Fractured Spanish and Linguistic Assaults

My mother was a stickler for Spanish. She spoke it perfectly and expected the same of us. But what a struggle it must have been to enforce linguistic boundaries around eight children who were rapidly soaking up English from school, TV and rock’n’roll, all without a day of formal instruction in their mother’s tongue.

Like most children of Latino immigrants, we naturally lapsed into Spanglish, a bastardized brew of both languages. If a word didn’t occur to us in one, we spontaneously substituted the same word from the other. The resulting hybrid sentences had a ring and cadence all their own.

To Maria Esther Sanchesviesca de Gurza, who studied piano as a young woman and loved opera all her life, Spanglish clanged with a painful linguistic dissonance.

“A mi no me mezclen los dos idiomas,” she repeated like a mantra. “Don’t mix the two languages on me.”

Good thing a mother’s love is unconditional, for we never attained the purity of speech she required. I still speak Spanglish with friends, and it’s fun because you never know how the mixed phrases will turn out.

Yet, my mother left a standard that stayed with me, like an acquired ear for good music. I cringe when the expressive language of Cervantes and Garcia Marquez gets degraded by poor translation.

And bad Spanish abounds in Southern California--desafortunadamente.

My mother would have had a hemorrhage if she had lived to see the bilingual signs at Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center, that humongous hospital overlooking the barrios of East L.A.

At the entrance to the Emergency Department, visitors are warned in English: “Patients Only Beyond This Point.” But the awkward and ambiguous Spanish translation states: “Solamente Paciente a Partir de Este Punto.”

What? People who enter emergency should only do so patiently? That’s not what they mean, but considering the hospital’s well-documented deficiencies, patients will probably need plenty of patience anyway.

A more grievous linguistic affront greets visitors outside, at the foot of the wide steps leading up to the hospital’s main entrance.

“CAUTION. Watch Your Step. Hold on to Handrail.”

“CUIDADO. Donde Pisan Agarrese del Barandal.”

Whoever wrote that ungrammatical abomination should be immediately arrested by the language policia. The tense is wrong, the verbs don’t match and the meaning is nonsense since it suggests people will find a handrail wherever they step.

The hospital’s broken Spanish sickened German Libenson, senior copy writer with cruz/kravetz:IDEAS, a Spanish-language ad agency whose customers include El Pollo Loco and Lincoln/Mercury dealers. He was taken to intensive care after an auto accident in 1995 and he’s still trying to recover from the linguistic mangling he endured.

“Oh, I feel very sad and very nervous when I see how words are not carrying their original meanings anymore,” said Libenson, a native of Argentina. “It’s like a betrayal.”

Anglicisms especially get his goat. Libenson can’t abide the use of marqueta for market, parquear for parking, cuora for quarter, yarda for yard and llamar pa’ tras for calling someone back on the phone. All these words are commonly used by Mexican Americans in the Southwest, but only one is in my Larousse Spanish-English dictionary--parquear as an Americanism for estacionar, the proper term for parking.

During the Chicano Movement of the 1970s, activists often flaunted homespun Spanglish as part of the distinct identity of Latinos in the United States. Any attempt to refine their speech was rejected as elitist. On the other side of the border, Mexicans often looked with disdain upon the idiomatic degradation of the language by their Americanized cousins, condescendingly called pochos.

I was caught in the middle--a pocho who polished my Spanish during a semester at UNAM, the national university in Mexico City. Today, I sympathize with my mother whenever I encounter inferior Spanish--on bank ATM machines and credit card applications and in home appliance manuals.

California may have turned its back on teaching its schoolchildren proper Spanish by dumping bilingual education. But we are too sophisticated a state to settle for a fractured and disfigured Castilian.

“That’s what I hate,” says Martha Luege, Cuban-born creative director for Casanova Pendrill Publicidad, an Irvine ad agency. “It just becomes accepted in society that incorrect Spanish is OK.”

To borrow a slogan from Libenson, the Argentine ad man: No perdamos nuestro idioma--Let us not lose our language.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com