There Is Nothing Wrong With Julián Castro’s Spanish

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/opinion/sunday/julian-castro-spanish.html

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The problem with Julián Castro’s Spanish is not whether he is an English monolingual, uses the wrong prepositions or alternates between English and Spanish pronunciation. There is, in fact, no problem with Mr. Castro’s Spanish, other than prejudice against Latino Spanish-speakers.

But as the second round of Democratic Party presidential debates approaches, you can expect to see the words “not fluent in Spanish” in articles about Mr. Castro.

For someone with a reputation for being a monoglot, Julián Castro sure does have a habit of speaking Spanish. With the words “Yo soy candidato para presidente de los Estados Unidos,” he made history, by making his announcement not only in English but also in Spanish. He used Spanish in his closing statement during the first Democratic debate. And during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, when he was a blip on only the wonkiest radars, Mr. Castro did just fine when he was asked point-blank by the Mexican-American journalist Lucía Navarro to switch from English to Spanish.

But while his fellow candidates Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg and John Hickenlooper get credit for speaking Spanish, minus the occasional slap on the wrist for Hispandering, Mr. Castro’s relationship with the Spanish language has been thoroughly picked apart. Long before he made his formal announcement, Mr. Castro faced scrutiny about his Spanish, his motivations and whether the label Latino applied to him. Some pundits hinted that Mr. O’Rourke, who likes to switch languages mid-speech, spoke better Spanish.

One thing that sets Mr. Castro apart from the other presidential candidates is that he is currently the only Latino candidate. And although running for president is something only three other Latinos — Bill Richardson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — can relate to, the policing of Mr. Castro’s language may well feel familiar to many Americans of Latino heritage.

I often see this difference in who gets praise for speaking Spanish play out in my job as a college Spanish instructor. Our language education model is geared toward teaching the O’Rourkes and Buttigiegs. We celebrate and promote the success of elite bilinguals, students whose first language is typically English. Teaching languages to monolinguals is perfectly fine; it is, mind you, how I make a living. It is refreshing to see politicians as positive role models for second-language learning.

In contrast, immigrants and people of color find themselves at the margins of language education as minoritized bilinguals. Instead of building on their multilingualism, our school systems place them in E.S.L. programs, often for longer than necessary. Language teachers share part of the blame. We have traditionally put more emphasis on correct verb endings than on the language practices of neighboring Spanish-speaking communities. When the Castros on our campuses enroll in a language class, they often end up in courses designed with Anglophone students in mind. Worse, when they take courses billed as language classes for heritage speakers, the instruction often belittles the Spanish spoken by Latinos in the United States as conversational, casual or even uneducated. This is an area where we need to do better.

To be sure, Mr. Castro himself has repeatedly stated that he does not speak Spanish fluently. He first addressed this issue when he rose to national prominence as the 35-year-old mayor of San Antonio, then again in his 2018 memoir, “An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream,” and in other media appearances. I have no trouble believing that he is sincere in his self-assessment because I have listened to many students with comparable life stories describe their proficiency in similarly negative terms.

In truth, terms like “fluent” and “bilingual” mean little because they are vague and subjective. When Latinos describe their Spanish as not fluent or not good enough, they have often internalized the idea that the Spanish spoken in, say, the West Side neighborhood of San Antonio is inferior to the Spanish spoken in Madrid, Bogotá, Colombia; or Puebla, Mexico. But to my ears, all varieties of Spanish are equally valid.

Rather than parsing the accuracy of Mr. Castro’s perception of his Spanish-speaking abilities, I find it more useful to focus on why language minorities tend to undervalue their own proficiency.

High on this list is the sense of loss associated with forced linguistic assimilation. Mr. Castro has described vividly how teachers slapped the Spanish out of his mother. It is not just your language that gets lost when this happens; you also lose the social and cultural capital represented by the language, as well as a sense of pride in your linguistic heritage.

There is also a vexing assumption that Latino identity equals Spanish proficiency, an assumption that often emerges within the Latino community itself. Mr. Castro has spoken out against the ideological trap of conflating language and identity. At its core, the belief that being Latino means speaking Spanish partakes of the zero-sum ideology that perceives languages other than English as “un-American.” When we conflate Latino and Spanish, we are essentially making a racial assumption: You look Hispanic, therefore you must speak Spanish.

By any measure, speaking and preserving the Spanish language is important for the Latino communities in the United States. The language landscape of the Latino population, however, is complex. Roughly three quarters of Latinos speak Spanish to some degree. Many, particularly third generation and after, are English-dominant or English-speaking only, and they are no less a part of the Latino community.

What makes Mr. Castro Latino is not whether he speaks Spanish. It is shared history and experience, including the deep-seated public curiosity about his relationship with Spanish. Few other communities of third-generation Americans feel the same pressure to speak their grandparents’ language as Latinos do. But instead of celebrating Mr. Castro’s linguistic heritage and his commitment to reconnecting with it, in the same way we admire Mr. Buttigieg for being a polyglot, we keep policing whether and how well Mr. Castro speaks Spanish.

Maybe it would make sense if Mr. Castro did not speak Spanish — except, if you ask me, he does.

Roberto Rey Agudo (@robertoreyagudo) is the language program director of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College and was a 2018 Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project.

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