Spanglish, the Media, and My Niece

Daniel Hernández

April 2, 2004

Amherst, Mass.

The story I did on Spanglish for the Los Angeles Times (“Hybrid Tongue or Slanguage?” Dec. 26, 2003) was meant to announce to our readers the arrival of Spanglish in mainstream media. As I reported and wrote the story, there were many invisible question marks and tangents hanging from every paragraph. All of these couldn’t get properly treated in the article, so I’ll try to examine some lingering points about Spanglish now. I’ll speak mostly of the California Spanglish ethos because that’s what I live and know best. Let me also emphasize that the following are my purely psuedo-academic thoughts on the subject, and not meant to be taken as anything else.

I’ve been interested in Spanglish as a journalistic topic because I’m a Spanglish speaker. My parents are from the border region of Baja California. My San Diego siblings and cousins comprise a generation raised with their feet planted on either side of la linea. It’s how we grew up.

In this world, Spanglish was uttered daily, but “Spanglish” was not.

The disconnect between Spanglish spoken and Spanglish recognized is what got me excited about the original idea for an article brought to me by Steve Padilla, a Times metro editor. Originally, the idea was to do a piece on Spanglish advertising. An article in Hispanic Business magazine that dealt with the language question in Latino marketing made Mr. Padilla recall a billboard for Mountain Dew he once saw that screamed “Toma this!” Mr. Padilla found it remarkable that at first he didn’t notice the fact that two languages were being mixed in that message. I found that interesting, too. Gradually Spanglish became my primary radar. I started seeing it and hearing it everywhere. Where before I wouldn’t have thought twice about Spanglishisms in my surroundings, over time things like the word PARQUEO (seen on a faded sign on a parking structure near the jails and courthouses in downtown Los Angeles) took on grand significance.

From the beginning the tough questions presented roadblocks. Should the newspaper call Spanglish a language, a slang, or a dialect? Is there cause enough to weave in the bilingual education debate? Should I discuss in detail the variety of regionalisms, the generational differences, the class differences? What about Spanglish’s history? I decided to try to tackle Spanglish through the notion that its rise in mainstream media strongly correlates to the boom in the nation’s Latino youth population, and the flicker of interest in corporate America to reach it. These two trends, I began to see, were gelling around a culture which, before, seemed so natural to me as to be unnoticeable, kind of like “Toma this!” It became apparent to me that we are witnesses to the rise of the subculture of the Spanglish generation. The way of life for us whose parents still curse and coo in Spanish, whose schooling was conducted in English, and who can jam with equally inherent knowledge to hip hop, indie rock, Latin pop, or banda.

Sure, all kinds of people speak Spanglish. Very young and very old, the highly educated, and those whose Spanglish would be more accurately classified as awkward English acquisition. There are many different kinds of Spanglish and people speak it for different reasons, often for complicated socioeconomic ones. But I feel the most interesting, ‘jazzy’ Spanglish comes from teens and young adults acclimated to America’s multicultural metropolises, particularly in California, a state with bilingual blood. Their Spanglish is conscientious without being labored, clever without being comical. These are kids who tend to be in the middle class, in the first- or second-generation, who make their lives in the East and Southeast regions of Los Angeles County, not to mention the nuclei of Orange County, the San Diego-Tijuana metro area, the Inland Empire, the Central Valley, and the pockets of Latinidad in the San Francisco Bay Area. A bicultural lifestyle unites them. Degrees of assimilation hardly matter. Spanglish kids party at all the Hollywood hot spots; they can be in rock bands, rap groups, or be pro skaters or actors and models; or highly motivated pre-law students; or future City Councilwomen or pachucos or young waiters or kitchen workers; they can be anything, but they never miss a second-cousin’s quinceñera or a Sunday carne asada. One ride in an SUV careening up the 605 freeway with Generation Spanglish at the wheel – as hip hop and rock radio stations in English blare in between sing-alongs with the Spanish pop or banda stations, as conversations revolve around mothers, college, Julieta Venegas – can be infinitely more informative on the state of Spanglish than any book or panel.

Still, encounters with Spanglish speakers in L.A. brought me head-on with the divide between Spanglish spoken and Spanglish recognized. Throughout my reporting, I found that the trick was getting members of Generation Spanglish to admit that they talked this way. Every time I brought up the topic to someone I might have overheard say the word “cequi” instead of “cake” or “pastel,” the word “Spanglish” was a red flag. The response would be one of disavowal, usually delivered (ironically) in Spanglish. Before long I had to introduce myself by saying I was writing an article on “Latino bilingualism” to keep people talking.

It was the same story with people who traffic in the selling of Spanglish culture. Flavio Morales, the programming director of the L.A.-based bilingual music television station LATV, told me he didn’t like “Spanglish” because it was a “marketing word.” Even though LATV uses Spanglishisms like “Watchalo!” on its promos, LATV bills itself as ‘bilingual’ television, not Spanglish television. Igual with the marketers I spoke to for the story, all of whom called “Spanglish” a cheesy word, an invention. The trendy tool among advertisers selling beer and burgers to young Latinos is something called “acculturation.” The marketing firms, especially the newer ones run by young Latino urbanites in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, told me they were giving “acculturation” to their clients by reducing dialogue and language in their ads. Music is now the driving narrative in television advertising targeted at young Latinos. And it’s mostly Spanish-inflected hip-hop.

Above all, this dismissing of “Spanglish” as a marker for a cultural movement demonstrates to me the ambivalence Latinos today have toward this way of speaking, or at least ambivalence with talking about talking in it. We’re uneasy about “Spanglish” just as we are unsure about Spanglish proper. Agreeing on embracing a third language? Some of us bicultural-bilinguals can barely decide whether or when to properly accent our surnames, or whether to italicize Spanish words when we use them in English prose. This is the strongest evidence that Spanglish has a long way to go before it is considered legitimate. There is no consensus. And without waiting for one, eager to capitalize on the opportunity to speak to a massive market of emerging consumers, the media has appropriated a sprinkling of what we might call Spanglish in film, television, music and advertising, but we all know most of what passes for Spanglish in the mainstream – including in the news media – is wooden, sounding nothing like the Spanglish of the streets.

If we insist on Spanglish ‘crossing over’, it will need its own media. It’s getting it, albeit slowly. Right now networks like LATV in L.A., mun2 in Miami and Urban Latino in New York are forging a bilingual-bicultural sensibility on cable television. Code-switching acts (like Akwid and Jae-P, the new L.A. banda raperos) are getting sweet record deals on labels like Univision. Radio is overdue. Someone once told me the big ugly secret of Los Angeles radio is that everyone knows there is an enormous market for a bilingual rock station, one that would play Kinky alongside Morrisey, similar to the now defunct MORE-FM station in San Diego-Tijuana, but L.A.’s KROQ continues to act as though all of its audience is concentrated in Newport Beach. Print media is behind as well. Although supermarket glossies catering mostly to Latinas print some articles twice, once in English and once in Spanish, and other regional publications such as L.A.’s Latino Weekly Review also publish in two languages, I haven’t seen a publication that merges languages within articles, and I don’t expect to see one soon. On the Internet, Spanglish content is mostly satire or kitsch.

It probably doesn’t help either that the Spanish-language media in the U.S. is as hostile or indifferent to Spanglish as is the mainstream English press. I haven’t heard a voice in the Spanish-language press that treats Spanglish with anything better than detached amusement. Pilar Marrero, the respected political columnist and editor at La Opinión in Los Angeles, recently wrote about the vice-presidential prospects for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who, as a Latino, could swing the brown vote decisively in the Democrats’ favor this November. Describing Richardson’s pedigree for the role, Marrero notes the governor is loved and respected by the political elite south of the border: “Habla un español correcto, con acento mexicano y no el spanglish de tantos otros que, en vez de producir gratitud, hace sonar los apretados dientes.” (‘He speaks correct Spanish, with a Mexican accent and not the spanglish of so many others, which, instead of producing gratitude, causes teeth-grinding.’) Meanwhile, La Opinión frequently uses English words in feature articles and headlines, and writes lovingly about the same Latino politicians we are to assume Marrero is making reference to. For my part, I love it when, say, state Sen. Gil Cedillo, who lead an effort to grant California driver’s licenses to the undocumented immigrants, attempts to instantly translate a rallying speech into Spanish before a Latino crowd, pausing, mangling words and grammar, and finally thinking ‘to hell with it’ and tossing in an English phrase which the audience understands perfectly well anyway. That’s how people in L.A. speak, and it probably gets Cedillo some Spanglish-friendly votes: ‘Es pocho como yo, I’ll vote for him.’

Spanglish and the media are still flirting with the possibilities. I’m as excited as the rest of you to see what happens next. But when I think about the future of Spanglish, I can’t help but place hope in children like my niece Bianca as the movers who will shape Latino U.S.A. in years to come. Bianca is in the first grade at an elementary school that can’t be more than a mile from the border with Tijuana. Her parents, cousins of mine, speak to her mostly in Spanish, and at school she speaks English. In her playtime, Bianca, like other talkative young children in my extended family, switches between English and Spanish literally at every other word. It is astonishing to listen to. She and her playmates speak so confidently, and so quickly, that you don’t get the sense her Spanglish will pass when she hits her teens and becomes an adult. It’s her language, and she’s probably never heard the word “Spanglish” said anywhere around her.

There’s reason to believe the true Generation Spanglish hasn’t quite arrived yet. The startling demographic data shows Latino children are the largest and fastest-growing youth grouping in the country. The cultural clues are everywhere. In a recent LA Weekly cover story about a Mexican American family trying to rebuild itself under the specter of the California prison system, the writer Celeste Fremon mentions the ex-convict’s 13-year-old daughter “Estephanie,” with a capital E. There must be tens of thousands of toddlers and teens across America with Spanglish names like Estephanie. Who knows what kind of Spanglishisms they are creating and sharing.

Personally, I like Spanglish as it is, the language that dare not speak its name. I would never drop Spanglish to a stranger unless I was sufficiently convinced that the stranger had some of their own Spanglishisms hidden in their vocabulary. This is what makes Spanglish fun (a word not commonly associated with the tongues of the canon), the seeking out of others who playfully abuse languages like you do, the cheeky secrecy of it. Spanglish is making strides, yes, but its greatest achievement so far might be that it has become modern Latinos’ most reliable social lubricant.

The rest of us can wait for Bianca and Estephanie to grow up and shape the world to their liking, in whichever language they see fit.