Some years ago in a letter to Críiticas, an English Speaker’s Guide to the Latest Spanish Language Titles, Irma Flores-Manges encoura­ged the magazine to “include reviews of books by Latinos written in Eng­lish,” citing relevant reasons. While expressing sympathy with her reasons, the editors responded that their “current focus was on the Spanish-language pub­lishing world.”

Críiticas fills an important space by focusing on the Spanish-language publishing world, but if that space is focused only on the Spanish-language publishing world then that space is not the space of U.S. Hispanics. For in focusing only on Spanish language publishing Críiticas contributes to the proposition that U.S. Hispanics are essentially a Spanish-language reading group or that non-Hispanic English-speaking Americans are interested in Spanish-language materials. Both are tenuous assumptions, particularly the first.

In the Census Bureau 2000 Supplementary Report on immigration in the 1990s, two-thirds of the children of Hispanic immigrants from this period “rated themsel­ves as speaking English very well” which, by extension, makes them English-language readers as well. U.S. Hispanics are not a linguistically monolithic group, although the lead article in the premier summer 2001 issue of Críiticas read: “How book-sellers can reach out and bring in readers of Spanish: Selling to the 35+ million” by Judith Rosen suggests, mind you, I say suggests, they are. When I was Associate Publisher of La Luz magazine in Denver from 1972 to 1982, we published La Luz in English because our research and market data then showed that only 15% of U.S. Hispanics were monolingual Spanish-language speakers (ergo readers, if literate) while 85% of U.S. Hispanics were English-language speakers (ergo readers). Of that 85%, 15% were monolingual Eng­lish speakers (ergo readers). That’s why we launched La Luz as the first national Hispanic public affairs magazine in English.

Mostly, second-generation U.S. Hispanics become primarily English speakers. All around them the English language captures them. First-generation U.S. Hispanics like me tend to hold on to the Spanish language, albeit ya mocha­do (mangled) oftentimes, but neverthe­less a working Spanish, not necessarily a reading competency. Bilingual does not mean bi-literate. My work with U.S. Hispanic writers indicates that most of them produce their works in English. Writing in English has little to do with preservation of the Spanish language or the culture. English is the koine of the country.

It seems to me, therefore, that Críticas is not about U.S. Hispanics but about Spanish-language publishing as the editors told Irma Flores-Manges. That’s a legitimate market, but there’s the rub. It appears that the editors of Críticas do not see the forest for the trees or else wrong-headedly they are push­ing an agenda that profits them but is inconsistent with the actualities they profess to serve. In other words, they’re about Spa­nish-language books. They don’t ask: Who will read them? They think U.S. Hispanics will read them.

It turns out, only a small percentage will since only a small percentage of U.S. Hispanics are Spanish-language readers. In this matter, Críticas’ posture seems to be “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up.” When my wife, Gilda, and I lived in Phoe­nix we noted that the Spanish-language collection in her library was used mainly by recent Hispanic arrivals. A Spanish-lan­guage collection is therefore important in serving the literary and information needs of this population. They need applications, directions, and ballots in Spanish. But the mass of U.S. Hispanics get their information from English language sources. I think of myself as a “coordinate” bilingual, that is, I function linguistically as well in Spanish as I do in English. I read Spanish as well as I do English. But I’m gravitationally an English-language reader. This is not to diminish the significance of the Spanish language in my life. This is just the reality of what takes place in the cauldron of languages in the United States.

How many second-generation German Americans in the Austin area Hill Country, for example, are still German speakers and German-language readers? Not many. Do American marketers try to reach this German American population in German?

As I said, Críiticas is serving an important space, but it’s not the space of all U.S. Hispanics. Sadly, while serving this important space, it aggressively underscores the assumption that all U.S. Hispanics are Spanish language speak­ers/readers and therefore linguistically monolithic. In the end, like English-language media, Spanish-language media is a business. Críiticas should be looking at the whole spectrum of U.S. Hispanic literary needs and production. But it’s not. U.S. Hispa­nics need a publication that does. This is not to dissuade Criticas from its role in promoting Spanish-language books and materials.

It seems to me the assumption Criticas and other media (especially Spanish-language media) promote is that the best way to market to the Hispanic population of the United States is with Spanish when the preponderance of that population is English speaking. I do not criticize Criticas for its role in promoting Spanish language materials for that portion of the U.S. His-panic population whose functional language is Spanish and that portion of the U.S. population (including Hispanics) interested in Spanish language materials. That’s an important function, and Criticas is doing an admirable job in that arena. The point of this piece is to question the proposition that U.S. Hispanics are essentially a Spanish-speaking population. My experience and research as a lexicologist and semiotician point to a U.S. Hispanic population mostly assimilated and/or acculturated in the ways of the English language.

In the matter of the word “Hispanic” we should consider what that term covers. This is not a new term coined by the Census Bureau. The term has been around for centuries. The word “Hispan­ic” is one of those large rubrics, like the word Catholic or Protes­tant. By itself, the word refers to all Hispanics (persons whose cultural and/or linguistic heritage derive from historical origins in Hispania: the Roman name for Spain), attesting to a common denominator, conveying information that the individual is an offspring or descendent of a cultural, political or ethnic blending which included in the beginning at least one Spanish root either biological or linguistic or cultural. That means a Mexican Indian with no Spanish “blood” (as we understand that term) in him or her, but who speaks Spanish and has amal­gamated or internalized Spanish culture is an Hispanic just as an Indian of the United State who speaks English and has amalgamated or internalized Anglo culture is an American though in the case of American Indians they are Americans both by priority (they were here first) and the United States made them Americans by colonization and later by fiat.

Talking about people in terms of labels can be misleading. For example, a person may be an Hispanic in terms of cultural, na­tional, or ethnic roots. Nationally, Colon (Columbus) was a Spaniard, though born in Genoa. Wer­ner Von Braun became an American national though born in Germany. In Argentina there are Hispanics who have no “Spanish blood” but who, nevertheless, consider themselves Hispanics, speak Argentine Spanish and are fluent in Italian or German, the languages of their immigrant forebears to the country.

Put another way, the term Hispanic is comparable to the term Jew, which describes the religious orientation of people who may be ethnically Russian, Polish, German, Italian, English, etc. There are also Chinese Jews, Ethio­pian (Falashan) Jews, Indian Jews, et al. So too the term Hispanic describes people by linguis­tic orientation (Spanish speakers) who may be Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Chileans, Argentines, et al. Additionally, there are blended Hispanics often identified as Indo-Hispanics, Asian Hispanics (many  Filipinos), Afro-Hispanics and a con-geries of other mixtures. There are also Hispanics who are identified as Black Hispanics and White Hispanics. There is an array of Chinese Hispanics, Lebanese Hispanics, Pakistan Hispanics, Hindu Hispanics, Jewish Hispanics (Sephards) et al. This all points to the fact that Hispanics are far from a homogeneous group.

In the main, though, their common characteristics are language (Spanish or a distinctively evolved version of Spanish as well as a distinctively evolved version of English oftentimes called Spanglish) and religion (most are Catholic, though there is a growing number of Hispanic Protestants). There are other lesser characteristics as well.

To avoid confusion between Hispanics who are citizens of countries other than the United States and Hispanics who are U.S. citizens, we refer to the former as Hispanic Americans and the latter as Ame-rican Hispanics, that is, U.S. Hispanics with roots in one or more of the Spanish-language countries of the American hemisphere. There are American Hispanics whose origins are in Guam, Hawaii, and other locations in the Pacific and the Pacific Rim, including the Philippines.

The United States has the fifth largest Hispanic population in the world exceeded only by Mexico, Spain, Columbia, and Argentina. In 10 years only Mexico will have a larger Hispanic population. In 2000, close to 7 million American Hispanics lived in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, another 3 million in New York City. Since 1980, the American Hispanic population of both cities almost doubled. And over the 1990s the Hispanic population of the United States grew 58 percent. Since 1980 Mexican Americans almost doubled their population size. The 2000 Census count enumerated almost 36 million U.S. Hispanics, not count­ing the 4 million or so undocumented Hispanics in the Uni­ted States and the 3.5 million Hispanics in Puerto Rico who are not included in the Census count. That means that at the start of the new millennium there were 43.5 million. Today that figure is closer to 50 million Hispanics in the United States (counting the Puerto Ricans of Puerto Rico). That is, 16 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic. Or, one in six Americans is Hispanic. Projections suggest that by the year 2050 one in four will be Hispanic. Peter Francese of American Demographics notes that “America really had no clue that the Hispanic population was that big.”

Per the U.S. 2000 Census count, Hispanics are in every state of the country. Five states are 15 percent or more Hispanic (New Mex­ico, 40%; California, 31%; Texas, 30%; Arizona, 22%, Nevada, 15%) and five states are 10% or more Hispanic (Colorado, 14%; Florida, 14%; New York, 14%; New Jersey, 12%; Illinois, 10%). Nine states and the District of Columbia are 5% or more Hispanic (Connecticut, 8%; Idaho, 7%; Utah, 7%; DC, 7%; Wyoming, 6%; Washington, 6%; Oregon, 6%; Massachusetts, 6%; Rhode Island, 6%; Kansas, 5%). Five states account for almost 75% of the U.S. Hispanic population (California, 34%; Texas, 20%; Massachusetts, 9%; Florida, 7%; Illinois, 4%).

These figures don’t take into Census errors like the one in 1970 that failed to count some 3 million Mexican Americans. One of the reasons for so much difficulty in counting American Hispanics is that a significant proportion report themselves as White or Black, not Hispanic.

In the twentieth century, the U.S. Hispanic population grew five times faster than the overall population. Since 1980, the nation’s Hispanic population has grown by more than 40 percent compared to 7 percent for the overall population. At present growth rates, the American population is expected to reach 325 million by the year 2020. Projecting the U.S. Hispanic figures per their growth rates, they could num­ber well over 60 million by the year 2020. That means that about one in five Americans could be Hispanic, roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population. By the year 2050 some demographic forecasters expect the U.S. Hispanic population to triple.

Twenty years ago, the Arizona Republic indicated that in the year 2013, “Hispanics will make up nearly half of Arizona’s population compared with 16 percent today, raising the prospect of their taking a strong leadership role in the state.” What makes this population growth of American Hispanics so significant is that little planning has been undertaken for such an eventuality, including the question of how to reach them — with Spanish or English?

Who are these people whose presence in the American population will have such a major force in the American future? Surprisingly, most Americans tend to think of U.S. Hispanics as a loose aggregation of “immigrants” who speak only Spanish, somewhat aware that the largest number of them live in the Southwest, a fair number in the Upper Middle Atlantic states and New England with a growing group in Florida.

Essentially, American Hispanics may be sorted into five groups: (1) Mexican Americans, many of whom identify as Chicanos, an ideological designa-tion that identifies their generation, (2) Puerto Ricans, some of whom identify as Boricuas, (3) Hispanos—U.S. Hispanics who identify themselves as Spanish, (4) Cuban Americans, and (5) Latinos— His­panics from countries other than Mexico, Cuba, Spain, and Puerto Rico. Not counting the residents of Puerto Rico, Mexican Americans today account for 66 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, about 32 million.

Two out of three U.S. Hispanics are Mexican Americans. Puerto Ricans make up almost 10 percent of U.S. Hispanics (18% counting Puerto Ricans on the island). One out of ten U.S. Hispanics is Puer­to Rican. Together these two groups make up about 80 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, In other words, four out of five U.S. Hispanics are Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. Latinos make up about 14 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population; and Hispanos (mostly in New Mexico) comprise about 1 percent of that population. Cuban Americans make up the remaining 4 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, March 2000).

In profile, U.S. Hispanics are a “young” population with a median age in 1999 of 26.6 years compared to 32.4 years for Anglos. Hispanics are predominant­ly an urban population: 82.5 percent live in cities, compared to 65 percent of Anglos. In terms of median income, in 1999, U.S. Hispanics earned $23,300, some $2,450 more than Blacks but some $26,000 less than Anglos. Nearly one out of every four American Hispanics fell below the poverty level in 1999, more than thrice the ratio for Anglos. In 1999, American Hispanic unemployment rose to 13.8 percent com­pared to 7.2 percent for the total population. While there were gains for some American Hispanics, all of these figures remained relatively unchanged in the year 2008 for the mass of American Hispanics who are still searching for America.

Importantly, American Hispanics are not recently arrived immigrants to the United States. Given the finite immigration quotas for “Latin America” since 1924, the present population of U.S. Hispanics would not be as large if its source of growth were solely from immigration. Their sheer size in the American population points to the fact that Amer­ican Hispanics are of longer duration in the United States and that their growth stems principally from fertility. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2006 there was a marked increase of  birth rates for every 1,000 Hispanic women compared to 1000 Anglo women.

The initial core of Hispanics in the U.S. population came from the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, later renamed New York after the British acquired it in the 17^th Century. Later, the Hispanic Jews (Sephardim) who came with the Dutch colony contributed significantly to the colonial revolutionary efforts of 1776 and to the later prosperity of the country. In the 19^th Century, in two swift “blows” within 50 years of each other, the United States “acquired” a sizable chunk of its Hispanic population, not counting the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 with its Hispanic residents and Florida in 1819 with its Hispanic population.

The first “blow” was the U.S. War against Mexico (1846-1848) out of which came the Mexican Americans of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. No one is sure of the numbers of “Mexicans” who came with the wrested territory (almost half of Mexico’s domain) but figures range from 150,000 on the low side to as many as 3.5 million (including Hispanicized Indians). 

The second “blow” was the U.S. War with Spain (1898) out of which came the Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Guamanians, Virgin Islanders, and the first wave of Cubans (though Cubans had been emigrating to the American colonies first, then the United States, since the 17^th Century). In 1917 Cuba was cut loose by the United States. The figures for these groups range variously as well. But the point is that American Hispanics have been part of the United States historically for some time.

Unfortunately, Americans have tended to think of them as newly arrived and to confuse them with Hispanic Americans, the 400 million who populate the Spanish-language countries of the American hemisphere, failing to note that in the Americas there are more speakers of Spanish than speakers of English.

Not all American Hispanics agree on the term Hispanic to iden­tify themselves. Many American Hispanics from the Southwest, for example, prefer to be called Mexican Americans or Chicanos and think the term Hispanic is an arbitrary label imposed on them by a bureaucracy with a colonial mentality. Many Puerto Ricans agree with that sentiment and prefer to be called Boricuas. Other American Hispanics contend the term Hispanic dilutes their individual identities as, say, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, etc. At best the term Hispanic is a convenient way to talk about a diverse group of people, much the way we use the term American to talk about an equally diverse group of people. Actually, the term Hispanic is used (and has been used) extensively in Latin America by Hispanics there to identify their common roots and heritage. In vogue now with many Hispanics in the Southwest and elsewhere is the term Latino, which could very well include Italians and other groups with links to Roman Latinization.

This “looking for a name” has created particular problems for American Hispanics, especially in libraries (including the Library of Congress) and with bookstores and booksellers. Irma Flores-Man­ges, an Austin librarian, thinks “we are leaving a whole group of people in limbo without any positive literature about Chicano or other Latino experiences in which the only books available are written by authors in English. The books are not available in some libraries because if you are not familiar with the authors you will not buy the books as librarians. The book stores usually have a small section on Latino studies, and sometimes our books are lumped in with immigration studies. I don’t know why it’s so hard for these stores to carry books by Chicano or Latino authors in English; there is usually a huge section for African Americans or Native American materials.”                

The difficulty lies in the fact that indeed Americans (including librarians) do not really have a handle on the His­panic taxonomy. For them all Hispanics are alike. Unlike African Americans who are not lumped in with Africans, Ame­rican Hispanics are lumped in with Hispanics of Latin America. The Library of Congress is a good example of this lumping. When one wants to find material on African Americans in the Library of Congress one does not go to the African Section. They are found in the American Section. But to find materials on American Hispanics in the Library of Congress one has to go to the His­panic Section where all other Hispanics are included also. Mostly, American bookstores have separate sections for African materials and for African American materials. Not so for American Hispanic materials. All Hispanic materials are lump­ed into the Hispanic section. Peddling the Colombian wri­ter Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books in Spanish or English translation for Chicanos instead of Rudol­fo Anaya’s works only strength­ens the proposition that Americans do not differentiate between Hispanics because they don’t know who Hispanics are.

Admittedly, there is much to a name. I’m an American Hispanic of Mexican stock who subscribes to a Chicano perspective of life in the United States. I’m not an Hispano because I’m not Spanish. And I’m not a Latino because I’m not from one of those “other” Spanish-language countries of the Americas. A Puerto Rican friend of mine explains that he’s an Hispanic of mainland Puer­to Rican stock and subscribes to a Boricua perspective of life in the United States. Another friend of mine tells me he’s an American Scandinavian of Norwegian stock who is a registered Republican. I don’t find that confusing at all. We’re all Americans, rich in cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversi­ty.

What’s in a name? Everything. That’s why my name is Feli­pe and my friend’s name is Sean. Names help to tell us apart. They also reflect our heritage and background. Unfortunately, many Americans tend to think the word Hispanic refers to a homogeneous group of people—which it does not, anymore than the word German, say, (as in German American) refers to a homogeneous group of people. American Hispanics come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.

Ideologically, Mexican American Chicanos say the term Hispanic diminishes their demographic priority when “lumped” with other American Hispanic groups (all of which are considerably smaller than the Mexican American group). Those Mexican American Chicanos contend that this lumping suggests all U.S. Hispanic groups are equal in size and have passed through the same historical process in the United States, a suggestion not supported by the facts. Not all U.S. Hispanic groups have passed through the same historical process as Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. The historical process of these two groups has been distinctive, not shared by “other” American Hispanic groups in the United States. A sizable number of Mexican Americans and all Puerto Ricans are American territorial minorities by virtue of conquest. For this reason, shrill groups of Mexican American Chicanos and Puer­to Rican Boricuas have resented across-the-board applications of legal remedies (affirma­tive action, for one) for all U.S. Hispanics for historical discrimina­tion they have not endured nor suffered. Militant members of these groups say that hiring a U.S. Hispanic of Peruvian descent, say, to head a major federal program does not remedy discrimination suffered by Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans at the hands of Anglo-Americans since it is their conquest for which these legal remedies were enacted. More­over, Peruvian culture — while Hispanic — is neither Mexican Ame­rican culture nor Puerto Rican culture. There are notable linguistic differences as well.

Additionally, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans point out the difference between an “oppressed territorial minority” (the U.S. came to them) and “political refugees” (they came to the U.S.). Many Chicano scholars explain that Hispanics from Mexico who gravitate to San Diego, Tucson, El Paso, Del Rio, San Antonio, and Brownsville are migrating to a part of what was their ancestral homeland of greater Mex­ico (previously New Spain) until 1848 (1853 in Southern Arizona with purchase of the Gads­den Strip) the way Jews have gravi­tated toward Palestine, their ancestral homeland. Moreover, those same Chicanos point out, most Mexicans migrating to the United States are racially more Indian than Spanish. On their Indian side they are, thus, autochtho­nous people, here long before the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, and the Mayflower. They are not immigrants. They are of the Americas, sharing a common bond with the indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada.

In view of the foregoing, plans for meeting the needs of American Hispanics must take into account their overwhelming reliance on the English language, particularly that 15 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population which is mono­lingual English operant. The same is true for that 15 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population which is monolingual Spanish operant. For them Spanish-language publishing makes sense. Reaching the 40 million-plus American Hispanic population requires balance.

I was amused by Leticia Salais’ piece on “Saying ‘Adiós’ to Spanglish” in Newsweek (December 17, 2007), in part because it reflects how little so many people know about language and its centrality in human intercourse and development. I was also saddened by the article because it tells us much about dysphoria (alienation) and its effects on self identity.

Leticia Salais caterwauls about the loss of the Spanish language her children have suffered. It turns out, however, that it’s not their loss of the Spanish language she bemoans but her own loss of a Spanish she never learned because the koine of the Southwest (especially El Paso where she grew up) was Spanglish, that mixture of Spanish and English so prevalent in the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. She explains how she did everything she could to escape the poverty and the color of her skin, having grown up in the poorest neighborhoods of El Paso, Texas.

Poverty is everywhere, and economic circumstances can change that. But the color of one’s skin is another story. Dysphorically, however, her escape was from her identity as a “Mexican.” In the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, it doesn’t matter which side of the border you’re from. If you’re a Mexican, you’re a Mexican. Never mind that Mexican Americans are mexicans with a lower case “m” and Americans with a capital “A.” This situation has prevailed for more than 160 years.

Hegemonically subject to the apodictic values of American society since 1848, far too many Mexican Americans have sought escape from the prison of the skin. Being mexican in the Southwest has been like being african (lower case “a”) in the South. Salais’ escape was to “run around with kids from the west side of town who came from more affluent families.” Though she spoke Spanish “well enough” she “pretended not to understand Spanish and would not speak a word of it.” In school she refused to speak Spanish even with her Chicano friends. While they joined Chicano clubs, all she wanted was to be in the English literacy club. At home, the only person she would speak Spanish with was her mother who knew no English.

She married and moved to Tucson where she was in heaven with her Anglo neighbors. When she got pregnant with her first son, she decided that English would be his first language and, if she could help it, his only language. But she saw the error of her decision – she realized the profitability of being bilingual “in a land of opportunity” that needed interpreters in so many of the professions and occupations. But her epiphany went beyond the realization of profitability. It took a turn towards the Spanish of propriety – good Spanish, the enunciation of words rolling correctly off one’s tongue. None of that Spanglish.

Spanglish is actually code-switching from English to Spanish or vice-versa in utterances or sentences that may be syntactically English or Spanish, what linguists call “intra-sentential alternation.” For example: “Bueno bye” when saying “goodbye” or “Hasta later” for “Until later.” Hyperbolically, the permutations are infinite. Spanglish works both ways – bi-directionally; and has a code for its intra-sententialism. In other words, code-switching occurs logically in its sentences. This means that Spanglish has developed a grammar of its own.

Along any boundary between two nations speaking different languages, more code-switching occurs than one is aware of, not to mention the phenomenon of borrowed words. Most languages are studded with scads of borrowed words. Early on, English speakers in the Hispanic Southwest made English words out of such Spanish words as “calabozo” turning it into “calaboose.” Or “juzgado” into “hoosegow.” Or “mesteño” into “mustang.” Or “la riata” into “lariat,” incorporating the Spanish article “la” into the noun and prefacing it with the English article “the” so that, in effect, the utterance is “the the rope.”Along the contiguous border between Mexico and the United States, English and Spanish fertilize each other. Languages in contact zones are like consenting adults creating words full of pregnant meaning enriched like DNA by the power of their constituents. Both American and Mexican elitists decry the presence and use of Spanglish along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, calling it bad English and bad Spanish – substandard and ungrammatical.

But Spanglish does not emerge just from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It emerges where there are communities of Spanish-speaking Hispanics in the United States from any Spanish-speaking country. Cubans in Miami speak Spanglish. Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicago speak Spanglish. Dominicans in D.C. speak Spanglish. Latinos everywhere in the

United States speak Spanglish to varying degrees.

The linguistic phenomenon of Spanglish is part of the efficient continuity of language. In their evolution all languages tend toward more efficient articulations and expressions. This is what accounts for abbreviations in English, such as “What’ll you have?” for “What will you have?” “I’ll” for “I will.” Or the abbreviations in text-messaging. In part, this efficient continuity explains how languages change. How Latin became French and Spanish and Italian and Portuguese and Romanian. Unfortunately, some English language purists pooh-pooh these notions, instead labeling the Spanglish phenomena as bad English and bad Spanish mixed together.

As a native speaker of Spanish and a professor of English for more than five decades, I speak Spanglish – and that’s not a sign of bad English and bad Spanish mixed together. It’s what happens with languages in contact with each other, enriching the discourse of expression. That mixture does not impoverish either language. Linguistically we must come to terms with the phenomenon that is Spanglish before it becomes a cause célèbre.

In Spanglish I can say “voy al show,” which means “I’m going to the movies.” Using the word “show” doesn’t mean I don’t know the Spanish word “cine” or “vistas”– it means I have the linguistic option of using either the English word “show” or the Spanish words “cine” or “vistas.” This is the same process as using a French word, say, in an English expression, such as “cause célèbre.” This is binary phenomena. A good example of binary phenomena is Ezra Pound who sprinkled his poetry with foreign words and expressions without bothering to explain them to the reader. Language is an amalgamation.

Even today, as when I was a child in San Antonio, Texas, one hears the judgment of the populi about Chicanos and their language. That vox populi contends that Chicanos don’t speak English and they don’t speak Spanish. The populi explain that what they speak instead is a bastardization of English and Spanish. Some commentators of that phenomenon have gone so far as to suggest that Chicanos are “alingual” – that is, they are without language.

The distinction between Spanglish and Tex-Mex (a corollary manifestation of languages in contact) is that the latter is a process of taking an English word and transforming it ostensibly into a Spanish word. The English word “truck,” for example, is transformed into “troca” just as the English word “muffler” is transformed into the word “mofle.” Both “troca” and “mofle” are not Spanish words per se, but part of the growing Spanglish lexicon that is well understood by “bilingual” residents along the U.S.-Mexico border. Interestingly, words like “troca” and “mofle” have migrated into Mexico and beyond and have become part of the extended lexicon of the borderlands such that in Mexico both words are used with aplomb.

Many, if not all, Chicanos use Hispanicized English words in their speech, not because they don’t have a lexicon of standard English but because it’s easier to use Hispanicized English words in their utterances. For example, in Spanish “to type” is “escribir a maquina.” With a little bit of “linguistic tweaking” the English language word “type” becomes “taipear,” the Hispanicized version, considerably shorter and more efficient than “escribir a maquina” – to write with a machine.

The same is true of the word “parquear” for “to park” instead of the Spanish word “estacionar.” Here it’s not the length of the Spanish word that engenders preference for the creolized word “parquear” but popularity of the word “park.” Chicanos perfer “parquear” not because they don’t know the Spanish word “estacionar.” What is operational in that preference is the density of usage for the word “parquear.” It has become “la moda”– the mode of parlance among Chicanos.

Creation of a “language” springing from two languages in contact is not uniquely a Chicano phenomenon. Creation of “blended nouns and verbs” occur everywhere languages “live” side by side or in proximity to each other. Because of the historical presence of American troops in

Korea, Koreans have added the word “hom-reon” for “homerun” to their lexicon in the same way that Mexicans added the word “hon-ron” for “homerun” to their lexicon. For “hotcakes,” Koreans say “hat-kei-i-keu” just as speakers of Spanglish use “keke” for “cake.”To their lexicon, Chicanos have added words like “wachate” for “watch yourself.” Many Chicanos use the word “dematriation” as the English version of “desmadre” (riot) as Ricardo Sanchez, the Chicano poet, used the word. In Korea these kinds of hybrid words are called “Konglish,” which also reflects words from Japanese. In English we interject many Spanish words into our speech, words like enchilada, tacos, tamales, and tortillas as well as plaza, patio, and barbeque (from barbacoa). This is not bad English, just the way of the word. Our speech becomes more colorful and indicates just how languages syncretize. As a consequence of the American presence in Japan, the Japanese word for “rifle” has become “rifu.” This is not bad Japanese, just an indication of how English has influenced Japanese.

In my Chaucer classes, I point out that Chaucer spoke more French than English, and we discuss how much French there is in the Canterbury Tales, especially in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” When we speak of Chaucer’s language, we do not call it “Frenglish.” Nor do we call Chaucer’s use of “axe” for “ask” or “na moe” for “no more” bad English. English did not become English until after it was fertilized by 400 years of French. And Spanish did not become Spanish until after it was fertilized by 700 years of Arabic. In like fashion, Latin became French after consorting with the Gallic languages of Gaul; and in Iberia, Latin transmogrified into Spanish after consorting with the Iberian language of Hispania (Roman designation for Spain).

Spanglish is a battle over symbols. The symbolic values of English are changing and will continue to change in the cauldron of linguistic diversity. The English language of today is not the English language of 200 years ago. The speakers of English in 1807 would be hard pressed to understand today’s English just as the speakers of English in the year 2201 will be hard pressed to understand today’s English. [The language of the Untied States is nominally English, but it has evolved sufficiently different from the English of England that it merits calling it “the American language” as H.L. Mencken did.]

There is no accurate count of the number of Americans of Mexican descent in the United States, but the most consistent figures presently suggest a population of approximately 30 million, two-thirds of the 45 million American Hispanics, most of whom in their bilingual identity speak Spanglish as well as English and Spanish with varying degrees of fluency. Speakers of Spanglish represent a linguistic community. It’s important to bear in mind that characterizing the speech of that linguistic community as “Spanglish” is a pejoration reflecting attitudes of linguistic imperialism couched in terms of “good English” and “good Spanish.” It’s this linguistic imperialism that internalizes in Mexican Americans the notion that Spanglish is an inferior language. This internalization promotes dysphoria.

On a recent morning talk-show in El Paso, Texas, where the topic was corruption in the El Paso County government, a Mexican American called in to the show, commenting that the corruption was because the county government had so many Mexicans. Adding that “as everybody knows all Mexicans are corrupt,” to which the host objected strenuously. The point here is how dysphoria alienates Mexican Americans from themselves.

This is the dysphoria that drove Leticia Salais to reject Spanglish and the culture that spawned it believing that no good could come of being identified as part of that culture, and certainly no good in speaking its language since it is not “proper English” nor “proper Spanish.” Thus, fleeing from one dysphoric situation, Salais has embraced an equally dysphoric solution, going from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak.

What is happening in Spanglish is what happened to Spanish as it emerged from Latin and as other languages emerged from Latin also. This phenomenon is not limited to romance languages. Though considered a Germanic language, English is also a product of its Latin roots both as a province of Rome for 500 years and as a captive nation of the French-speaking Normans for 400 years. Chaucer was part of the latter milieu, working at literature in the forge of an emerging language, much the way many Chicano writers have been working at the forge of the emerging languages of Chicano English and Chicano Spanish.

Current views about language, culture, and behavior are still influenced by historical and traditional concepts. In most instances, these concepts insufficiently explain the intricate relationship between language, culture, and behavior. Ergo the public opprobrium towards Spanglish. And also the current public opprobrium in the United States towards Spanish in general and at large, producing the backlash of English Only attitudes. Unfortunately these attitudes tend to reinforce existing stereotypes about Spanish-speaking American Hispanics and to perpetuate a variety of psycho-social propositions about Mexican Americans in particular.

Historically, until 1970 one such proposition identified Spanish-speaking Mexican American children in the public schools of the Hispanic Southwest as retarded. This was the state of Mexican American children in the American educational system as I pointed out in my cover story on “Montezuma’s Children” (The Center Magazine, November/December, 1970). Forty years ago, Mexican American children were considered retarded because they could not speak English. Though research since then has established that that psycho-social sentiment was engendered because they were “Mexicans.”

There is no “proper Spanish” just as there is no “proper English.” There is the Spanish and English of usage and convention. We tend to identity one brand of English as “standard English” and one brand of Spanish as “standard Spanish” in hopes of creating some kind of national cohesion via language. Unfortunately, language is not the glue of national unity. Across the globe there is internecine conflict between peoples who speak the same language. Respect for the individual regardless of the language he or she may speak and the way it’s produced (accent) is the key to national unity. African Americans, for example, speak English (American English) yet have remained only marginally part of the national polity.

Leticia Salais has not achieved an epiphany. She is now ensconced in a linguistic ivory tower passing judgment on those who speak Spanglish. She prefers the mellifluous sounds of Peruvian Spanish, as she indicates in her Newsweek piece, rather than the cacophonous sounds of Spanglish, failing to realize that in Peru the Spanish language has undergone a comparable evolution to the Spanish in Mexico where the indigenous languages in contact with Spanish have influenced each other and produced a Spanish unique to Peru. A Spanish that is not Peninsular Spanish.

While I was an undergraduate at Pitt in Comparative Studies (languages and literatures), many students from Latin America would exclaim that their country had preserved el mero castellano – the pure or true Spanish. The most notorious in this regard were Argentines and Colombians, neither aware of how phonologically different their Spanish was from Peninsular Spanish. In Spain I heard many varieties of Spanish.

At the beginning of my linguistic studies at Pitt I imagined code-switching as a dual track in the brain where at appropriate places a synaptic spark enabled the switch from, say, Spanish to English or English to Spanish, much like switching trains on tracks. This was also when I accepted the proposition that one thought in specific languages. We now consider that “thinking in a language” involves coded electro-chemical impulses that are translated into aural signals at a voicing point. We don’t think in languages but in electro-chemical codes. Consider that when we press the letter key for “R” on a computer keyboard, the letter “R” is not traveling from the keyboard to the computer screen but a coded form of the letter and transformed into print at an appropriate place in the transmission process: the monitor or the page.

I’m reminded here of how many times I’ve heard non-Spanish speakers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands express a desire to learn Spanish, adding the caveat: not “kitchen Spanish,” explaining that “kitchen Spanish” is the Spanish the maids use. They want to learn Castillian Spanish. Shades of the Mexican-Dixon Line! In the U.S.-Mexico borderlands the maids are almost always Mexican as are the gardeners and those who work at the jobs of last resort. Linguistic truths give way to invidious fallacies and, before long, Mexican Americans are considered once more as lazy, unambitious, stupid, and retarded because they fail to meet the linguistic standards of the English language.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS ON LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND BEHAVIOR

“The Minority on the Border,” The Nation, December 11, 1967.

“The Mexican-Dixon Line,” El Grito, Summer 1968.

“The Green Card Dilemma,” The Texas Observer, 60:5, 1968.

“Perspectives in Language, Culture, and Behavior,” International Lan­guage Reporter, 2^nd Quarter 1969.

Problems and Strategies in Teaching the Language Arts to Spanish Speaking Mexican American Children in the Southwest (monograph with Carl L. Rosen), U.S. Office of Education (ERIC/CRESS), February 1969. The Linguistic Imperative in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (monograph), Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics 1970. “A Mexican American Border Dialect of American English,” Studies in Linguistics, October, 1970. “Montezuma’s Children” (Cover Story), The Center Magazine of the John Maynard Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, November/December 1970. Entered into The Congressional Record, 116 No. 189 (November 25, 1970), S 18961–S 18965.

“Language and Reading Problems of Spanish-Speaking Children of the Southwest” (with Carl L. Rosen), Journal of Reading Behavior, 1:1, 1970.

“Schools for Mexican Americans: Between Two Cultures” (Cover Feature), The Saturday Review, April 17, 1971. ERIC Report ED 034647.

“Sociolinguistics and Language Attitudinal Change” in Sociolingistics in the Southwest, Bates Hoffer, editor, San Antonio: Trinity University 1972.

“Preparation in the Art of Teaching English,” Improving College and University Teaching, Spring 1973. ERIC Report EJ 083031.

“English Teaching: Some Humanistic Goals and a Personal Credo” in Goal Making for English Teaching, Henry B. Maloney, editor, Champaign, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English, 1973. ERIC: ED 082193.

Chicanos and Concepts of Language (monograph with Marta Sotomayor), San Jose, California: Marfel Publications, 1974. “Language, Culture, and Behavior: Implications for Social Work Educa­tion” in Chicano Content and Social Work Education, Marta Sotomayor and Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, editors, New York: Coun­cil on Social Work Education, 1975. “The Difference Between a Dialect and a Language,” SAAABE Newsletter (Publication of the San Antonio Area Association for Bilingual Education), Fall 1979.

“A Bilingual Childhood,” The American Scholar, Summer 1981. Life, Language, and Literature: Ways of the Word (monograph), Tempe: Arizona State University, 1989.

“Myth America: Realities and Velleities of the American Ethos” (Mary Thomas Marshal Lecture, Texas State University–Sul Ross), Journal of Big Bend Studies, January 1994.

“Ebonics is About Language, Not Ethnic Identity,” Hispanic Link News Service, January 27, 1997. Distributed by Tribune Media Services International.

“Tyrannus Lex: Common Ground and the English Only Movement,” Hispanic Vista Weekly Digest, February 21, 2005.

“Terms of Identity: What’s in a Name?” Latino Suave, December 2005 / January 2006. “Lies Like Truth: Discourse Issues in Language,” Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification (on-line journal), University of Michigan, Volume 1, June 26, 2006. ISSN 1559-3096

In a time when the national temper calls for reason in the solution of problems facing the American people, a powerful media venue like CNN mixes jingoism with (advocacy) journalism, not just with Lou Dobbs but with Nancy Grace and others. Fox News is not any better. Networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC have pretty much stuck to reporting news rather than making news or stirring the pot of distemper with jingoism.  

This is not to say that Lou Dobbs does not have the right to his opinions and to articulate them per the First Amendment. The issue is his “right” to air them over public airwaves without recourse for an equitable response. Sending emails to Lou Dobbs is not the same as equal time for an opposing view.

But the still larger question is: why is CNN airing such programming in its line-up? For many of us, the racial inferences inherent in the issue of “immigration,” over which Dobbs rants nightly, are inescapable. It’s not immigration that has Dobbs’ knickers in a knot, it’s Mexicans. Lou Dobbs doesn’t like Mexicans. He’s not pushing for a border fence along the U.S.-Canada border. Or to keep out “illegal” European immigrants. Or Cubans rushing into Miami. He wants to rid the United States of Mexicans.

His rants make no distinction between Mexicans and Mexican Americans. To Dobbs, a Mexican is a Mexican. His rhetorical brush paints over the differences. Night after night pursuing his bête noir, he insults not only Mexicans but Mexican Americans as well. Via the soft under-belly of the United States, Dobbs sees hordes of terrorists infiltrating the United States to carry out their nefarious schemes of violence.

Has it not dawned on Dobbs that the pilots of the planes that rammed into the twin towers in New York were not Mexicans and they did not come into the United States through Mexico?

Never mind that despite the historical American dismemberment of Mexico in 1848, Mexico has maintained enthusiastic diplomatic relations with the U.S., becoming one of the country’s most favorable trading partners. But Mexicans are not streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border to inflict physical harm on Ameri­cans. On the contrary. The Mexicans who have crossed into the United States without documentation are doing so to improve their economic circumstances.

But Dobbs thinks their very presence in the United States harms the American economy. Ignore reports and studies to the contrary. Dobbs has his mind made up, and he will not be confused with the facts. Moreover, for Dobbs, that horde of “illegal” Mexican immigrants imperils the values of American life and culture. Mexicans are today’s whipping boy and Dobbs is wielding a big crop. There is a growing movement of Catonists in the American Republic who fear immigrants and what they augur for America’s future. Catonists are pessimistic about that future.

Cato was a senator in the Roman Republic during the Punic Wars with Carthage in the third century BC. He was an “anti-intellectual monumenta­list” who fed Roman fears of en­croachment by decadent foreigners whose alien values, he contended, would disrupt the Roman political tradition and the organization of the nation. And though the Roman Empire was a multicultural enterprise, Cato was a Roman supremacist who believed that

Rome was for the Romans. Americans like Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor of foreign affairs, believes multiculturalism will destroy the United States. It was not multi­culturalism that destroyed Rome; it was the arrogant excesses of its leaders that destroyed Rome. It’s out of this fear of multiculturalism, hardened and institutionalized, that the current wave of American nativism rises. In the mid-18^th century, just after the U.S. War against Mexico (1846-1848), American attitudes about the territory dismembered from Mexico focused more on the promise of the land than on patrolling it. The wrested Mexican territory was, after all, an expansive piece of real estate, and, according to the propaganda of the time, sparsely populated, which is why it was there for the taking. But the fact of the matter is that the annexed Mexican territory was much more populated than Anglo statistics have suggested.  

The Tejano historian Arnoldo De Leon has painted, perhaps, the best “picture” of this land and its population of the time. He describes the landscape as dotted with small communities and family jacales connecting the larger population clusters like San Antonio, El Paso, and Santa Fe, communities of Hispanos doing for themselves as  frontier people everywhere have done for themselves. Anglo American accounts, however, have distorted the reality of the Hispanic Southwest to fit their own providential purposes.  

All of this is to say that Mexican Americans have historical priority in the American Southwest, which was once part of their patrimony. But missing in the current debate over immigration are the voices of Mexican Americans, those who are at the crux of the issue. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that Mexican American voices are absent in most public policy discussions in this country.

This is why, as Mexican Americans, we must debate the debaters, those who are arguing most stre­nuously for immigration reform, not because we are opposed to immigration reform but because we are a vital part of that issue and our voices ought to be, therefore, part of the debate.  

Unfortunately, the only views Americans get about public policy issues like immigration are those advanced by  mainstream mongers like Lou Dobbs, who are caught up myopically with the topic, Catonists who have only a single-minded view of America’s future and what the United States should be. Instead of a populist vision of America that includes all our visions, we are sub­jected to a singular apodictic vision of America based on one man’s view – an American Cato.

At 81, World War II seems like a world and a half ago. I had just turned 17 when I enlisted in the Marines during the dark days of World War II and 20 when I was mustered out in 1946. My role in that “great war” was nominal. Its heroes lie buried on far-flung battlefields.Best estimates indicate that more than half a million American Hispanics served in the armed forces during World War II (1941-1946), most of them Mexican Americans. I was just a speck among that number.The San Antonio of 1941, where a branch of my mother’s family settled in 1731, was a place of “brown blood and white laughter” as I wrote in a poem years later, remembering the city’s segregated schools and its English-only rules. Though the war transformed the city economically, a different kind of war would vanquish the barriers that had made San Antonio a divided community and strangers of Tejanos in their own land.At war, American Hispanics showed their mettle. Boys became men. On the Day of Infamy, I went to the cathedral and prayed, wondering if I could pass for 17, hoping the war would wait for me.

What seems lost in national memory is that American Hispanics played significant military roles in that conflagration, recipients of more Medals of Honor during that fray than any other ethnic group. But they came home to a country that disdained their service, continuing to treat them as foreigners in their own land.

During World War II, Hispanics served in the Army, the Army Air Corps, the Navy, the Marines, the Coast Guard, the Merchant Marine. They were pilots, navigators, bombardiers, gunners. On the home front they were Air Raid Wardens, led War Bond Drives, served at USO’s, handed out donuts and coffee to American GI’s at train stations and military bases, scores of Hispanic mothers placed Gold Star on their windows, and dutifully covered their windows at night in compliance with “blackout” instructions.

Across the country American Hispanics played crucial roles in the victory of World War II by working in defense plants building planes, tanks, jeeps and other military equipment. In Pittsburgh, Mexican American women from the Ohio Valley communities of Mexican Americans built gliders in the Heinz plant which converted its ketchup machinery to the war effort.

After the War, I came home, hung up my uniform with its plastron of medals, and went looking for America. The first part of that odyssey carried me to the University of Pittsburgh where — with the help of the G.I. Bill — I matriculated with only one year of high school. I went on to achieve the Ph.D. in English (British Renaissance literature) at the University of New Mexico with only one year of high school and no GED.

More than half a century later, PBS added insult to injury by its ill-advised decision to air Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 14-hour mini-series on World War II despite the fact that the series did not include the significant participation of Hispanics in that War. Ironically, Burns’ documentary was originally scheduled to air on September 16 — a commemorative day for Mexican Americans during Hispanic Heritage Month, the day Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1810. That sparked considerable controversy since the documentary did not include any of the contributions of Hispanics to the war.

However, after an intense “Defend the Honor” campaign of public protest by the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Hispanic vet organizations like the American GI Forum, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez–associate professor of journalism and director the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas–and Gus Chavez (founder of Defend the Honor” campaign), PBS president Paula Kerger agreed to emendations of the documentary. How extensive remained unclear even after word leaked out that Hector Galan, the Hispanic film-maker from Austin, Texas, who produced the 1996 series “Chicano! History of The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement” for PBS, had been contracted to provide supplementary Hispanic footage for the series. Burns stood firm, saying that he would not “re-cut” the film. When asked about the Defend the Honor campaign by Matt Lauer on the Today Show on Friday morning (September 21, 2007), Ken Burns disingenuously told Matt Lauer that “Latinos never came forward to be part of the documentary.” In Orange County, California, the PBS affiliate (KOCE) responded vituperously to the Defend the Honor steering committee, which sought to meet with the station management, with the accusation that “you all belong to a fringe group who refuse to be satisfied and who seem to enjoy the attention you are receiving by continuing to attack PBS.” The station added that “PBS and KOCE have been true friends to Hispanic Americans and deserve far better than the treatment they are receiving from an unreasonable few.”

I’ve long thought that congressional funding for PBS and NPR should be eliminated since both are disconnected from the realities of American Hispanics and seem to be impervious to the demographic presence of Hispanics in the U.S.

TV network media and a majority of mainstream American newspapers don’t have a clue about American Hispanics. They don’t know who they are. The fault lies with American history, as Carlos Guerra correctly points out: how it’s written and how it’s taught. An old African proverb contends that “the history of the lion hunt will always favor the hunter until lions have their own historians.”

Hispanics are not newcomers to the territory that is now the United States. Long before 1848 they were here with the Dutch in New Amsterdam (later renamed New York); they had established settlements on the Gulf Coast long before the arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts; and in the Southwest they had established thriving cities like San Antonio, Santa Fe, El Paso, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterrey, and San Francisco long before the U.S. declared war on Mexico in 1846 and dismembered it, taking more than half its territory as a booty of war.

Today there are Hispanics in every state of the nation, in every major city of the country. In many places they are the majority population. The current Census count indicates that there are 45 million Hispanics in the American population, not counting the 4.5 million Hispanics on the island of Puerto Rico. Two-thirds or 30 million of those Hispanics are Mexican Americans.

In Texas, according to Steven Murdoch, the state demographer, Hispanics will be 65 percent of the state’s population by the year 2040. The U.S. Hispanic population is the second largest in the world after Mexico. By the year 2050, twenty-five percent of the American population will be Hispanic–one in four Americans will be Hispanic.

Amid the current brouhaha over immigration, Americans seem to have forgotten that in America’s defense, Hispanics have played significant roles in every war starting with the American Revolution. Some scholars contend that without Spain’s help in the war for independence (Bernardo de Galvez and Francisco de Miranda), the revolting American colonists would not have won the struggle.

American history does not identify as an Hispanic Jorge Farragut who went to the aid of besieged Americans in New Orleans during the War of 1812, nor that during the Civil War, Hispanics fought on both the Union side and the Confederate side of that internecine dispute.

Hispanics from Texas and New Mexico were with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” at San Juan Hill in Cuba. They were in China with the Boxer Rebellion; and in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. They served in significant numbers in World War I–the Great War to end all wars.

South of us, Mexico entered World War II in 1942 as America’s ally and by 1945 had three fighter squadron in the Philippines. More than 500,000 Mexican braceros (workers) were recruited by the United States to help fill the depleted manpower on American farms and industries.

The point is that from the founding of the nation, American Hispanics have served in the American Armed forces in overwhelmingly numbers. Currently, American Hispanics are on active military duty everywhere, most of them having already served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

American Hispanics have not only fought to defend the nation but they have fought for every inch of progress they have made. Mimi Lozano had it right: Ken Burns and PBS are lousy historians and blind to the history of American Hispanics.

A dding supplementary Hispanic footage to the first episode of “The War” consisted of 28 minutes at the end of the Guadalcanal sequence of the episode. Two Hispanic Marine veterans who were at Guadalcanal with Carlson’s Raiders were interviewed with intersticing clips of Carlson’s Raiders. This struck me as an emendable gesture but far short of delivering on the Hispanic contributions to World War II.

At the start of episode one, when the narrative focused on Sacramento, Burns could have spliced into the narrative that the first draftee of World War II was Pete Aguilar Despart, a Mexican American from Los Angeles; and that at the height of the war, just one month after Private Jose P. Martinez (U.S. Army) had bee killed at the battle of Attu in the Aleutians, an action for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, Mexican Americans were fleeing for their lives in Los Angeles in what came to be known as the Zoot-Suit Riots.

In Episode 5, Ken Burns could have added that on April 24, 1945, Congressman Jerry Voorhis from California read into the Congressional Record:

“As I read the casualty lists from my own state, I find anywhere from one-fourth to one-third of those names are names such as Gonzales or Sanchez, names indicating that the very lifeblood of our citizens of Latin-American descent in the uniform of the armed forces of the United States is being poured out to win victory in the war. We ought to resolve that in the future every single one of these citizens shall have the fullest and freest opportunity which this country is capable of giving him, to advance to such positions of influence and eminence as their own personal capacities make possible.”

Sad to say, American Hispanics continue to be the invisible minority, but that condition can change. Indeed, we ought to hold Burns’ and PBS’ feet to the fire but we can resolve to make our own documentaries about our contributions to the United States. Our absence in documentaries is like our absence in American textbooks.

As recently as 2003 I received an anthology of The American Tradition in Literature (shorter 10th edition in one volume) from McGraw Hill (2281 pages) in which only one Hispanic writer was featured on page 2199 — Isabel Allende, the Chilean writer. I’m a great admirer of Isabel Allende’s work, but including her as the representative for American Hispanic writers in The American Tradition in Literature would be like including Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer, as the representative for African American writers in The American Tradition in Literature.

Copyright 2007 by the author. All rights reserved.