Monolingual Latinos… Who speak English
February 5th, 2006North County Times - North San Diego and Southwest Riverside County News
Here’s a twist on the Spanish/English issue, in California:
“This led him to believe that my sister and I would be better educated and successful if we only spoke English,” she said. “And he feels like he accomplished this, because my sister and I both graduated from college.”But Ponce said there are times at work when she feels that her inability to speak Spanish is an issue.
“I work with students … 60 percent of them speak Spanish,” she said. “It’s stressful when I do a parent meeting. There’s always that courtesy, that I’m letting them know that it’s me who doesn’t understand. In those situations, I feel helpless, and I feel like I’m being judged.”
The thing about language policy is that it’s really hard to generalize. It’s easy to argue just about any point of view on language policy, because you will always find someone whose live is a living testament to the advantages of some particular policy. And yes, that includes the whole “English only” thing — there are Latinos, for instance, who argue that English only is the most fair way to treat immigrants to the United States, and that as a result of that policy they are healthy and wealthy and wise.
I myself advocate as much bilingual education as is possible. But even I find myself struggling to deal with facts like this:
The solution might seem as simple as having everyone learn both languages. But Schmidt notes that though many people are in favor of bilingual education, they often don’t want it to be taught in schools because it costs taxpayers more money.
It’s easy to be an idealist about language policy. I imagine it’s not so easy to be an idealist who has thousands of people banging on the door demanding their slice of the annual budget.