T Jr Hardman
May 24, 2006, 11:10 AM
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Jordan wrote (nd I had to do some reformatting):
> Hardman said:
>
>
>> Ah, given that the high-school dropout rate for even
>> 3rd generation Mexican-Americans hovers close to 50 percent,
>> social mobility -- in the terms most other Americans
>> understand it, meaning going to college and becoming
>> upper-middle-class -- doesn't much seem to concern them.
>
>
> Mexican-Amercians want to make money. They want to make money both for
> themselves and for the families that they want to have and support.
> They are quite aware that if they are _completely_ ignorant of English,
> their choice of jobs is even _more_ limited, for ANY level of education
> (ranging from "college degree" to "total illiteracy") for the simple
> reason that Spanish only lets them talk to other Latinos, while English
> lets them talk to almost all other people in America, _including most
> immigrants from places OTHER than Latin America_ (and of course the
> combination of Spanish AND English is _especially_ useful)_.
>
> It happens that it is more difficult to learn a language in adulthood
> than in childhood. Consequently, despite the enormous usefulness of
> English to a Mexican immigrant in America, some are either unable or
> unwilling to learn it. However, second and later-generation immigrants
> grow up _in_ America and are consequently exposed to it. It is
> difficult for a second-generation immigrant to _avoid_ learning at
> least some English (even if for some insane reason he decides he
> doesn't _want_ to); by the third generation the Mexican-American has
> grown up with parents who probably speak at least some English and will
> probably go to a school where most of the people speak English and some
> speak little or no Spanish, even in a Latino neighborhood.
Well, in almost any neighborhood whatsoever, a Mexican-American child
will have learned English in public school, assuming that they go to
public school rather than a private school. One might also reasonably
presume that a private school might be of higher quality and that their
English instruction might be better than that received in a public school.
However, there is still an abysmally high dropout rate from highschool
in the "latino" community. There's an even higher rate of "failure to
try" graduating from college. This isn't to suggest that there are no
"hispanic" doctors, lawyers, or engineers; there certainly are quite a
few such degreed professionals but the per-capita rate is among the
lowest for any ethnic-origins group.
Quite a lot of "hispanic" Americans drop out and enter the trades, and
there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of the females who drop out
drop out because they're pregnant. Whether pregnancy is used as an
excuse because they're not doing well in class, that's all arguable.
However, this might have the side-effect that the girl has to rely on
her extended family, perhaps especially on the grandparent generation,
to help with child-care while she works. Thus, the Old Country influence
would be perpetuated, along with a native immersion in the Old Country
language.
>>>The only way for this to change would be if so many Latin American
>>>immigrants entered America _so_ fast that the _koine_ became Spanish.
>>>But that would require some sort of _forced_ migration to America -- it
>>>wouldn't happen fast enough naturally even with wholly open borders.
>>
>> Ah, the point you might be missing -- and I can presume only
>> that you must not very much get out of the house, or
>> your upper-class neighborhood, and haven't seen what's been
>> happening.
>
>
> ???
>
> I grew up in the Bronx, in New York City (which has a huge Puerto Rican
> minority) and I currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area (which has
> a huge Mexican minority). I have lived in an "upper-class
> neighborhood" for 3 years out of the 41 I've been alive, and that was
> 1986-89, not recently. So I don't have a clue what you imagine my life
> to be like.
>
> I'd assume you were listening to Coyu except that _his_ fantasy version
> of my life is a lot stranger, and includes criminal enterprises, the
> abduction and rape of young girls, and me weighing around 500 lbs, so
> your fantasy version is obviously rather different ...
I don't have a fantasy about you, as this is probably the first time
I've encountered you here on UseNet.
My point was that all over the USA, the influx of about
one-million-per-year of illegal aliens, mostly Mexican, has been
distributing itself all over the country for the last decade. You might
indeed notice it less in California, as there is a very sizable
Mexican-American (or "chicano") population which probably is a valuable
force in terms of assisting assimilation of illegal aliens. But
elsewhere in the States, we see a lot of formation of enclaves, and they
often become rather insular, especially in their monolingualism. Call
such places "Little Mexico" or "Little El Salvador". In such places, we
see the births of American citizen children who arrive at first grade in
public school and they cannot speak a word of English. In my own area,
it's worse; there are so many national origins (and different languages)
and so many of the parents are working two or more jobs, that unlicensed
baby-sitters wind up caring for far too many children and perhaps most
of those children will speak a language different from that of the
babysitter. As you mention below, the only language in common may be
English, and if the babysitter can't speak that fairly well, the English
is learned from the babysitter's television. The local schools had a
problem with kids showing up for first grade speaking perfectly-accented
English but with a vocabulary of only about 300-400 words, which is far
too limited a set to receive useful instruction. These "alingual"
children really startled the educators, especially when they started
showing up in fairly large numbers. Interestingly, this was far less
common among the children whose parents spoke Spanish at home, as that
was a far larger community and the chances of the babysitter speaking
that were greater than of speaking, for example, ki-Swahili.
Thus I would posit that effectively, in such communities, Spanish is
indeed the Koine, or nearly as much the Koine as is English.
>> For one, you have a population which has very decreased growth,
>> and which has an elder-heavy population curve.
>> Sure, the vast majority of Americans are anglophone
>> ("english speaking") but they're also aging, and are
>> demographically moving towards an average age
>> above the reproductive age. Remember, when the
>> average woman is post-menopausal, it's very likely that
>> you have a decreasing population of nubiles.
>
>
> Except that non-Latino immigrants normally do _not_ match the
> demographic picture you've just drawn, and for the most part non-Latino
> first-generation immigrants are much more likely, if they speak any
> language other than the one of their original nationality, to speak
> English (rather than Spanish). This is also, btw, true of Latino
> immigrants except that the language of their original nationality,
> which they _will_ speak, IS Spanish.
Which only supports my statement that Spanish is becoming at least "the
alternative Koine".
> The Latino immigrant not only has to worry about how to talk to "Anglo"
> Americans. He also has to consider the question of how he is to
> communicate with (say) Chinese, Haitian, Vietnamese etc. Americans.
> And those other immigrants are much more likely to be speaking English
> than they are Spanish.
It depends where you are. There is such a large community of people who
are effectively monolingual Spanish-speakers here in the DC suburbs,
that it makes as much sense for the Korean storekeepers (for example) to
speak Espa~ol as it does to speak English. Indeed, I can think of many
specific stores where the vast majority of the clients are either
monolingual hispanophones or whose English is is such low quality that
the Koreans can't understand it. Of course, this example may be of
limited utility to my arguments, but it does illustrate that in at least
some situations, Espa~ol has become a de-facto Koine.
It's worth pointing out that I've lost count of the times I have heard
someone from the Middle East or Asia express resentment at the way that
many businesses haev bilingualized. A common phrasing of this is "why
does everyone cater to the spanish [speakers]? We ourselves had to study
English to live here, now we will also have to study Spanish? -because
if they aren't made to learn to speak English, they will continue to
speak Spanish and we will have to learn Spanish in order to do business
with them."
I'd say that when the non-hispanophone immigrants make such remarks,
it's clear that _they_ consider Espa~ol to be the alternative Koine.
>
>
>>The more they have, the harder they are to deport... and though their children will of course learn to speak English, they'll almost certainly be primarily speaking Spanish at home, and "home" includes the neighborhood. Culturally, they'll be equal parts of all-American, Old Country, and the inevitable new brew of homegrown culture that emerges in any first-generation immigration population of any size. <
>
>
> The normal pattern with immigrants to America is: first generation
> speaks the native tongue (whatever) and maybe some English; second
> generation speaks some of the native tongue and certainly some English;
> third generation speaks primarily English and maybe some of the native
> tongue. 4th and subsequent generation may know some choice phrases in
> the native tongue but are primary English speakers.
>
> The difference, _right now_, with Latin Americans is that, because of
> the huge wave of immigration in the last few decades, one is more
> likely to meet a 1st generation Latin American immigrant than (say) a
This is exactly my point.
> 1st generation Russian American immigrant. (The pattern would have
> been the opposite back around 1900, btw). And it is of course
> theoretically possible that the Latin American immigration could swell
> to such proportions that it would amount to colonization, and rather
> than later-generation immigrants learning English to talk to the
> majority population, English-speakers will have to learn Spanish to
> talk to the (new) majority population.
>
> But that's not likely -- there simply aren't enough people willing and
> able to immigrate to America at any one time to make that happen.
This was my point where I was asking you if you got out of the house much.
At least a million per year of illegal aliens -- primarily from Mexico
with most of the rest being from Latin America -- have been successfully
arriving and then staying illegally in the USA for the last 12 years or
so. That's a minimum of 10-million illegal aliens who are primarily
monolingual hispanophone. For each of those last 12 years, perhaps half
of those 10 millions have had one child per year. Of course this is a
high estimate but nobody has ever suggested that women don't have
children when having that child gives them an anchor in the USA and
makes them nearly impossible to deport. Still, that would be at the high
end, 5 million women having one child a year for 12 years, that's, what,
60 millions of kids being raised in nearly-monolingual hispanophone
homes? Of course the actual numbers aren't as high, according to the
6-year-old 2000 Census. But they're high enough to assure that Spanish
does indeed become a co-equal, if not actually to supplant, English as
the Trade Language of the USA.
>
> Sincerely Yours,
> Jordan
>
--
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to speak foolishness and remove all doubt.
--Aesop
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