By Rawlins Gilliland, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – For starters, most American citizens could never trace having ancestors on North American soil in 1775 when Bunker Hill was fought. Indeed, most would have zero idea what "Bunker Hill" even refers to. But picky, picky! As for sharing "Our American Values," considering that this country is divided about 50/50 on abortion rights, gun control, prayer in school (to name a few), I'm trying to figure which "American values" we specifically share that these newcomers are said to be rejecting?
The email restates the dreary myth that earlier immigrants, in contrast to this latest crop, readily abandoned their native tongues, and were miraculously absorbed into the American Way. Yes? Why then is there still, one century later, a Little Italy in New York City? Or Chinatown in San Francisco, where I once lived? But once again, picky, picky...
Obviously, Hispanics are a primary target of the emails writer's far-right wrath, noting the Metroplex with over one million Spanish speakers. When it comes to Spanish, it works about like I found it in Chinatown years ago: in the first generation born here, the older children first speak Spanish, then later, Spanish and English. The middle ones generally speak less Spanish, and the youngest perhaps little or none by the time they hit their teenage years. And their children? They may not learn Spanish at all.
Why then the breast-beating over people speaking Spanish? One answer is hilarious to a seventh-generation Texan like myself. Especially when I read a self-righteous protest that people are moving here with "no sense of our history." You see, Anglo-Irish descent though I may be, in multi-generation Texas families like my own, our great grandparents were born in Mexico, or what later became the state of Texas. The Spanish language and the Mexican culture ARE part of "our history," "our heritage." Each Christmas, Laura and George W. Bush decorated the Governor's Mansion in rich old traditional Mexican d cor as homage to this enormous part of who we are and where we came from as Texans.
The worst threat to "Our Language" is homegrown. It's a sad irony that far too many born-in-the-USA citizens routinely brutalize English with ignorant indifference, despite having grown up here with every opportunity to know better. These red-whatever color and blue Americans can't conjugate a verb properly, and have no grasp of grammar, let alone spelling or writing. Only last night, I heard a local sportscaster report that "A-Rod had already ran around first." Much of Heartland America seems to proudly hear themselves speaking "Our Language" when Toby Keith sings "Ain't Got No Boun'dries." That mocking contempt for English and its distortion of our American heritage is an indictment of multiple failed education systems, not our immigration policies.
And I ain't lyin'.
Rawlins Gilliland is a writer from Dallas.