Obama Spanish pitch a call for inclusiveness

| The New Mexican

7/16/2008 - 7/17/08

He didn't win friends or influence people from the English-only bloc, but Barack Obama's recent advocacy of Spanish struck a nice note here in the American Southwest. It should resonate around the country.

He was ad-libbing his way through a presidential-campaign appearance in Georgia — but even there he drew applause when he said, in rhetorical response to the notion of our nation as a single-language fortress, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish."

It was a great indicator of Obama's inclusiveness.

If anybody wants to fault him for that remark, it should be for the premise he tossed off right before it: "Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they'll learn English."

Oh, really? Many do — but many don't, and that bothers certain gringos whose ancestors gave up their German, their Italian, their Swedish during rapid assimilation. So even as Obama was smirking it up about European visitors to this country who speak our language and others — while your average American tourist there might do well to say merci beaucoup — there was no denying that it's Spanish that draws the ire of a vocal few Middle Americans.

By even mentioning sporadic efforts at mandatory-English legislation, he might have been raising a straw man — but he was pretty effective at tearing it down.

Here in Santa Fe, Spanish has been spoken for far longer than English has — and it still is. To most newcomers from the old British colonies and their colonies-turned-states, that's part of the charm.

But today, immigrants from southern North America are everywhere in this country — and so is their language. Even as they set about learning the lingua franca, their spoken-word assimilation delayed by their need to work 25 hours a day, our country's Spanish-speaking population is being catered to by a commercial world eager for their business.

But is that any reason for resentment from the masses whose language is limited to English?

Chauvinism, it might be argued, is a trait traceable to our simian forebears — thus tough to overcome. And what if those people are talking about us in that language not enough of us understand?

To that, the editorial "we" would say: Don't flatter yourselves; chances are, they're conversing about the same boring stuff we are: the weather, the kids ...

But if it really bothers you, why not break their code? Pick up some Spanish; it's probably the easiest other language to learn. The New Mexican publishes La Voz de Nuevo México, where advertisements, cartoons and photo captions are painless introductions to the language. And on Mondays, we offer El Nuevo Mexicano.

Papers in many parts of the country are offering similar publications — so Obama pretty clearly is onto something when he says "we should have every child speaking more than one language."

As he made clear, it doesn't have to be Spanish — but Spanish is so prevalent that the senator made sense applying español to his not-just-English pitch. He is running advertisements and commercials in that language. And his opponent's first general-election radio commercials shout "estamos unidos con John McCain."

The sooner immigrants learn English the better. But besides offering their kids transitional bilingual programs in our schools, we should make more languages available to all children.

As today's international crises make clear, the United States must gain greater awareness of a world closing in on us. For too long, we've taken the dominant-nation attitude that others must speak our language. We pay for that arrogance every day.