National Hispanic Heritage Month

Abstract

Each year, I brace for National Hispanic Heritage Month, the intensely rich and active national holiday that takes months to plan, weeks to execute, and days from which to recover. With community partners, we often discuss how to best make use of this public holiday to spotlight our most pressing needs. As an educator, I use this public holiday to show students and colleagues, who are ever-more concerned about curricular alignment with workforce needs, about the importance of my mother tongue and its superpower to bridge communication in our multilingual nation. In the United States, more than 40 million people speak Spanish as their first language and there are more than 50 million speakers of Spanish. We can use this national public holiday to unearth and commemorate more widely – and loudly – that Spanish is also an American language. However, we might also realize that honoring our national Hispanic heritage needs more than one month.

Each year, it takes months to plan, weeks to execute, and days from which to recover. It is a whirlwind of fun, joy, excitement, embraces or abrazos, pride, encounters, and learning – a celebration of heritage, cultures, histories, languages, poetry, literature, music, dance, and culinary traditions in universities, schools, cultural centers, nonprofits, cities, and even banks for National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15.

How best to use this public holiday to spotlight our most pressing needs? Do we advance the necessity for more board representation? Or do we focus on raising awareness on language access – the hiring of more certified translators and interpreters in schools and the legal and health professions? How can chambers of commerce make the business case to elected officials for removing employment barriers for undocumented and Daca-mented youth?¹ How can we advocate effectively for more access to higher education and greater representation in the K-16 curriculum?²

Hispanic heritage needs more than a month.

I. Celebrating heritage needs more than a month

As an educator, I use this public holiday to show students and colleagues, who are ever-more concerned about curricular alignment with workforce needs, about the importance of my mother tongue and its superpower to bridge communication in our multilingual nation. In the United States, more than 40 million people speak Spanish as their first language, and there are more than 50 million Spanish speakers. How many are aware that the United States is on its way to becoming the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, after our southern neighbor, whose shared border is more culturally and linguistically porous than it is recognized?³ Mexican cuisine is a staple of the American diet (and not just during Cinco de Mayo). Spanish enters our lexicon through cultural exchanges such as music and the visual arts. Puerto Rican artists with global audiences, like Bad Bunny, increasingly normalize Spanish music in the mainstream without the need for translation or crossovers into English.⁴

Not only is Spanish widely used but it is also an old language in these lands. Spanish imposed itself in Florida and the Southwestern part of what is now the United States before English dominated. In An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States, Rosina Lozano reminds us that the “long, deep, and varied history of Spanish in the United States is not well known” and that “the oversight is understandable since the major influx of Spanish speakers has occurred in the past 40 years.”⁵ A national public holiday emphasizes that Spanish has been a mother tongue for centuries in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and other parts of the Southwest before the border crossed these communities.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo from 1848 marked the end of the Mexican-American War, resulting in formidable territorial expansion for the United States as it gained Spanish speakers. Lozano notes that “treaty citizens proclaimed their American citizenship while speaking an American language: Spanish.”⁶ We can live the American dream in our preferred language(s) and Spanish is very much part of our national story.

Two presidents – Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan Democrat, and Ronald Reagan, a Californian Republican – contributed in 1968 and 1988 to solidifying today’s purposeful and festive Hispanic Heritage Month, which also honors indigeneity, Afro-Latinidad, anti-colonial legacies, and the independence from Spain of Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other countries in the Americas. As you partake in your local cultural festivities, may the multilingualism of the holiday ring loud and clear and thanks in part to the power and influence of the public humanities and arts.⁷

II. Understanding the deep-rooted history of Spanish in the United States

Unfortunately, the deep-rooted and longstanding history of the Spanish language in this country tends to be ignored or dismissed: “The presence of Spanish-speaking citizenry who preceded Anglos remains obscured in many stories of westward expansion,” Lozano writes.⁸ Education can help. Curriculum needs to represent our current and future student populations precisely as American universities face a looming enrollment cliff and need to enroll more Hispanic and Latino students, the fast-growing potential college-going population.⁹

As a modern languages professor, it can be discouraging, even Sisyphean to make the case repeatedly for the existential need for our fields precisely when communication across cultures could make various industries and sectors more innovative and competitive.¹⁰ Hearing bureaucratic euphemisms on possibly “sunsetting,” voire eliminating Spanish major programs at universities is confusing, to say the least, as community partners and employers expect the opposite.¹¹ And Spanish is more than a subject: it is an identity for millions as language is, as John Nieto-Phillips writes, “bound up in notions of identity and civic belonging… the product of historical forces spanning oceans and continents.”¹²

Struggles for educational access in Spanish are part of American history. Nieto-Phillips recounts that “during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Spanish had become a symbol of ethnic identity and pride.”¹³ Mexican-American youth in East Los Angeles demonstrated the power of mobilizing through the 1968 Walkouts or Chicano Blowouts and other protests. Similar organizing led by students, parents, and civic leaders for access to Spanish and more opportunities has occurred in other cities throughout different periods; and it will continue.

Not all Hispanics and Latinos speak Spanish.¹⁴ Nor should they be expected to. Spanish is a colonial language imposed in this part of the world by a European power at the expense of indigenous languages and communities. As Nieto-Phillips reminds us, “During more than four centuries, language proved one of Spain’s most effective tools in its global reach.”¹⁵ That imposed language has also been subverted, conquered, and transformed. A language is rarely monolingual, as it is influenced by violent and peaceful contact with other cultures and languages. A language is like a repository of sediments from nearby and faraway lands. Let us consider what foundations we lose when our multilingual society relies too heavily on monolingual institutions.

III. Embedding multilingualism in higher education to advance career-readiness

Multilingualism can enhance higher education’s relevancy internally and externally by making Spanish and other languages more embedded in missions and strategic plans.¹⁶ Employers need bilingual professionals; they expect higher education institutions to engage in relevant career-readiness. Community partners in healthcare, the legal professions, K-12, nonprofits of all kinds, and businesses often request Spanish-speaking student interns, support with language access initiatives, and culturally competent outreach to the multilingual and growing Latino community locally, statewide, throughout the Southeast, and beyond.¹⁷ Similarly, bilingual professionals share their frustration with needing to educate colleagues in their workplace that they are not (paid) interpreters or translators. They urge advocacy tools, language, to make the case for the hiring of certified and academically trained translators and interpreters to focus on their own labor responsibilities.

Imagine if we celebrated our multilingual communities all year round, and not just from mid-September to mid-October. We would probably see (and hear) more representation in our boardrooms, higher education institutions, schools, media industry and outlets, and anywhere else.¹⁸ When we value everyone’s stories and contributions all months of the year, we all benefit from wider experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and networks to lead our collective path forward, adelante.