An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States

By Rosina Lozano

"This is the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read about the use of Spanish in the U.S. Incredible research. Read it to understand our country. Spanish is, indeed, an American language."—Jorge Ramos

An American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780520969582

Rosina Lozano

Rosina Lozano is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University.

Book preview

AN AMERICAN LANGUAGE

IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES

The humanities endowment

by Sharon Hanley Simpson and

Barclay Simpson honors

MURIEL CARTER HANLEY

whose intellect and sensitivity

have enriched the many lives

that she has touched.

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Simpson Imprint in Humanities.

AMERICAN CROSSROADS

Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh

AN AMERICAN LANGUAGE

THE HISTORY OF SPANISH IN THE UNITED STATES

Rosina Lozano

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2018 by Rosina Lozano

An early version of parts of chapter 2 appeared as Translating California: Official Spanish Usage in California’s Constitutional Conventions and State Legislature, 1848–1894, California Legal History 6 (2011): 321–56.

Chapter 10 is drawn from my previously published article, Managing the ‘Priceless Gift’: Debating Spanish Language Instruction in New Mexico and Puerto Rico, 1930–1950, Western Historical Quarterly 44 (Autumn 2013): 271–93. doi: 10.2307/westhistquar.44.3.0271.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lozano, Rosina, 1978– author.

Title: An American language : the history of Spanish in the United States / Rosina Lozano.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Series: American crossroads ; 49 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017049892 (print) | LCCN 2017052400 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520969582 (Epub) | ISBN 9780520297067 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520297074 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Spanish language—History—19th century. | Spanish language—History—20th century. | Spanish language—Political aspects—United States. | Southwest, New—History—1848–

Classification: LCC PC4826 (ebook) | LCC PC4826 .L69 2018 (print) | DDC 460/.973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049892

Manufactured in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Nick, Walter, and Tomás

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Introduction

PART ONE. A Language of Politics, 1848–1902

1. United by Land

2. Translation, a Measure of Power

3. Choosing Language

4. A Language of Citizenship

5. The United States Sees Language

PART TWO. A Political Language, 1902–1945

6. A Language of Identity

7. The Limits of Americanization

8. Strategic Pan-Americanism

9. The Federal Government Rediscovers Spanish

10. Competing Nationalisms: Puerto Rico and New Mexico

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. 1849 California Constitution (English and Spanish)

2. Spanish-language loyalty oath, Santa Fe County, New Mexico

3. Fannie Vallejo Frisbie

4. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Platón Vallejo

5. County map of New Mexico

6. Bilingual storefront, Las Vegas, New Mexico

7. Interpreter on stage, Las Vegas, New Mexico

8. Bilingual ballot, Santa Fe County, New Mexico

9. Bilingual storefront, Los Angeles

10. World War II propaganda poster

11. Schoolchildren, Taos County, New Mexico

12. Bilingual storefront, East Harlem

Introduction

Quienes lean esta frase y entiendan lo que dice dominan, hasta cierto punto, un lenguaje específico, el español. Everyone who easily reads and understands this sentence has a certain level of fluency in a different specific language, English. Perhaps you read the first sentence and were confused or uncomfortable. Or you read it and patted yourself on the back for being able to understand it. Or you were so comfortable with the language that you read it as a native speaker and then had to switch gears to read the next sentence in English. Language affects both our perception of the text in front of us and our perception of ourselves. I open without italicizing the first sentence—often an invitation to skip over the words—to make precisely this point.

The relationship between language and identity forms the central theme of this book. Your ability to understand only one of the sentences at the beginning of this introduction or the ease with which you understand both mirrors the way language has shaped individuals’ sense of belonging in the United States for over a century and a half. A time-lapsed map of the United States displaying its residents’ mother tongues would include hundreds of American Indian languages that were encroached on by European imperial languages like French, Dutch, Spanish, and English. Additional European settlement and African slaves added to the mix with their own languages. Texas, New Mexico, California, and other states became part of the U.S. boundaries with Spanish-speaking settlers already in residence. This account is concerned with one of the most persistent languages on this map—Spanish—tracing how it moved from a language of governance in the mid-nineteenth-century Southwest to a language of foreignness that has both served as the antithesis of American identity and supported the broadening hemispheric goals of the United States in the twentieth century.

An American Language uncovers the history of Spanish-language rights in the United States. Language rights are usually understood today by the United Nations and UNESCO as a category of civil or human rights that broadly represent the right of an individual to determine the language used in private and public settings.¹ In 1996, UNESCO issued the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, which delineated protections for minority-language speakers. These protections included the right to be recognized as a member of a language community, the right to the use of one’s language both in private and public, the right to teach and preserve the language, and the right to have access to the language in media and official spaces.² These global guidelines on linguistic rights developed in a contemporary setting, but this does not mean that individuals did not advocate for language rights in an era that lacked the term. While the federal government did not explicitly specify any language rights historically, states, territories, and localities have extended various levels of protection to non-English speakers over the course of U.S. history. Sometimes states and territories made official, legal protections for different language communities. At other times, non-English-language speakers merely received some sort of recognition of their language needs and the state or territory left localities with the power to grant language concessions, which permitted residents a higher level of civic participation.

The United States remains one of just eight nations in the world that have no official language.³ Congress has rarely discussed language in its federal laws, nor has it often interfered with state and local language choices. Measured in political and demographic terms, English has always been the dominant language of the nation, but the United States has never been an English-only society. The long multilingual experience of the United States has remained largely absent from popular understandings of the nation’s history. The old joke—What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks only one language? An American—is not only hackneyed but also historically inaccurate. In 1790, non-native English speakers made up one-fourth of the U.S. population.⁴ European immigrants entered the country by the tens of millions throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century and initially participated in civic life in various European languages, including German, French, Italian, Polish, and Hungarian.⁵

The enduring presence of Spanish within U.S. borders serves as a lasting and contemporary reminder of what has been a long national relationship with language politics. The Latino population has grown through immigration and birth by almost 49 million since 1965, a formidable demographic expansion that has demonstrably transformed the politics of language throughout the nation.⁶ Spanish was by far the second most spoken language in the nation in 2009, with 35.4 million people speaking the language at home—and with many others having the ability to speak the language too.⁷ In 2015, the Instituto Cervantes in Spain proclaimed the United States host to the second-largest population of Spanish speakers in the world and projected it would become the largest in 2050.⁸

Given the coverage of the topic in the contemporary media, a reasonable person might conclude that Spanish speakers are receiving unprecedented Spanish-language concessions in some courts and workplaces, on ballots and campaign material, and in bilingual schools. Most of these accounts suggest that Spanish is simply a language of recent immigrants. Some celebrate the spread of Spanish speakers as part of the nation’s multicultural transformation. Others resist its use, fearing the debasement of an American culture that they view as built on the English language. In reality, these geographically limited allowances represent modest gains when considered historically. In the early years of the U.S. Southwest, Spanish was a language of governance required to build a U.S. political system. The omission of languages other than English in the larger historical narrative of the country has effectively eradicated a collective consciousness of multilingualism, which obscures the broader history of Spanish-language rights—a history that extends over centuries and that originated not in ethnic immigrant enclaves but in preestablished settlements.

Spanish in the United States is a colonial, indigenous, and immigrant language—the three major categories to which sociolinguists assign languages.⁹ In the western hemisphere, Spanish started off as a colonial language that subsumed indigenous languages. After the passage of centuries, Spanish became the native language of Spanish settlements in Louisiana, parts of the future U.S. Midwest, and the future Southwest, and the lingua franca for many American Indians who lived among these Spanish-speaking settlements.¹⁰ Over the course of the twentieth century, migration to the United States from Latin American countries has replenished Spanish’s place in the country and bolstered perceptions of Spanish as an immigrant language, distracting most from its earlier manifestations. This long exposure to the Spanish language makes it a part of the nation’s fabric; echoes of each of these stages remain in state names like Colorado, in policies put in place determining who can serve on juries, in how we respond when hearing Spanish on the street, and in the way politicians reach out during political campaigns to the robust Spanish-language media.

A LANGUAGE OF POLITICS

Colorado state senator Casimiro Barela was born in El Embudo in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, in March 1847. In 1889, he reflected on the incredible transition that his parents experienced when New Mexico became part of the United States on the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexican War the year after his birth. Barela recognized his parents as among those who, owning [sic] to the commitment of this great government, gave up their status of citizens of the Republic of Mexico. One can imagine the leap of faith they took when they renounced the government of their childhood and youth, all for a solemnly extended guarantee. Senator Barela regretted New Mexico’s long wait for statehood and countered those who believed these former Mexican citizens incapable of self-government. After all, the people of New Mexico had formed a deep loyalty to the principles of the American government.¹¹

The history of Spanish-language politics in the United States began in earnest with the takeover of former Spanish lands, enveloping Spanish speakers like Senator Barela’s parents. The most significant moment came in 1848 at the close of the U.S.-Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war, recognized not just the land itself but also the people who lived on the land. These Mexicans were settlers on territory the United States now claimed but did not control due to the presence of autonomous Indians who raided newly arriving Anglos and long-standing Mexican settlers alike. Efforts to control the land required collusion between U.S. officials and the Spanish-speaking settlers who became elected officials and created the state and territorial systems bilingually, or in some cases, almost exclusively in Spanish. Joined increasingly by Anglos, the former Mexicans made up a demographically significant segment of the polity, which excluded American Indians from citizenship and suffrage. This reality encouraged the use of Spanish in politics in the absence of any federal intervention or regulatory prohibitions. The upheaval caused by American Indian control over New Mexico’s lands, a vast territory that included portions of the current states of Arizona and Colorado, made Mexican settlers a third player in the process of U.S. settlement.

I use the term treaty citizens to unite these former Mexican nationals annexed with California and New Mexico. Article IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted U.S. citizenship to the Mexican citizens residing in the ceded territory. In a single bold stroke, the treaty extended U.S. citizenship to approximately 56,000 individuals born in California and New Mexico, without a proviso regarding race or language.¹² Although the treaty claimed to accept all Mexican citizens as U.S. citizens, indigenous citizens of Mexico from California and New Mexico were not treaty citizens. The Mexican government recognized the Pueblos as citizens, but the United States did not, and Pueblos who lived in settlements near Mexican villages and towns in New Mexico found the treaty’s promises especially hollow. Californios and nuevomexicanos—Mexican settlers living in California and New Mexico, respectively—became U.S. citizens who proved crucial to the initial creation of U.S. political institutions throughout the Southwest. Treaty citizens’ origin point for citizenship also differed from the other major Mexican territory to join the United States in the 1840s—Texas. When Texas became a state in 1845 it already had an overwhelmingly Anglo population who controlled the state government and kept Spanish from becoming a language of politics. Language and citizenship together united treaty citizens.

Treaty citizens had legal citizenship and therefore could claim belonging as an American.¹³ For this reason, throughout the text I refer to people designated white, other than treaty citizens, as Anglos rather than Americans. The treaty made no mention of language rights, but over time former Mexican citizens used the treaty to advocate for their right to access their own language. The treaty became a sort of amulet that treaty citizens gripped tightly and held up as proof of their rights in the years that followed the U.S.-Mexican War. They used the treaty largely metaphorically to support their claims to what they interpreted as the rights of full citizens.

Treaty citizens and their descendants repeatedly returned to the treaty as their origin point as Americans. There is no evidence that the treaty was broadly circulated or studied, but its invocation in many speeches and petitions suggests it became well known as the arbiter of their civil rights. Into the late twentieth century, Spanish-speaking natural-born citizens pointed to the treaty to protest policies that made them second-class citizens and to highlight the illegality of the injustices that the U.S. government and political system directed toward them because of their racially ambiguous social status.¹⁴ While the U.S. government legally and officially considered ethnic Mexicans white people, they remained nonwhite in the eyes of many Anglos.

Treaty citizens were the first geographically dispersed, politically significant, and racially ambiguous group to gain U.S. citizenship.¹⁵ Historians should consider their dichotomous political and social status in conversations of how race or difference shapes citizenship—a discussion that often begins with the millions of former slaves who became citizens two decades after treaty citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment (1868).¹⁶ Former slaves did not have racial ambiguity in the United States; over time, they were legally subjected to the one-drop rule. Whereas Blacks were black if they had any African ancestry, treaty citizens retained white status even though many Spanish settlers had relations—both forced and consensual—with American Indians, which resulted in a population that Anglos often categorized as mixed race. Use of the Spanish language became an important distinguishing factor for federal and territorial officials in determining who was a treaty citizen and who would receive federal services as members of federally recognized indigenous tribes. Treaty citizens’ designation as legally white often resulted in political citizenship in the form of electoral protections and court proceedings but not social citizenship in the form of acceptance as fully integrated members of American society.¹⁷ Treaty citizens’ distinct cultural affiliations—including language—and their often darker skin marked them as separate in the nativist view of Americans as white and English speaking.

Aside from the treaty, treaty citizens had little in common. The majority of them could not communicate easily with one another across the vast territory and could do little to secure rights as a group. They did share the Spanish language though. When treaty citizens were absorbed into the United States they operated local governments, where they remained the majority, in Spanish out of necessity. After the initial unifying moment of 1848, the language experiences of treaty citizens in the Southwest diverged dramatically. California received statehood in the legislative political Compromise of 1850, whereas New Mexico remained a territory until 1912. New Mexico’s boundaries shrank, as large portions of the territories of Arizona and Colorado were carved out of its territory in the 1860s. Colorado obtained statehood in 1876, while Arizona waited with New Mexico until 1912. Treaty citizens provide a point of commonality to gauge the conditions that created distinct language outcomes and permitted some regional dialect variations.

The comparison of states and territories is one of the book’s major analytical threads. California’s statehood status and demographic shift led to a rapid conversion to English in all aspects of life, which contrasts with the situation in New Mexico, whose long territorial status allowed its language use to remain distinct from the rest of the nation. New Mexico’s treaty citizens dispersed across three states, each with dramatically different language concessions and language politics. The Colorado constitution included provisions for Spanish until 1900, while the Arizona legislature hardly gave any Spanish-language concessions. New Mexico’s territorial status and demography enshrined Spanish as the default language of elected officials for decades. This legacy contrasts with California, where English was firmly entrenched in political and legal policies by the end of the nineteenth century. The 1879 state constitution revoked non-English-language rights in concert with the broader national tightening of requirements for citizenship and residency, including the end of Reconstruction protections for Black citizens and the start of Chinese immigration restriction.

Statehood became a major political goal for Anglo settlers who arrived in western territories during the nineteenth century. States could create an independently funded legislative, legal, and educational system; states, unlike territories, sent voting members to the U.S. Congress. In contrast, territorial status left residents under the governance of the federal, executive, and legislative branches. Congress paid territorial wages and printing costs and confirmed territorial laws.¹⁸ The president chose the major territorial executive and judicial officials. Territories often lacked the funding to create robust educational systems.¹⁹ A long territorial tenure like that experienced in New Mexico diverted political and organizational resources toward the drive to obtain statehood—energy and advocacy that could have been mobilized to achieve a more robust state government and infrastructure. The wait for statehood, however, had the effect of allowing Spanish speakers to retain political power in Spanish.

The politics of language provides a lens to view changes in how nationalism is practiced, for language has served and continues to serve as a marker of power. Americans’ ideas of nationalism are constantly changing and being reassessed. Looking at how elected officials and the general populace respond to the presence of large numbers of Spanish speakers explains how different interpretations of Americanness are formed. The reasons for these interpretations range from the types of opportunities available to non-English speakers in the United States to their sense of belonging as full citizens of states with voting members in Congress. Territorial residents could remain distant from the more popularly accepted national expectations and had a different politics of language.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the desire for U.S. expansion or empire still defined and dominated the country’s priorities, which outweighed a unified form of nationalism on language.²⁰ Anglo settlers and the government often saw eventual Anglo settlement as the solution to all problems in a territory occupied primarily by nonconforming citizens. Treaty citizens and their descendants would become diluted, many believed, as Manifest Destiny made its seemingly inevitable march across the continent. The federal government accepted Spanish-language use in the Southwest as an impermanent practice. Congress never discussed making the United States a bilingual nation like Canada, which officially embraced bilingualism in the 1860s.²¹ Instead, federal officials assumed English was the inevitable dominant language in former Mexican lands, even though the legislature did little to support this transition in the nineteenth century. But once accepted, treaty citizens’ use of the Spanish language was difficult to dismantle. As mainstream ideas of American identity solidified nationally at the turn of the twentieth century, belonging as an American included using the English language. This shift left treaty citizen families (the descendants of treaty citizens whose citizenship remained tied to the treaty even though they were natural-born citizens) torn between language and citizenship, two core aspects of how they chose to identify themselves.

The second major transition for Spanish-language speakers in the United States occurred half a century after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, also because of a war. In 1898, the United States added the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to its territories. The federal government also made Cuba a protectorate and had significant oversight over the Cuban government and educational system. The experiences of this new group of Spanish speakers tied to the United States show just how much the United States had shifted its views on Spanish by the start of the twentieth century. The changes moved Spanish increasingly from a regional language of politics to a language with political implications for the United States.

A POLITICAL LANGUAGE

Four distinct groups joined treaty citizen families as speakers of Spanish in the United States in the twentieth century: those added as a result of the Spanish-American War, those who crossed the border, those who lived in Latin America, and those who chose to learn Spanish. Spanish speakers added by the Spanish-American War used varying degrees of Spanish in different aspects of their lives. Elite Filipinos operated the Spanish colonial government and the islands’ limited schools largely in Spanish, but most Filipinos spoke at least one of the over one hundred languages and dialects native to their archipelago. Puerto Rico, by contrast, presented a population of almost a million Spanish speakers. Mexican immigrants escaping the violence of the Mexican Revolution who took advantage of surplus agricultural and industry jobs became another new and large group of Spanish speakers starting in the 1910s. These Mexicans quickly came to outnumber treaty citizen families in the Southwest (though New Mexico received far fewer of these immigrants than its neighbors). U.S. political and economic interest in Latin America explains the final two groups of Spanish speakers. Latin Americans who visited the United States became watchdogs, with journalists sharing the conditions of Spanish speakers in the United States with readers in Latin America. Finally, Anglos across the country began learning Spanish in the hope of taking advantage of Latin American business or political opportunities, making Spanish the most learned non-English language in the early 1940s. Spanish speakers and interest in Spanish remained a constant presence in the United States throughout the early decades of the twentieth century.

As the influence of Spanish as a language of government in the Southwest declined, Spanish became a language with competing political meanings. New Mexico’s use of Spanish as a language of governance largely disappeared in the 1930s. After nine decades, Anglo visions of English as the language of government prevailed but not to the complete cultural exclusion of Spanish. Citizenship did not bind these Spanish speakers; most Mexican immigrants lacked the ability to make claims to language rights as citizens. Mexican immigrant efforts to organize in Spanish came into conflict with a strong Americanization movement that sought to eradicate undesirable Mexican cultural traits and teach American ones, including the English language. The prevailing view of Spanish by U.S. citizens as the language of Mexican migrants, whom they deemed undesirable, shifted the politics of the Spanish language to discussions of eradicating a radical and foreign language. But Anglo views of Spanish encompassed more than just Americanization.

A countervailing view of Spanish opened up the possibility that Spanish served another purpose. Supporters of Pan-Americanism—both in the United States and in Latin America—encouraged Spanish-language instruction in order to prepare ambitious young people for economic and political opportunities available in Latin America. Spanish therefore became a political language that would help the United States attain power in the hemisphere and then globally in the twentieth century. In Puerto Rico, colonial subjects’ (and after 1917, citizens’) rejection of the English language allowed Puerto Ricans to use the Spanish language politically to distance themselves from the United States and to retain political and cultural autonomy.

Views of the Spanish language by elected officials and the general public in the Southwest and in Washington became increasingly contradictory in light of the simultaneous presence of the rhetorics of Americanization and Pan-Americanism. The politics surrounding those who spoke the language and the reasons they should be permitted to retain it or acquire it show that even when Spanish concessions disappeared from the law, the United States never escaped the political implications of the Spanish language.

LANGUAGE, NATIONALISM, AND MIGRATION

Examining the politics of Spanish-language use in the United States reveals how the idea of the nation has evolved over two centuries of global migration and integration. The United States is not a monolingual exception in a multilingual world; different states and localities have always acknowledged the presence of languages other than English. Historians and the general public have largely interpreted the early politics of Spanish as a history of minoritization, loss, or perhaps, for the more optimistic, continuity. I tell a different story here, one of migration and of how speakers of a nondominant language challenge citizens’ understandings of their own nationalism.

I am fascinated by how the totality of Spanish-language politics offers an entry point into a story that not only transcends individual states, territories, and communities, but is larger than the United States. Focusing on Spanish shows the ramifications of persistent migration, which is the factor that sets Spanish apart from every other non-English language in the United States. While some immigrant language groups—especially German—experienced many decades of renewal, Spanish speakers have become the major story of the twenty-first century, due to Latin America’s proximity to the United States and the sheer number of immigrants who have chosen to enter the country.²² Their desires for recognition, to make a political impact, and to embody cultural or economic change encounter opposition from long-standing citizens. This fissure in ideas, values, and practices often precludes mutual understanding.

The story of how the United States has responded to the presence of a distinct language group that continues to replenish itself connects the country with the global movement of people—a trend that has become a global dilemma.²³ It may seem counterintuitive, then, that this book focuses on Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens. Yet without the original Spanish settlements, the treatment of Spanish in the United States would more closely resemble that of other immigrant languages. Through the experience of the treaty citizens, it is possible to interpret the ramifications of migration from Spanish-speaking countries for the politics of the Spanish language as a whole. Analyzing the role of Spanish-speaking institution builders grants a broader understanding of the arc and privileged position of the place of Spanish in the United States.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Latinos surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. The last wave of immigration from Latin America, combined with internal migration from the Southwest, has resulted in Latinos becoming political players in such unlikely places as North Carolina, Georgia, and other areas not associated with long-standing Latino communities. The concerns with migrant belonging, cultural shifts and exchange, and generational upheaval are not unique to the Southwest or the United States. This longer history provides a new perspective that supplies evidence of Spanish having a historical role as a language of politics. This evidence counters the views of the media and federal officials who are involved in debates over the use of language in the country and who interpret Spanish solely as an immigrant or foreign language.

LIVING LANGUAGE

Jefferson Martenet, an Anglo migrant who arrived in California in 1852 from his native Baltimore, joined the xenophobic Know-Nothing party and the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856.²⁴ At first glance, he would seem to have no real connection to californios or Spanish; if anything, one might expect that he was repelled by them. But in an 1853 letter home, he wrote about a certain hombre and the Sierra Nevada (Snowy Mountains) and used the terms sombrero and zapatero.²⁵ Martenet was just one of many Anglos who came to California with no previous knowledge of Spanish but adopted Spanish phrases or learned the language as a marker of their new home and as a means of transacting business with treaty citizens.

This flexible approach to language was, of course, a two-way street. The Civil War captain Porfirio J. Jimeno was educated on the East Coast and came from a prominent californio family.²⁶ In 1865, he wrote to his uncle Pablo de la Guerra, a californio statesman from Santa Barbara, using English more than Spanish but including what could be described as an early form of Spanglish. Hemos tenido un lindo viaje de Drum Barracks a este punto.* ‘Via hell!’ alias ‘Carrisso Creek,’ he wrote as he traveled through the Arizona territory.²⁷

The history of Spanish-language politics in the United States is dynamic and nonlinear. Both Spanish and English are living languages and have regularly been altered by new speakers and writers who adopt words and phrases—either completely or in slightly altered form—from each other as well as from other languages. The languages themselves have never been uniform. The Spanish heard throughout the United States includes various regional vocabularies, along with the dialects stemming from the many countries and territories that are points of origin for the current Latino population. Spanish-language words or derivations are often spoken or written with no recognition of their Spanish origins. Place-names like San Francisco, San Diego, Nevada, Montana, and Colorado, along with common words including patio, plaza, vanilla, canyon, tornado, mustang, and corral, demonstrate the legacy of Spanish in the United States. Spanish itself has changed to such an extent that there is an Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (North American Academy of the Spanish Language). This institution serves to preserve and draw attention to the particular estadounidismos—the specific uses of the language that originated in the United States—in a bid to convince the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy to establish norms for this form of the language.²⁸ The mixing and melding of new concepts and forms of expression have left each language richer.

Spanish-language quotations throughout this book hint at the changing texture and flavor of the written language over a hundred-year period. By including the original Spanish, I hope to provide a small snapshot of both formal and more casual linguistic choices. The alternative—providing a translation without the original text—offers only one possible interpretation rather than permitting those who know Spanish to read and judge the sentiment and meaning for themselves. The quotations reflect regional variations in dialect, vocabulary, and slang but also show how even formal language changes over time. For these reasons, Spanish-language quotations appear as the authors wrote them, without editorial intervention. The best crowd-sourced English-language translations follow in parentheses or in notes.²⁹ This approach serves as a reminder of the presence of Spanish in political, economic, and social contexts and reaffirms the language choices made by the historical actors.

SOURCES AND SCOPE

In 1889, the treaty citizen and village teacher Jesús María Hilario Alarid published a poem on the virtues of using Spanish in the United States. Titled El idioma español (The Spanish Language), the poem reflected nuevomexicano pride in Spanish and argued for its retention broadly in the extensive Spanish-language press: Que el inglés y castellano/Ambos reinen a la vez/En el suelo americano (That English and Spanish/Both reign at once/On American soil). Alarid saw Spanish as the major language of culture that originated in Spain and should be kept even as the community learned English. His poem showcased a major argument for Spanish-language retention, even as he conceded English was the language of government.³⁰

Treaty citizens’ commitment to Spanish abounds in traditional sources like Spanish-language newspapers, but it also appears in sources more rarely explored by historians, including territorial and municipal records, state session laws and journals, federal official letters, political party collections, election rolls, and Senate hearings. While treaty citizens often initiated the discussions, federal officials also spoke of Spanish concessions among themselves and Congress determined federal programs or translation support for territories.

This book uses all of these sources to reconstruct a largely literate, and therefore often top-down, history of official policies for the Spanish language. While accents, vocabulary, and choices of language are highlighted throughout the book whenever possible, the vast majority of the sources uncovered are written, rather than oral, which means that literate male elites—state builders and officeholders of some privilege and means—dominate the sources and, by extension, this book. Nevertheless, I have attempted to incorporate individual desires and community language aspirations into this admittedly policy-driven history. I have endeavored to balance a broad range of Spanish-language politics and Spanish speakers’ preferences to provide extensive coverage of the place of Spanish in the Southwest and the nation.

An American Language is a political history of language and identity organized in ten chapters in two parts. The first five chapters deal with the crucial factors that permitted Spanish to become a language of Southwest politics. The chapters together show how treaty citizens dealt with their new lives in the United States and explain why elite treaty citizens chose to invest their limited political capital in language rights and a U.S.-based political system. The primary and immediate motivating factor for treaty citizens was land, the focus of the first chapter. Treaty citizens prioritized their ties to the land over the draw of resettling in Mexico, which would have permitted cultural retention. Precarious elite landownership enabled Spanish to emerge as a language of governance in the Southwest, a display of power considered in the second chapter whose manifestation is most visible in the official translations commissioned at the state, territorial, and federal levels. The staying power of these translation concessions is explained in chapter 3, as it correlated with individual and collective opportunities to learn either Spanish or English. Chapter 4 recovers the formation of a bilingual form of political engagement from the legislature to elections to newspapers. The story of treaty citizens and language remained important in New Mexico, where it was largely undetected nationally until a well-publicized Senate visit in 1902, a story that unfolds in chapter 5. Part 1’s five chapters follow the arc of treaty citizens and their descendants’ use of Spanish as a form of political power and as a core marker of their identity.

Part 2 traces the shifting and competing political uses of Spanish in the United States. The five chapters in this part consider Spanish speakers who originated beyond the Southwest in relation to long-standing Spanish speakers in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Chapter 6 discusses how Spanish speakers used the language to create opposing identities as citizens and migrants. The gradual loss of Spanish as a major political language in New Mexico by the 1930s meant the end of Spanish as a language of government within the contiguous United States. While the loss was a victory for the idea of Americanization, the long use of Spanish in New Mexico’s government was also a testament to the staying power of bilingual governance in the country. Spanish speakers faced a formidable foe in the supporters of Americanization. Fiscal limitations and disinterest hindered educators’ ability to adequately implement English-only preferences, as I describe in chapter 7. School districts often prohibited Spanish, but somewhat counterintuitively, they also often segregated Spanish-speaking students from English-speaking ones (often for racial, rather than language, reasons).³¹ Americanization sentiments never fully dominated, however, in part because they were at odds with the rising interest in Pan-Americanism. Chapter 8 examines how Spanish speakers used the national interest in Pan-Americanism to elevate their native tongue’s importance; it could now be employed as a form of U.S. nationalism. The competing efforts of Americanization and Pan-Americanism expose a contracted American self-image that increasingly disconnected speaking Spanish from U.S. citizenship, even as the country embraced the language in order to achieve new hemispheric economic and political goals.

These broader conflicting national Spanish-language policies and interests intensified during World War II and are the focus of the final two chapters. Chapter 9 turns to federal agencies that employed members of the ethnic Mexican community; the government agency archives at times offer a remarkable understanding of how geography and a region’s relationship to Mexican immigration resulted in Spanish speakers’ distinct relationships with the Spanish language and the nation. Chapter 10 continues with a close analysis of a 1943 Senate hearing in Puerto Rico that opposed Spanish-language use at the same time that New Mexico revisited compulsory Spanish instruction statewide. It argues that Spanish became a language of culture and a form of respect for the past in New Mexico, whereas in Puerto Rico it remained a language of government and a necessity in society. Finally, the epilogue turns to the post–World War II era, when the mass arrival of Latino immigrants transformed U.S. language politics in a number of ways.

The politics of the Spanish language in the United States began as a regional story but has become national. Stories of Spanish-language use, varied in topic and impact, emerge from all parts of the United States. Puerto Rico persists as a Spanish-speaking territory. U.S. cities owe their resilience and revival in large part to Latino and immigrant workers and their vibrant neighborhoods and businesses.³² Scientists and educators have made an about-face; in the 1930s many concluded that bilingualism was akin to a disability that led to a lower IQ, whereas today bilingualism is embraced as a marker for a healthier, more elastic, and more agile brain for the old and a positive model for early language development in babies and youth.³³ In 2016, California repealed an anti–bilingual education proposition voted on in 1998; in 2017, it introduced legislation to permit diacritical marks in official records to be more cognizant of family, tradition, and identity.³⁴ Affluent communities like Palo Alto, California, and Princeton, New Jersey, have joined districts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Miami, Florida, in creating Spanish-immersion elementary programs that support the values of bilingual education. And educators more generally espouse the benefits of bilingualism for all students.³⁵

Despite these successes, the larger public and the government have almost exclusively treated Spanish as an immigrant language in the twenty-first century, with no perceived rights or precedence rather than as a partner in governance and society.³⁶ By the end of the twentieth century, Spanish’s transition from a language of politics to a political language was largely complete. U.S. English, an organization hoping to make English the official language of the nation, and rising anti-immigrant sentiment in state politics won many successes in the 1980s and 1990s just as the largest boom in Spanish-speaking immigrants increased discussions about the need for and importance of bilingualism. While many academics, educators, and elected leaders in certain parts of the country see the presence of Spanish (and other languages) as a net positive, others denounce immigrants’ use of foreign languages (particularly when those immigrants are undocumented). In 1995, Texas state district judge Samuel C. Kiser accused the mother of a five-year-old of effectively abusing her child by speaking to her only in Spanish. This was too much even for U.S. English, which denounced the judge’s attempt to regulate the private language choices of a family.³⁷ In 2017, Oklahoma state representative Mike Ritze suggested all non-English-speaking children should be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which would then determine their citizenship status.³⁸ Counties in states like Georgia are fielding (and at present denying) requests to offer bilingual ballots and other social services in Spanish.³⁹ These perpetually competing forces make language politics especially compelling; and this later clash, far from a brand-new development, marks the interaction and coexistence with Spanish speakers as a recurrent issue.

As these opposing reactions to the presence of Spanish-speaking immigrants show, the Spanish language is used by politicians, courts, and nativist organizations as a test of sorts, a test that determines who is deemed American in the United States. Spanish serves as a marker of difference and has