The Spanish language has been spoken in the United States for nearly two centuries, and it will be widely spoken for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Spanish is today at the center of a vortex of U.S. fears, realities, and myths: it has no official approval by any university or state agency and yet it is widely spoken throughout the country; it is the most-studied, least-well-learned, second language of the United States. It is in fact a second-class language that makes possible debates on “bilingual education” that are not about all children learning two languages but about some “alien” children gradually unlearning the ethnic oral tongue that, apparently, does not require complex grammar or phonetic instruction. There is the strong fear that Spanish is killing off English; it is considered the language of the largest minority, and yet a small percentage of this minority, if by minority we mean citizens, fluently speaks it or is fully able to use it as a written form of expression at all levels (academic, literary, professional). Spanish is today one of the world’s most commonly spoken languages, with a long and distinguished literary tradition, but it has no cachet among mainstream U.S. literati. A foreman in rural Oregon or a physician in a community clinic in East Austin ought to mumble it but not the erudite Princeton professor of American or European history. In the United States, it is the language that everybody, from President George W. Bush to any PhD candidate who needs a second language requirement in order to graduate, claims to speak un poquito, even if they can hardly write a line of it. It is the most feared language, and yet it is the only one that is believed to be acquirable by either contagion or osmosis, not by extensive reading and writing. And, having the historical opportunity to create a polyglot society, there remains in the United States a strong fear about the end of their monolingual world: the logophobia of, say, politicians in California or professors at Harvard, the absurd cult of monolingualism.

Indeed, in the United States no one speaks the one-and-only form of Spanish, in the same way that no one speaks the one-and-only form of English. All conceivable different versions of both languages are combined and spoken simultaneously in the United States. This is an unprecedented and incredible linguistic and social fact. Many had believed that America brought about the end of “proper” English. For Henry James, U.S. English represented a degeneration of the “true” English language as a result of too many influences, which explained “the imperfect disengagement of the human side of vowel sound.” U.S. English had betrayed the roots of proper English, creating an indiscriminate use of the letter r.¹ Nevertheless, as did French, German, or Spanish nationalisms with their respective languages, U.S. nationalism made U.S. English into the “spirit of the new nation.” As Borges’s “Greek in the Catilo” — “the name is the archetype of the thing” — U.S. patriotic poets believed that all democracy, liberty, and equality were embodied in “the honest words” appropriated by U.S. English, and thus the word “Mississippi,” said Whitman, “winds with chutes” and “rolls a stream three thousand miles long.”²