Relearning a Lost Language

Social worker Deanna Corral stood mute before immigrant foster children, unable to ease their fears in the Spanish she once knew.

Businessman Joe Ortiz pitched his product to Mexican chief executives in stammering street calo that rang weak next to their soaring, proper Espanol.

And construction worker Manuel Zapata ached to join his bilingual wife and in-laws when they switched from English to Spanish during family gatherings.

So like growing numbers of Southern California Latinos of their generation, Corral, Ortiz and Zapata have returned to the language that assimilation snatched away.

They are learning Spanish, boosting their careers and social contacts in a region where about a third of the population speaks the language and where business ties with Mexico and the rest of Latin America are booming. In the process, they are closing a gap that often has left them feeling inadequate, isolated from relatives or friends, unable to feel the depth of their own culture.

Corral, Ortiz and Zapata came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, when many Spanish-speaking parents suffered discrimination and believed that their children would do better if they grew up speaking unaccented English. Like immigrants from other countries in other eras, these parents would not speak their native language to their children.

Hundreds of thousands of Latinos in the Southland know this dilemma. Among the sons and daughters of today’s Latino immigrants, 28% speak only English at home, according to the most recent Census Bureau survey.

After two years of private Spanish lessons, Deanna Corral, a 25-year-old third-generation Mexican American, is beginning to recover the ineffable qualities she lost after childhood.

“My grandmother never learned English,” she said. “But I sat with her the other day and we began to chat in Spanish. She told me the family history. I didn’t understand everything, but that didn’t matter.

“My grandmother hugged and kissed me and said: ‘I thought you’d never hear these stories from my lips.’ ”

Growing up, Corral spent most of her Sundays inside an East L.A. church where Mass was celebrated in Spanish for her grandparents and others yet to learn the dominant language of their new land.

She recalls grade-school days when she understood the benedictions echoing within the cathedral, just as she sang the Mexican folk music played by her father, a professional musician and guitarronista of a mariachi trio.

But her dad’s concern that bilingualism could compromise her English and block her foray into mainstream American society prevailed over her mother’s insistence that it could help bring career success.

“My dad sings in Spanish and speaks it fluently,” Corral said. “But I guess he was concerned that I would end up with an accent if he taught it to me. And that whites would look down on me because of that.”

Work with a private El Monte foster care agency, where half of the parents and children are Spanish-speaking, spurred Corral to spend hundreds of dollars on courses at a Berlitz language center.

She has progressed to the intermediate level, bilingual enough to reassure frightened foster children, like 12- and 6-year-old immigrant sisters recently rescued from abusive parents.

“When they arrived at their new home, they were both crying,” she said. “I convinced them in Spanish they would be safe here and I felt so satisfied.”

While growing numbers of all Southern Californians are learning Spanish, the need is particularly pressing among Latinos.

Ramon Salcido, a USC sociologist specializing in Latino issues, said collapsing borders, globalization and the Latino migrant labor force has channeled many monolingual Latinos into courses or self-instruction.

Salcido, who founded a course last year to teach Spanish to Latino sociology students, noted that immigrant children were historically punished by teachers for speaking the home language in class.

“But that has changed,” he said. “The case in L.A. is that you need Spanish to function. It gives corporations an advantage in the marketplace, so it’s desirable again.”

Indeed, career brought Joe Ortiz back to the language of his parents.

A second-generation Mexican American, Ortiz recalls large family gatherings at the Indio home of his childhood, where Spanish floated in the air with laughter and the scent of dishes still prepared in the style of his grandmother’s birthplace, Zacatecas.

But in the Ensenada boardrooms where he works to establish a Baja California pager network for a North Hollywood telecommunications firm, rapid-fire business banter was too much for Ortiz to catch.

“One of the most frustrating things about doing business in Mexico was being looked at as a pocho,” said Ortiz, 31, using a term for Mexican Americans perceived to have abandoned their heritage. “I was relying on some of my calo--my street Spanish--to express myself and because of that, native speakers were able to pigeonhole me as unrefined.”

So to keep better pace, he is expanding his self-described college-level Spanish through self-instruction.

He is in Mexico half of the year on business, not only diving into the meetings but strictly immersing himself during off-work hours. The other months, his classroom is Los Angeles, where he plucks pop phrases from ubiquitous Spanish billboards and voraciously reads Latin American magazines bought at Spanish bookstores.

He also practices by speaking with the janitors who clean the firm’s offices at night, breaking a common silence between professional Latino Americans and the working-class Latino immigrants who often bus restaurant tables and garden suburban lawns.

“In trying to learn the language, they see I am not forgetting my roots,” he said. “And it has allowed them to share their world with me.”

But Ortiz’s passion is not universal.

Third-generation Mexican American Chris Balli, 28, knows only a few Spanish phrases and questions why he should learn more.

The freelance advertising artist was born in Louisiana and has been living in Los Angeles for seven years. His 30-year-old brother knows Spanish but Balli lost it, a self-described product of too much television and too little attention to his mother’s language lessons.

His features are Latin--carmel-colored skin, raven-black hair--but he said he does not understand why an immigrant carpenter, refurbishing his next-door neighbor’s Pasadena house, addressed him in Spanish the other day.

“I don’t know what he said, but I knew he would roll his eyes when I didn’t answer,” Balli recalls. “And that’s exactly what he did.

“Don’t they realize I’m removed from Mexico; that I’m less Mexican American than American? Instead of me learning Spanish, they should learn English.”

Ben Lopez, a 27-year-old television production assistant, echoes a similar sentiment for a different reason.

He was born in Mexico and arrived in Los Angeles with his family at age 7. Much like the immigrants of a generation ago, he said he lost his Spanish out of a desire for upward mobility.

“I wanted to learn English to the point where I didn’t have an accent, so I would be a good candidate for a job. It has nothing to do with being ashamed of being Mexican,” he said.

To Lopez, his assimilation is not an effort to blend into a white-dominated society but a multicultural search for common bonds.

“There’s a lot of different ethnicities in my social circle and English is the one thing that enables us to connect,” he said.

Still, Barbara Garza, 29, discovered a more powerful bond through Espanol.

Two years ago, knowing some Spanish but hardly fluent, she enrolled in a UCLA graduate program designed to teach the language to students of Latino heritage and was sent to the Autonomous University of Guadalajara.

There, in Mexico’s second largest city, she saw painter Jose Orozco’s powerful murals rising high on sun-baked walls. She marveled at the Gothic, Byzantine and Arabic blend of the city’s fabled 16th century cathedral. Familiar stories her mother often recounted in English suddenly took on new meaning when told during a Spanish-language history course.

“My family is from Guadalajara,” said Garza, a second-generation Mexican American who was born in Laredo, Texas. “My mother used to talk about my fair skin and say it was common to many people in the area because Spaniards settled there in great numbers.

“In one of my classes, we studied these Spanish settlements. I looked around and saw so many students with skin as fair as mine. I realized this wasn’t just Mexican history, it was part of my history too.”

Construction worker Manuel Zapata’s desire is to pass Spanish on to his 2-year-old son, Michael.

Zapata’s mother came to the United States from Mexico speaking only Spanish, but the language had left her by her 30s. His father, also born in Mexico, remains fluent but the cross-country truck driver was rarely home to teach his children.

So Zapata is sometimes forced into silence when his bilingual wife, Carol, and in-laws turn to Spanish in discussions about everything from their Mexican heritage to their children’s Little League performance. Spanish is a more intimate language, the one they immediately switch to when family matters surface.

“They don’t look down upon me because I can’t speak it,” he said. “But I feel empty because I know there is no excuse for me not to learn something that could open up a new world.”

For a year, Zapata has been taking weekly night courses at a Covina adult school, supplemented by help from his wife. She takes the lead in teaching Michael.

“She’ll tell us to do something, like ‘close the door’ in English, then follow it up with cerra la puerta,” Manuel said. “But one day I’m going to know enough to teach our child too.”