Hispania Guest Editorial: "Spanglish": What's in a Name?

This was the title of a paper I read in a session organized by the AATSP at the Modern Language Association's convention in Los Angeles, in January 2011, before a substantial audience that engaged afterwards in a lively debate. At the end of the session, the participants left with a clearer idea about what Spanglish is and, in particular, is not. However, as people say in Spanish, una golondrina no hace verano, and there is still persistent confusion and apprehension about the exact meaning of the term and the appropriateness of its use, particularly in the academic world. (See, in this regard, Dumitrescu 2010, which includes, among other things, a lengthy discussion about the perception of and the attitudes towards Spanglish of California educators, most of them AATSP members who participated in a survey.) Horacio Peña's (2009) words are representative of such apprehension: "Vilipendiado por unos, alabado por otros que lo consideran el idioma del siglo XXI, el Spanglish siembra en el corazón de algunos el miedo de la desaparición del español, el horror de ver algún día un letrero que diga: 'Aquí se habla el español'" (15).

Indeed, Spanglish, a derogatory term coined by the Puerto Rican journalist Salvador Tió in the mid-fifties, and frivolously used nowadays by the media in confusing and inaccurate ways, has stirred a strong controversy among its partisans and its detractors at both the political and the educational levels. The following quote from the Encyclopedia Latina: History, Culture and Society in the United States is representative of this polarization of opinions: "A controversial language, Spanglish is debated along ideological lines. In the United States, opponents argue that it is a block in the road to Latinos' full assimilation into the melting pot. These opponents also believe that Spanglish is proof that bilingual education was a half-baked language-learning system. Supporters counter-argue that Spanglish is not an obstacle but, instead, the stepping stone to a new culture, part Latino and part Anglo" (Stavans 2005: 113; emphasis mine).

Many US Hispanics support this latter view. For instance, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) wrote that "for a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves—a language with terms that are neither español ni inglés, but both" (177). And Ed Morales (2002) claimed: "There is no better metaphor for what a mixed-race culture means than a hybrid language, an informal code; the same sort of linguistic construction that defines different classes in a society can also come to define something outside it, a social construction with different rules. Spanglish is what we speak, but it is also who we Latinos are, and how we act, and how we perceive the world" (3). Meanwhile, Ilan Stavans (2003) famously declared Spanglish "a new American English" and tried—with disastrous results—to translate the first chapter of Don Quijote in this new "language."

By contrast, academics like Roberto González Echevarría (1997) believe that "politically, . . . Spanglish is a capitulation; it indicates marginalization, not enfranchisement" (A29), and that—as John Lipski (2008) wrote—the use of the term Spanglish is "as out of place in promoting Latino language and culture as are the words crazy, lunatic, crackpot, or nut case in mental health, or bum, slob, misfit, and loser in social work" (72).

Sociolinguists have convincingly demonstrated that we are not witnessing the birth of a new language, and that, in fact, what most people call Spanglish is actually code-switching, a well-known communicative strategy among bilinguals fluent in both languages, who alternate them for a variety of purposes, among which—contrary to popular belief—the...