Two Worlds Under One Country: Examining Spanish in the US

Spanish has been permeating the culture of the US more and more these days. In many states, if you vote, the instructions on voting are in Spanish, leases and other legal documents are in Spanish, and moments before the inaugural address of Joe Biden, Jennifer Lopez used Spanish alongside English in celebrating America. There are bilingual schools popping up across the US whose main selling point is dual language education. Many Americans are putting themselves on a path of learning some competency in the Castilian tongue. 

We almost saw the full legitimization of using Spanish in voter outreach for the 2016 election. Before Donald Trump was a frontrunner, candidates Jeb! Bush, Senator Marco Rubio, and Senator Ted Cruz all showcased their Spanish skills to the growing right leaning Hispanic Republican base. It has been said that the growing Hispanic presence in the US will affect voting patterns and become a powerful electoral force. Things like that have always been said since the 1970’s, and not much change happens as 50% of Hispanics are registered voters, far lower than their African-American and Anglo counterparts. Even more so, Trump doubled down on the nativist American heritage and outperformed all his Spanish speaking counterparts, and in 2020, won large percentages of Hispanics in Texas and Florida. All without Trump speaking more than “taco” and “Cinco de Mayo.”

Maybe speaking Spanish isn’t as great of a political asset as we’d like to believe? In the 2018 Texas Senatorial race between incumbent Ted Cruz and challenger Beto O’Rourke, many pundits praised Beto’s Spanish ability as an asset against Cruz. Beto actually challenged Cruz to a moderated Spanish debate, and Ted Cruz admitted he had “lousy Spanish” and declined a Spanish debate. Come election time, Beto lost by 2.6% of the vote, and in his home town of heavily Hispanic El Paso, they had a  44% of registered voter turnout. Granted, that 44% turnout was on par with presidential years, but lower than a recurring 60% and above voter turnout for African-Americans or Anglos. Hispanic lack of voting and political participation had struck again. 

Okay, so knowing Spanish isn’t some political panacea that will grant you victory in elections, nor is it necessary to win over historic portions of Hispanic votes. The English language is and will remain the dominant tongue in the United States. But let’s say you wanted to communicate as a leader towards the Hispanic peoples residing in America, speaking Spanish would be helpful to get your message across, right? Well, it turns out 17% of Hispanic peoples in the US consume their news only in Spanish, 54% consume it in English and Spanish, and a whopping 29% consume their news entirely in English. See the graph below from the Instituto Cervantes.

Maybe Trump was onto something? Politically isolating a group of people who aren’t registered to vote in an effort to rile up your nativist base wasn’t as much a suicidal political move as much as it was a calculated risk that paid off for him in 2016. Democratic candidates have been lured to throw their money and resources chasing the mythical “Latino vote”, which may never materialize in substantial numbers for the leftwing. Yes, we can all agree that Trump’s actions were classless when he demonized Mexicans and Hispanic migrants. But the Hispanic people themselves voted for the man in near unprecedented numbers, even flipping a county in Texas (Zapata County) that last voted for a Republican Presidential candidate in 1920 (Warren G. Harding) and is 93% Hispanic. 

So what is the advantage towards learning Spanish in the United States, if not for political purposes? There are more dollars to be made, for sure in some industries when you go bilingual. But in sales, sometimes speaking Spanish is an anchor, as the individuals who don’t know English but live in the United States are probably limited in their job prospects. So you’d have less potential money to earn by servicing them, than you would if you spent your time with English, monolingual or bilingual, speakers. You don’t even need to know Spanish to become the CEO of Univision. So money isn’t as big of a motivator as one would think. 

One interesting projection to note is that the future growth patterns for Hispanic Americans will most likely reach over 100 million people by 2060. Despite the recent domestic instability in the US, Spanish speaking migrants, especially from Central America and the Caribbean, continue to see the USA as the final destination for a better life. There’s also the reality that Mexico and the USA are connected joint and hip with a physical land border. That’s an advantage other immigrant groups like the Germans, Poles, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Italians didn’t enjoy. The Spanish speaking influence will always be a part of Southwestern American culture as long as a physical border exists between Mexico and the United States. Puerto Rico is also a free associated entity with the US, with very easy access to the US from PR, as they are American citizens and serve in the American armed forces. The Hispanic influence from Puerto Rico can be seen across the US as there are almost double the amount of Puerto Ricans or those with Puerto Rican ancestry living in the US than in Puerto Rico.

It may be in the US’s best interest to invest in another language of commerce as the US percentage of global GDP has been shrinking over time. The decline of the United States serves as encouragement for other nations to learn Spanish. The Chinese government has been rapidly expanding its Spanish and Portuguese language schools in China, sending over students in exchange programs to further increase trade cooperation. This is a small part of China’s massive one trillion USD global belt and road initiative meant to attract nations into its influence.  El Salvador cut ties with Taiwan in 2018 and by 2021 June will stop using US gallons and measuring food in pounds, opting to fully switch to the metric system. The approachment of China into Latin America is greeted with suspicion from Washington, but a welcome alternative for some of these countries. 

The United Kingdom also sees strength in the Spanish speaking world. Following a 2004 removal of foreign language from secondary school’s compulsory curriculum, the study of foreign languages went into a free fall, dependent on students’ interests and entry into the courses. French and German language entries each suffered a reduction of 30% since that removal. Spanish entries fell only 2% in the same time frame. On a different type of secondary exams, A Level courses for Spanish entries have increased, which were expected to enjoy a 10% increase for the 2019 year. Interestingly, the UK still controls a tiny bit of land, Gibraltar, in southern Spain, and have been for over 300 years. They too have a physical connection to La Hispanidad.

In a similar situation, Spain controls two cities in Northern Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, so Morocco has a physical and historical connection to Spanish as well. Spain has had dominion over them for almost 500 years and it doesn’t look like they will relinquish control any time soon. Moroccans are also famously multi-lingual, and Tamazight, Darija, French, and Spanish are all important languages in the North African country. Following the United States’ acknowledgment of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in 2020 December, Morocco gained some diplomatic legitimacy on their control over territory that once belonged to Spain and the Spanish speaking Sahrawis. 

Morocco isn’t the only African country with a sizable Spanish speaking population. Equatorial Guinea, a tiny country of 28,050 km² in central Africa, is the only African country which has Spanish as an official language. Since 1844 it has maintained Spanish as the preferred language of governmental and educative purposes. Most of the population has a good command over the Spanish language, with a closer dialectic similarity to Spain’s Spanish than any of the Latin American dialects across the pond.

With the US demographic changes coming, and the rise of a multi-polar world, it would be wise to invest in a rising language for the future. The United States is already a part of the Anglophone world, and nurturing a strong connection to the Hispanophone world could give the US balance in a world of a powerful China. Also, it’s the only other language one could feasibly use in the US in all 50 states that is not English. We don’t have the options of Europe where German, French, Italian, or Slavic-based language speakers are just hundreds of kms away. We only have Spanish and to the extreme far north east, French with Quebec, which Quebec already has a hard time convincing the rest of Canada to learn French.

In a way, Spanish has always been a part of US culture, and will increasingly play a part of it, though there are limits, as we’ve already discussed the political realities of Spanish. In an increasingly Hispanophone world, American parents would do well to enroll their children in Spanish speaking classes, not for the political potentials, but for the connection to another culture that spans four continents, that is the second largest language by native speakers, and the third largest by total speakers. We are already going to have a large portion of our population be Hispanic. Arming ourselves and the future youth with another language at their disposal can give us the advantage to keep competing in the multi-polar world. 

So how difficult would it be to learn Spanish or have your kids learn Spanish, as Anglophones (native English speakers)? The US Department of State has calculated that it takes an Anglophone about 600-750 classroom hours to learn Spanish. For an Anglophone to learn Chinese-Mandarin it would take around 2,200 classroom hours. The reason for the vast learning difference is that English and Spanish use the same alphabet (Latin) and share many cognates and vocabulary words that Chinese doesn’t share with English nor Spanish. The Spanish word for the English “dragon” is “el dragón”. The Chinese-Mandarin word is 龙, (pronounced Lóng). Much easier to swing back and forth from English to Spanish than Mandarin.

The same difficulty is true if you reverse the language learning process; for example, a Spanish speaker would need to invest roughly 600-750 classroom hours to learn English, and around 2,200 classroom hours for Chinese-Mandarin. A Chinese native speaker would need to invest about 2,200 hours to learn English, and the same for Spanish; however if the Mandarin speaker knows English beforehand, then the time to learn Spanish goes down to an Anglophone level, since they would already understand the cognates and Latin alphabet. 

The learning curve is on the American’s side. China has to invest thousands of extra hours to gain the same competitive advantage the US has through its natural linguistic inheritance of English as a mother tongue. That same inheritance puts the US as the world’s largest English speaking country, and thanks to its physical proximity and generous immigration policies toward the hispanophone world, the US has the second largest Spanish speaking population in the world. The US also has allies in strengthening its linguistic skills, as Mexico’s Cultural Diplomacy and Spain’s Instituto Cervantes in 2020 December announced plans to jointly help teach Spanish in the United States. If the US could educate one fourth of its monolingual English speaking population to speak Spanish, a single country would be the loudest mouthpiece for two of the largest language groups on the planet.

The question is, will the US take the linguistic advantages given to it? We have been able to get away with exerting our English without interference due to our military and financial strength established on the bones of the British Empire. The American hegemony enjoyed after WWII is eroding with the rise of developing nations across the globe. This isn’t a bad thing, it just means that we will have to adjust our skillset. To engage commercially and culturally in a multi-polar world, the US will have to learn Spanish to compete effectively in a future shared by a strong China. Morocco still maintains their Tamazight, French and Arabic connections alongside their small populace who speak Spanish. Canada’s kinship to the francophone world runs blood deep with Quebec. The US has arguably one of the strongest associations to the Hispanophone world, and as we’ve discussed above, the nation is already sitting on a golden goose of market and linguistic opportunity.  

This new necessity of acquiring a secondary language is going to be uncomfortable for some people. It might even be humiliating for folks to consider that English isn’t going to give them all the advantages as it had in the past. An intrinsic aspect about learning another language is the humbling attribute of lowering your status to speak to others. It’s an act of humility to reach out to others in their language of preference, as they are at a greater speaking, listening, reading, and writing ability than you when you’re crossing the barrier to communicate with them. You gotta put yourself in uncomfortable situations and new environments to communicate to your fellow neighbor. 

JFK’s campaign made history by going against the American language of power and influence, English. It lowered the campaign’s social status to reach the then forgotten and meager Hispanic voter base. Through service above self, there is respect to be earned and leadership to be granted. Perhaps then, in choosing a humble message, it was no accident that JFK and Jesus both rode burros to their kingdoms.