La Torre de Babel
31st January 2012
It seems odd that someone can be born and raised in the United States, and even graduate from a high school in the United States, and still not understand basic English.
Arizona has become a bellwether for what will likely be America’s grandest cultural divide of the 21st century: the demographic struggle between Anglos and Hispanics, two groups that are split along a seemingly intractable linguistic rift. Arizona is home to an ongoing immigration dispute that has pitted the governor against the president. The state recently outlawed a “Mexican-American Studies” program that was deemed to encourage Hispanic resentment against Anglos.
On the other hand….
This has all fallen on deaf ears in the heat-wilted border town of San Luis, AZ, probably because nine out of ten residents speak Spanish at home. The 2010 US Census pegged the city’s population as slightly over 25,000, with a decisively dominant 99% of its residents being Hispanic. (The quotient was less than 90% in 2000.) So as someone who’s fluent in Spanish but only possesses “survival English” skills, Cabrera would adequately represent her local constituency.
It’s not clear to me why ‘good English’ is necessary for someone to represent a constituency that is 90% Spanish-speaking. It’s not as if there aren’t enough people around who are bilingual and can provide translation services in cases where they are necessary. We don’t insist that American military personnel speak Arabic in order to do ‘nation-building’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a position on a city council, not an executive job where the officeholder is required to serve the public generally. Sure, it would be a good thing if she were to speak better English, and I certainly hope that this incident motivates her to get better at it, but still, I don’t see why it’s so necessary in this case. Is puzzle.