Bilingual Education Worked for Me

From CNN: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich equated bilingual education Saturday with "the language of living in a ghetto" and mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages.

Not that anyone is waiting around for Newt Gringich (who?) to say anything smart or relevant, but the former Speaker of the House has touched on a very important issue. Of course, in true red-neck bigot form, he took a very logical argument and twisted it so that bloggers like me who have a huge chip on their shoulder about issues like immigration and the word "ghetto" can have a field day.

I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and I am the product of bilingual education. From kindergarten through the fifth grade, my days alternated between English and Spanish. Having been born in Brooklyn, I was placed in the English-first track, which basically meant that all of my classmates were Latino, as were my teachers, and we alternated freely between English and Spanish. Our school plays focused on Puerto Rican folk dancing and on singing songs about the coqui and dancing around a mariachi's sombrero for any which celebration of our heritage. My first boyband crush was Menudo and by the time I was ten I was too worn out to care about the New Kids on the Block.

I'm all the better for those experiences. Not only do I speak Spanish fluently, but my Spanish lessons came in handy when I took up French in junior high school (and wound up in Paris during my junior year of college). And yes, while I grew up in what most of my snooty friends would call the ghetto, bilingual education was my ticket out of the 'hood.

But that's just me.

The flip side of the bilingual education debate is that it makes learning English seem unimportant or unnecessary. If you want to broaden this debate, throw Telemundo and Univision into the mix -- are these channels vital links to one's mother tongue and to the Latin American countries, or are they a crutch that halt the assimilation process?

I can tune in and out of the Spanish-language channels and go from my cheese Mexican "novelas" to Ugly Betty. But there are also people in my family who only switch between Univision and Telemundo and after 30+ years in this country they still don't speak English.

While Newt Gingrich might want immigrants to hurry up and learn English, everyone from Pepsi to Walmart has no problem advertising in Spanish and investing millions into studying the buying habits of Latinos. And that's because in any language, it's clear that Latinos are a financial force to be reckoned with.

The problem isn't language. Latinos will be the first to tell you that view English as the language of success. But it's also the language that's being used to villify them. Not learning English is an act of defiance. If English is only good for standing up to idiots like Newt Gingrich, then why bother to learn it when there are jobs to be had that pay enough for a car, a small living space and TV to watch Univision?

The answer to that question is that you then instill an adversarial mentality into a new generation of young people who could be contributing more to this country but are too passive aggressive to do more for themselves. You then wind up with twenty-somethings who were born and raised in this country and speak neither Spanish nor English but a really bad mixture of both.

For me, English was always a vehicle for preserving my Spanish language and heritage. I thought both languages were important and so did my parents. While I have relatives who didn't learn English, I also have cousins who never learned Spanish -- I think both generations are missing out on a world of experiences and opportunities.

Bilingual education is not the problem -- it's the disdain that both groups have for one another that's halting progress.