Trip of the Tongue (34 page)

But once I got to Laredo I was glad to be there. It was hotter than Satan's sweaty ball sack, and I had to find a bottle of water and a spot of air-conditioning every twenty minutes or so or risk serious dehydration, but I was delighted by the downtown area. It felt very much like the liminal space I had been hoping it would be. I realized that if I took off my glasses, leaving me able to see but unable to read any signs or license plates, the streets of Laredo looked just like Mexico. It felt very much like a Mexican city with American laws.

Established in 1755, Laredo is famously the only part of Texas to have flown seven different flags. Six are well known to Texans: the Spanish flag, the French flag, the Mexican flag, the Texas Republic flag, the Texas Confederate flag, and the U.S. flag. The seventh is the flag of the Republic of the Rio Grande, a short-lived nation established in 1840 by Mexican insurgents, and the second-best example of the town's independent streak. The best example occurred when the city was given to the United States after the Mexican-American War. Laredo voted to petition the government to allow them to continue to be part of Mexico, but the petition was denied, and many of the town's residents moved across the river to found Nuevo Laredo.

Today Laredo is the largest inland port in the country, and along with Nuevo Laredo it handles a huge percentage of the trade between the United States and Mexico. Trade, then, is Laredo's main business—and also its main tourist attraction. As far as I could tell, most people come here to shop. The city, particularly near the border, is chock-full of presumably Western/vaguely Mexican/ambiguously tribal handicrafts at stores with names like El Alamo Pottery and Los Chiles Imports. Farther north is an even more popular shopping district of utterly generic big-box American retailers. Admittedly, I found it hard to get excited about shopping in Laredo. But then, I wasn't there to find a Mexican floor candelabra. I was there to experience
la vida bilingüe
.

I was expecting Laredo to be something like Montreal. About half of Montreal's population is fully bilingual in French and English, a wonderful thing if you don't speak French but incredibly exasperating if you're trying to speak French. The moment you slip up or stumble, Montrealers switch fluidly and almost apologetically into English, like they're a little sad you don't have the benefit of their language skills. Every time I've been there I've played a game I call How Long Will It Take Them to Figure Out I'm a Native English-Speaker. My record so far is five French words.

Percentage-wise, the makeup of Laredo's language community isn't that different from Montreal's. As of the 2000 Census, almost 92 percent of Laredo's population reported speaking Spanish, with just over 88 percent of this group reporting speaking English “well” or “very well.” These high levels of bilingualism led me to assume that my experience in Laredo would be similar to my experience in Montreal—that is to say, I thought they'd all make fun of my Spanish.

What I found was very different.

Almost everyone I encountered in Laredo spoke Spanish and English. This was true whether I was talking to a guide at the visitor center, the curator of a museum, or the cashier at Walgreens. I was frequently greeted in Spanish despite the fact that I don't look at all Latina. Wherever I went, Spanish words were used as a matter of course, almost as if no one stopped to consider I might not know them. It was the first time in my life outside of language class I'd ever been assumed to speak any language besides English. And I was, I have to admit, totally flattered.

But it's important to note that although Laredoans used
some
Spanish with me, they didn't use
only
Spanish. I was surprised to find that many Laredoans used Spanish and English, sometimes in the same conversation. I had thought that the everyday language here might be like the souvenirs, stereotypically Mexican products marketed to American tourists, a melding of the most well-known qualities of each into some third thing that is entirely different. I expected to find a creole, in other words—or at least a pidgin.

Navigating the languages of Laredo made me think back to a book I had read recently, Bill Santiago's
Pardon My Spanglish
, which I purchased under the impression that it might help me make my way through old Laredo. Here's a paragraph I think is particularly relevant to the point at hand:

As a descriptive term, code-switching,
como se dice
… sucks.
No se trata de
codes,
sino de idiomas
and everything they embody: culture, heritage, emotional frequencies, ways of thinking and feeling.
El switcheo
is actually between co-dependent realities.
Así que
code-switching is obviously code for:
Estos chingados académicos
have no idea
de lo que están
talking about.

This paragraph is a great example of the type of language I frequently heard in Laredo, a way of speaking known—however inadequately, prosaically, or in this case ironically—as code-switching. Code-switching occurs when multilingual speakers elect to draw from different languages within a single conversation. Sometimes the language shift will occur because the speaker is searching for a word. But just as frequently the language they choose is a reflection of the subject, the situation, and the interlocutors. It is like the way you might elect to use jargon with a work colleague or an SAT word in an interview—or, for that matter, like the way you might elect
not
to use slang with your grandmother or profanity in front of your little sibling. Code-switching is a similar phenomenon. Multilinguals just have more registers to draw from.

A distinctive feature of code-switching is that speakers don't just switch to the vocabulary of another language; they also switch to its grammatical and phonological rules. You can see, for instance, that though Santiago switches between Spanish and English, the grammar of each language is preserved—in Spanish, for instance,
estos
and
chingados
agree with
académicos
. When English is used,
is
agrees with
code-switching
and
embody
agrees with
they
. You don't see grammatical rules bleeding from one language into the other; neither do you see rules independent of either language.

Even so, I agree that
code-switching
isn't the most descriptive or transparent term. It certainly has no poetry to it. But then, I often suspect that there is a secret cabal of linguists who meet each year to make sure linguistic terminology remains as impenetrable and unpleasant as possible. This way they can make sure that anyone with an interest in language feels compelled to pursue graduate studies, thus preserving their supply of low-cost teaching assistants. And I can certainly understand not wanting to reduce a way of talking and interacting to something as sterile-sounding as
code-switching.
It sounds more like the province of machine than man, like something the IBM programmers taught Watson.

But code-switching is so much more interesting than that. Like creoles, pidgins, and jargons, it's a creature of language contact. But unlike creoles, pidgins, and jargons, code-switching occurs in—and is therefore evidence of—environments more conducive to bilingualism than, for instance, the slave-based societies of the colonial Americas. Though code-switching is not a phenomenon that connotes anything close to perfect social equality, at the very least it must be a sign of relative social mobility.

When I went to Laredo, I expected to find one of three things, in descending order of probability: (1) a community that had developed an English-Spanish creole, (2) a community that was assimilating to Spanish, or (3) a community that was assimilating to English. I thought I would be able to deduce from this what we might be able to expect from American cities with growing Spanish-speaking populations. As it turned out, I wasn't quite sure how to interpret my actual observations, though I was certainly aware that they represented only one small part of the city's complex linguistic reality.

I knew one thing for sure, though. If English was still somehow managing to hold its own in a city where 92 percent of the population spoke Spanish, then groups such as U.S. English were tilting at windmills even more than I had thought.

Admittedly, even my own travels may seem to perpetuate the idea that English is spoken less and less in the United States. In Miami, for instance, I felt like I was living in three different languages, none of them English, and in Laredo it was frequently assumed that I understood Spanish. But my experience was anything but random. I chose to visit these cities because I knew that their language communities were supported by their particular immigration patterns and policies. And even in these cities—cities I had selected specifically for their vigorous Spanish-language communities—I was never without linguistic recourse. With very few exceptions, everyone I met spoke at least some English. With
no
exceptions, everyone I encountered in any sort of official capacity spoke excellent English.

My experience may be anecdotal, but it is supported by hard data. Although not everyone who comes to the United States manages to learn fluent English, it is exceedingly rare for the second generation to avoid doing it. According to Calvin Veltman, an expert on language demographics, there are a few determinants of the rapidity with which English is acquired. Economic motivators are, of course, hugely important. But Veltman has found that the younger a person is at the time of immigration, the more extensive the language shift. Furthermore, the longer a person has been in the United States, the more extensive the shift. He ultimately concludes that “the language shift process of immigrants begins
immediately upon arrival
in the United States, progresses rapidly and ends within approximately fifteen years” (italics mine).

Empirical evidence demonstrates not only that immigrants are still learning English—and learning it well—but also that they are learning it quickly. A 1998 survey of eighth- and ninth-grade students in San Diego and Miami, two cities with extremely large immigrant communities, found that an overwhelming majority of students were extremely proficient in English. Of more than 5,000 students surveyed, 93.6 percent spoke English “very well” or “well.” Haitian and Latin American students logged slightly higher numbers—95.4 percent and 94.7 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, in an analysis of data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles survey and the third wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Douglas S. Massey, and Frank D. Bean found that 96 percent of third-generation Mexican Americans prefer to speak English at home—which is to say that only 4 percent were still speaking Spanish.

If Spanish-speakers are assimilating to English so completely, why, then, is there such a strong sense in the United States that the opposite is true? Well, it's not entirely imagined. Though retention of Spanish in the second and third generations is certainly not high by any standards, it is nevertheless slightly higher than language retention rates seen in other groups today and historically. In
Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation
, sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut conclude, “Children whose cultural background includes Spanish are more likely than other second-generation youths to preserve that language, regardless of what school they attend or what type of family they come from.”

But perhaps most important, the Latino population in the United States has been rapidly increasing. Though rates of Spanish retention are low and the speed of English acquisition is high, the massive influx of foreign-born Spanish-speakers is naturally going to affect the immediate language environment. As a result of immigration, there has, very broadly, been a slight increase in limited English proficiency in the United States over the past thirty years. The proportion of the population ages five and over who spoke English less than “very well” grew from 4.8 percent in 1980 to 6.1 percent in 1990 to 8.1 percent in 2000. According to the most recent available estimates, this number has now crept up to 8.6 percent.

These numbers probably underestimate the perceived language shift. As ethnic communities welcome steady inflows of immigrants, the usual process of language shift—limited English in the first generation, bilingual in the second generation, monolingual English in the third—is obscured, at least on the surface. When families acquire English proficiency, their economic circumstances typically improve, allowing them to move out of the gateway neighborhoods favored by new arrivals. If you walk into a border town or ethnic enclave and look around, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that these communities “just aren't learning English.”

I would suggest, however, that the rise in alarmism about the English language is also driven by factors beyond an exaggerated perception of demographic trends. As it turns out, most of the states that have passed official-English legislation are not what I would call our more multicultural regions. Despite this—or, indeed, perhaps because of this—official-English proposals in these states have garnered overwhelming support. In Alabama, 89 percent of voters supported an official-English measure at a time when less than 3 percent of the state's population spoke a language other than English at home. Of the ten states with the highest percentages of English-speakers, eight have passed legislation declaring English the official language.