A Second Language Is a Wonderful Thing to Gain

People, can we talk?

Many of you were upset by my recent column about Latinos who lose their Spanish while growing up in the United States. But I’m afraid some of you read between the lines and missed my meaning.

“Your columns are very well-written,” commented one obviously perceptive gentleman. “I know that you are an intelligent, well-educated man. How, then, can you be so wrong? Chicanos just don’t get it. Learn English here in the gringo states of America and life will get better, period.”

That was just the beginning. Some readers accused me of undermining the nation’s Judeo-Christian foundations, of fomenting cultural strife, of creating conditions for a domestic Kosovo by advocating the Balkanization of America.

Gee, was it something I said?

Many others cheered the column, especially a few parents thrilled that their children were becoming bilingual and biliterate in dual immersion programs offered by select schools. “Basically, they become smarter,” wrote the mother of one girl studying simultaneously in English and Spanish at one such school in San Clemente.

But I got lectured so vigorously by critics, including a few Latinos, I feel obliged to explain myself. First, allow me to recap my misunderstood missive, which ran under this perfect headline: “A Language Is a Terrible Thing to Lose.”

It’s a shame, I wrote, that some Latino leaders had to go back to school to learn Spanish, a language many spoke as children. I rapped the school system for not helping immigrants retain their native tongues, and blamed California’s ban on bilingual education for making matters worse.

I also suggested that the pressure to make immigrants assimilate and stick to English is rooted in a peculiarly American ideology of expansion and colonial domination. That’s when some of you hit the roof.

One reader questioned my “mindless maunderings about those bad old English-only racist-imperialists,” especially since Spanish was imposed on Mexico the same way by another imperial power. (More about his historical mistake in a minute.) He said his own ancestors clung to German for almost 150 years in this country before finally giving it up three generations ago.

“It was a natural process, not a cruel imposition,” this reader countered. “They simply became Americans, unhyphenated. . . . I have an interest in things German but no special attachment to a land and culture which my ancestors chose to leave for a better place. I recommend the same thing to you.”

Thank you. And may I recommend a class in comparative colonial history?

Spain and England employed vastly different imperial strategies. To begin with, the conquistadors brought with them powerful allies the British didn’t have--Catholic priests.

The Franciscans, in particular, resisted the crown’s Hispanization of the Indians and spent years learning Nahuatl, the official language of the Aztec empire where a multitude of local languages were (and still are) spoken.

In colonial Mexico, the Lord’s work was bilingual.

Missionaries considered indigenous cultures pagan and primitive, to be sure. But they learned the native language so that Christianity would not appear as the religion of foreigners, nor the convert as a traitor to his country, wrote Robert Ricard in his classic “The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico,” published originally in French in 1933.

The Franciscans found a precious helper in the person of a little Spaniard, Alonso de Molina, who eventually became a Franciscan himself and wrote the great Vocabulario Nahuatl.

“He was only a child when he arrived in Mexico and, as was natural at his age, assimilated Nahuatl quickly and easily, and became the teacher of his future brothers,” Ricard wrote.

The moral of the 500-year-old story: We should be teaching our children a second language as early as possible. That’s what my column preached, but some readers somehow thought I didn’t want immigrants to learn English. One of them wrote: “How sad that you, with such a wonderful command of the English language, would deny that skill to thousands of children for the sake of a political agenda.”

Nothing could be further from my intent. My point is that immigrants don’t need to shed their second language while they learn English. That’s a key premise of bilingual education, despite all the politically motivated myths you’ve heard to the contrary.

“To me, language is a resource and the more languages you have, the richer you are,” said Elizabeth Guthrie, a trilingual French teacher at UC Irvine who I called for an opinion. “It’s a little sad to throw some of that richness away.”

Amen.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesdays. His e-mail address is agustin.gurza@latimes.com