States for three years were able to speak English adequately, according to one academic study. This is the group most likely to be affected by the outcome of the debate over language policy. Thousands of those immigrants are now waiting to get into English classes in Los Angeles and elsewhere. They want to learn English because they know they can’t achieve economic opportunity without it. They need to be encouraged for their efforts and provided help in achieving their goal.

Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country. Some demographers estimate that if current trends continue, one out of every three Americans will be of Latin descent by the middle of the next century. That would make Latinos about the same proportion of the U.S. population as French-speaking Canadians are of Canada’s.

If Latinos abandon their commitment to learn English, the United States could be faced in the 21st Century with the same kind of language divisions that plague our northern neighbor today. Dukakis would do well to keep that in mind on the campaign trail.