Alien Speech, Incorporated: On the Cultural History of Spanish in the US

Over six million people file into US classrooms each year with the aim of learning Spanish. They are met by a dazzling array of textbooks, videos, interactive software, and monetized online resources targeted not only at tuition-paying consumers, but also at a substantial, if uncountable, number of learners outside the formal space of the classroom: the ambitious self-teachers and brusher-uppers who are also served by this segment of the multibillion-dollar educational publishing industry. In the face of this formidable market, let me pose a naı̈ve question: why don’t these would-be learners walk instead to a nearby location where they are likely to find one of the nation’s twenty-eight million Spanish-speaking persons—a lettuce field in Salinas, a slaughterhouse in Ottumwa, a cable-company service center in Hoboken, a restaurant kitchen pretty much anywhere in the country—and instead hire a native speaker to teach them? Competing against those low-wage labor markets, the enterprising student could surely strike a smart educational bargain.¹

If this scenario seems to violate common sense, it is worth asking why. Its absurdity hinges on the assumption that a laborer can’t be counted on to command, fully and reliably, the proper usages that the learner is most invested in knowing: the prestige dialect, global standard Castilian. Furthermore, we have come to consider teaching to be a specialized craft that requires training in empirically proven methodologies, as well as the oversight of some kind of guild—which, in this case, emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, followed eventually by its research arm in applied linguistics, Second Language Acquisition theory (SLA).² While contemporary SLA practice no longer places equal weight upon each of the traditional “four skills” (speaking and oral comprehension are emphasized more than reading and writing), it is difficult for us to imagine a language-learning scenario devoid of the mediating presence of texts: where would one set down the worksheets, the dictionary, the pencil in the lettuce field? That assumption is deeply rooted in the origins of modern language pedagogy, which borrowed its rationales as well as its methods from classical education and thus prized highly the ability to read in the European vernaculars.³ The professionalization of teaching, the assertion of the “proper,” the greater authority of the written tradition—all represent historically specific values that have been naturalized, often unconsciously. While they may pertain to all modern languages, at present Spanish occupies an exceptional position in the cultural life of the US, as simultaneously the most widely studied and the most abjected language system other than English: our “second national language,” in Carlos Alonso’s apt phrase (17), yet one whose ascent has not been accompanied by an increase in prestige. This contemporary status problem did not come into being suddenly during the last three decades, when the population of US Latinos began to spike; it was shaped over the centuries by modulating ideas about the domesticity and foreignness of certain registers of Spanish, including the highly particularized register of literary language. These modulations are significant not only for the Latino branch of ethnic studies; they are embedded, I will argue, into the mainstream history of ideas about language and languages in America.

As I meant to highlight by choosing examples from the agricultural and service sectors for my Swiftian scenario of de-professionalized Spanish teaching, the mainstream view of Spanish and its speakers has become profoundly, although not fully, proletarianized—a process that began with the absorption of successive Hispanophone communities during the nation’s westward expansion and has continued in fits and starts since then. Communication with this population was conceived practically: learners were presumed to require mainly oral rather than written proficiency, so that bits from seventeenth-century dialogue manuals were quickly retooled with new vocabulary for mining equipment to send with gold-seekers to California. By that point, however, the study of Spanish had already been pragmatically rationalized in different terms—as a language of potential political and trade alliances—in letters from Jefferson in...