Speaking Spanish in the US. Janet M. Fuller
that Spanish language loss is universal or inevitable, as we’ll see in the next section.
Spanish maintenance against the odds
As we discussed earlier in this chapter, the usefulness of the Census Bureau’s statistics about Spanish in the US is constrained by the questions that they don’t ask as much as by the ones that they do (Leeman, 2004, 2018c). In particular, we saw that the lack of a question about how well respondents speak non-English languages prevents us from gauging the degree of bilingualism among home speakers of Spanish. Another gap in the data is that the ACS doesn’t ask respondents what language(s) they know, but only whether they speak a language other than English at home (see Figure 2.2). As a result, people who know Spanish but don’t speak it at home are invisible in the Census Bureau’s statistics and thus some Spanish maintenance goes unrecorded (Leeman, 2004).
In fact, various researchers have found evidence of Spanish maintenance (in addition to English proficiency) into and past the third generation. For example, Alba (2004) found that in some border communities, such as Laredo, Texas, more than 40% of the third generation report speaking at least some Spanish at home. And in their research examining language maintenance among the children and grandchildren of immigrants in Southern California, Rumbaut et al. (2006) found that 17% of third-generation Mexican Americans surveyed spoke Spanish fluently. More anecdotally, Carter and Lynch (2015) attest that it is not hard to find third-generation bilinguals with high levels of Spanish proficiency in Miami, while Rivera-Mills (2012: 28) reports a ‘resilient use of Spanish into the fourth generation’ in her Arizona study. So too, in Anderson-Mejías’ (2005) Texas research, there were several fourth- and fifth-generation participants fluent in Spanish. Some Spanish-speakers actively resist the pressure to assimilate to English monolingualism by using Spanish in their public and private lives. For some, the anti-Spanish and anti-Latinx policies and discourse of recent years have strengthened their resolve to do so (Sánchez-Muñoz & Amezcua, 2019). One manifestation of this resistance on social media is the hashtag #stillspeakingspanishyque.
García et al. (2001) also point to the ongoing use of Spanish by Puerto Ricans in New York. Their work challenges the binary conceptualization of language knowledge and use in studies of language maintenance (i.e. either you know a language or you don’t; either you’re speaking English or you’re speaking Spanish), as well as the assumption that language shift is a one-way street. Instead, García and her colleagues describe Puerto Ricans’ patterns of language use as a vaivén (‘swaying, back-and-forth’), emphasizing not only the back-and-forth connections and mobility of Puerto Ricans in New York and Puerto Rico, but also the continued use, and symbolic importance, of Spanish even among people who more traditional, binary models might consider to have undergone shift to English.
Factors impacting Spanish maintenance or shift
In our discussion of the ethnolinguistic vitality framework we outlined the three kinds of factors that shape patterns of language maintenance and shift. In the previous sections, we saw that while favorable demographic factors can contribute to somewhat higher rates of Spanish maintenance, they are insufficient to buck the overall trend of shift to English. In particular, areas with greater numbers and density of Spanish-speakers do tend to have more Spanish maintenance, but members of the third and subsequent generations who have maintained Spanish are still in the minority.
As for status factors, language ideologies constructing the US as an English-speaking nation, the negative portrayal of Spanish and the racialization of Latinxs are all aspects of the subordination of Spanish that contribute to its intergenerational loss. These ideologies and processes (which we discuss in Chapter 4) also shape institutional support factors. Generally speaking, there is little governmental support for Spanish maintenance, and educational policies also favor shift to English. Indeed, for the children of immigrants who learn Spanish at home, the start of school often also marks the transition to English dominance. In contrast, when educational policy promotes additive bilingualism, this has been shown to have a positive impact on Spanish maintenance (see Chapter 9).
In addition to these group factors and societal trends, researchers have also examined individual factors. For example, there are differences among siblings based on birth order. Specifically, first- and/or second-born children are more likely to retain Spanish than their younger siblings (Beaudrie & Ducar, 2005; Parada, 2016; Valdés, 2005). Gender has also been seen to play a role in some cases, with girls showing higher levels of proficiency than boys (Arriagada, 2005; Lutz, 2006; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Zentella, 1997a). Some of these gendered patterns might be accounted for by social networks; among the Puerto Rican children in Zentella’s (1997a) study, girls were expected to help around the house and stick close to home, and thus were more likely to interact with other Puerto Ricans. In contrast, boys were allowed more freedom to go out of the neighborhood and thus developed more friendships with children who did not speak Spanish. Further, mothers seem to play a more important role in intergenerational transmission than do fathers (Arriagada, 2005; Velázquez, 2018). Cashman’s (2017) research on patterns of language use among queer Latinxs (discussed further in Chapter 6) offers an important reminder both that gender identities are not binary (i.e. there are more identities than just ‘male’ and ‘female’), and that there is a need to take intersectional identities into account. Along these lines, Cashman found that for some of her participants, the homophobia of their biological families led to severed ties and reduced participation in Spanish-speaking networks.
Although societal forces work against Spanish maintenance, parents’ and caretakers’ efforts to use and pass their language on to children can serve as a counter-balance (Fishman, 2001). As we noted above, parents are not always successful in their efforts to transmit their language to their children, and for this reason researchers have sought to investigate the language maintenance success stories in order to identify the specific behaviors and language practices that have had a positive impact (e.g. Schecter & Bayley, 2002; Velázquez, 2018). One finding emerging from such research is that the desire to pass on Spanish is not enough on its own. Instead, language socialization through shared activities and sustained interactions in Spanish was important as was participation in language-focused and literacy-related events, whether these were centered on religious activities, schoolwork, movie watching or pleasure reading (e.g. Schecter & Bayley, 2002; Velázquez, 2018).
It is not only parents and caretakers who make decisions for their children; children themselves and the adults they become also obviously play a role. People also change over time, and some who reject Spanish as children later make a conscious effort to recover and strengthen their ability. Silva-Corvalán (1994) uses the phrase ‘cyclical bilingualism’ to refer to the phenomenon of people learning Spanish at home from their parents, undergoing shift to English after entering school, and then seeking to reacquire Spanish in their teens or twenties. It’s likely that some such individuals are included in the reports of fourth- and fifth-generation Spanish-speakers cited above. Relatedly, Villa and Rivera-Mills (2009) use the phrase ‘reacquisition generation’ in reference to heritage speakers of Spanish who enroll in Spanish courses and, like Silva-Corvalán, they stress the motivation as being to (re)connect with ethnolinguistic heritage. Just as the loss of Spanish is often accompanied by shame and regret, maintaining Spanish and/or passing it on to one’s children is often associated with pride and satisfaction as well as other positive social indicators (Portes & Rumbaut, 2005; Schecter & Bayley, 2002; Velázquez, 2018).
In this chapter we delved deeper into the statistics about Spanish and Spanish-speakers in the US and used these statistics to demonstrate their great diversity. Speakers of Spanish claim a vast range of racial identities and national origins, and they include recent immigrants as well as people whose families have been in the US for many generations. So too, they live in many different kinds of places across the country, with some living in communities where a majority of people speak Spanish at home, and others in communities where Spanish is quite rare. The next chapter will offer a deeper exploration of this diversity, as well as a review of the history of Spanish and the people who have spoken it in what is now the US since Christopher Columbus arrived