UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS - SIX MONTHS LATER : Separate Lives / DEALING WITH RACE IN L.A. : A War of Words Over Language

The debate seems never to wane or lose its racial overtones, cutting to the core of our views on multiculturalism.

On one side are those who insist that America needs the common link of English to bind its disparate and sometimes warring immigrant elements. On the other side, it is argued with equal passion that preserving native cultures and languages should be encouraged as a celebration of the nation’s pluralistic lineage.

In many ways, the debate over the place of foreign languages in our society has been a thorny touchstone that seems to encompass a variety of controversies: immigration, work, racial stereotyping.

“It’s a powerful issue because it has come to symbolize for some a mythic America,” said Alfredo J. Estrada, editor and publisher of Hispanic magazine. “The language issue crystallizes that vision of when America was ethnically pure and we all spoke English. It never existed.”

As in few other places in the nation, the conflict reverberates in Los Angeles, which has grown in the past few decades into a major hub of the Pacific Rim.

Fueled by the flow of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, the size and diversity of Los Angeles’ multilingual population has skyrocketed.

While Dade County, Fla., boasts the highest rate of bilingualism in the country, there are few other areas that can match the range of languages spoken in Los Angeles, from Spanish to Mon-Khmer.

From less than a third of the population a decade ago, nearly half the county now lives in a household in which a foreign language is spoken, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Here, you can buy a car in Hindi, cash a check in Chinese and even attend school in a select group of languages, including French, Armenian, Korean and Japanese. It is not unusual to find residents who have spent decades in the United States, but still have a limited grasp of English.

Many residents lament that they feel like strangers in their own neighborhoods, unable to understand signs in a corner shop or the conversations on the bus as they commute home at night.

“People can feel very threatened by it,” said Vanessa Dixon, lobbyist for U.S. English, a group dedicated to increasing English education and making English the official language of the United States. “We are such a divided society. We need a common language to hold us together.”

There is no denying that there have been conflicts, misunderstandings and suspicions stemming from the inability to communicate, such as the sometimes difficult exchanges between Korean-born shop owners and their customers that have come to characterize relations between the two groups.

But even in the hottest flash points, the smoke of controversy seems to outstrip the flame. Though the popular stereotype casts Los Angeles County as a chaotic Babel, the majority of Angelenos speak English well--a little more than 85%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In Monterey Park, a focal point of the English-only movement, monolingual speakers of Asian languages account for only 18% of the city’s total for those between the ages of 18 and 64.

The majority of Angelenos also seem largely unconcerned with the English-only issue. For example, on the controversial topic of foreign language signs, a Los Angeles Times Poll found that 25% of people supported their use and a striking 48% didn’t care one way or the other.

And if the inability to communicate exacerbates misunderstanding and intolerance, why then is one of the sharpest racial conflicts in America between blacks and whites, two groups that speak a common language?

“The fact of the matter is that we miscommunicate all the time in English,” said Kathy Imihara, a staff attorney with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles who has fought several English-sign laws in Southern California.

Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, said that in many ways, the conflict is really not an issue of language, but rather a fear of the people who speak them.

“Language is just an easy identifier,” he said. “It’s really a symbol of a broader challenge of how you deal with vast demographic, economic and global change.”

Kwoh said that the emergence of anti-foreign language movements have often paralleled times of economic uncertainty or social change when the competition for survival is sharpened.

In 1918, it was the move to disenfranchise Yiddish speakers in New York City. After World War I, a movement began to prohibit German-language schools, Kwoh said. In the 1980s, the issue was Asian-language signs in Southern California.

Kwoh said immigration, the recession and increasing economic competition from overseas has again brought the country to yet another point of change.

Certainly, in a city as diverse as Los Angeles, the debate over the place of other languages in society seems, at times, archaic and out of place.

Many immigrant parents say the bigger problem they face is not learning English, but rather how to maintain native languages within their families. The allure of English--the language of business, diplomacy and Michael Jackson--is strong.

William Paparian, a city councilman in Pasadena, said that for many immigrants, maintaining a language through the generations is viewed as a matter of survival. Language is the glue of culture, providing continuity and cohesion among a people.

Paparian grew up in the San Fernando Valley unable to speak the language of his grandparents, who came to this country from Armenia.

But after marrying, he and his wife, an Armenian immigrant, decided to send their children to a bilingual English and Armenian-language school in Glendale.

“For me, it was almost a political statement,” Paparian said. “It’s our way of recapturing something that was lost. My children are the only ones in my family that have this ability.”

In varying degrees, Paparian’s view is echoed by thousands of immigrants who have come to the United States.

“It is really important to us,” said Tenzin Tersey, a Tibetan immigrant. “If we don’t continue speaking Tibetan, we will lose our culture one day. If we do not use it, the next generation will not learn. By the third generation, we will have lost everything.”

But there is a migration of new immigrants to this country and the trend, here and around the world, is toward greater global mobility and communications.

Eventually we must find our place in a changing world and forge new ties, beyond the superficial link of language, to bind the elements of our society in the face of growing diversity, said Kwoh.

“That,” he said, “is the real challenge of the 1990s and the next century.”

Multilingual America

Languages of the Home

The Census Bureau asks whether any language other than English is spoken in the home. If there is a single yes answer, all members of the the household are listed as foreign-language speaking. City: Percentage of People in Foreign-Language Households Dade County (Miami): 57% Los Angeles County: 46% San Francisco: 42% New York City: 41% Orange County: 31% Harris County (Houston): 26% Ventura County: 26% San Diego County: 25% Suffolk County (Boston): 25% *

How Bilingual Is the U.S.?

The Census Bureau asked respondents to grade their own ability to speak English. The results.

Little Good or No City English English Dade County (Miami) 81% 19% Los Angeles County 86% 14% San Francisco 87% 13% Orange County 90% 10% New York City 90% 10% Ventura County 93% 7% Suffolk County (Boston) 93% 7% Harris County (Houston) 94% 6% San Diego County 94% 6%

*

A Region of Many Languages

Here is a look at the top 15 languages spoken at home in Los Angeles County.

Language No. People % People English 4,440,633 (54.6%) Spanish/Creole 2,654,775 (32.6%) Chinese 209,107 (2.6%) Tagalog 155,996 (1.9%) Korean 124,290 (1.5%) Japanese 63,921 (.8%) Vietnamese 51,313 (.6%) French/Creole 40,921 (.5%) German 39,849 (.5%) Indic 34,254 (.4%) Arabic 29,039 (.4%) Italian 28,454 (.3%) Mon-khmer 23,900 (.3%) Russian 19,991 (.2%) Hungarian 10,342 (.1%)