The Psychological Dilemma
Many educators, politicians, and cultural scientists, even within the non-native-English-speaking community, recommend total linguistic and cultural assimilation.
Richard Rodriguez
Rodriguez (1982), for example, an Hispanic who was forced to assimilate in order to succeed, actively pushes for assimilation. He labels bilingual education “a scheme proposed in the late 1960s by Hispanic-American social activists” (p. 11), and he accurately defines it as “a program that seeks to permit non-English-speaking children, many from lower-class homes, to use their family language at school.” (p. 11). He claims that the loss of one's personal, private, native language is necessary to gain social status. Then he steps over a line, with no apologies, where many dare not tread, and responds to the advocates of bilingual education:
I hear them and am forced to say no: It is not possible for a child – any child – to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life – a family's “language”. (p. 12)
He declares that nobody can carry personal, private, home language into the public realm: that the home language, the language of personal communication, cannot be translated into an appropriate public language.
As I initially read Rodriguez’s remarks that no child could or should be allowed to transfer her/his first language into the classroom, it seemed obvious to me that a large number of U.S. children – the English speakers – do exactly that. As I continued reading, however, I discovered that Rodriguez is not necessarily referring to a child's spoken language, though he wraps his arguments in that guise, but to the language of communication, regardless of its spoken or unspoken form. Rodriguez makes a major distinction between the motivations and manners by which families and intimates communicate, including but not limited to speech form, and the motivations and manners by which formal education systems operate in the name of communication.
But Rodriguez slips into sociocultural elitism when he, as the education systems, equates language – personal and private – with the parent “tongue” of an individual or group, equates the public language with English, rather than with a particular form and manner of communication – as he initially has intimated – and claims a need to relegate the home tongue, when it is not English, to a place of unacceptability, even in the home, rather than addressing the personal and private uses of language regardless of tongue. (Note the difference here between my use of “language” and my use of “tongue”.) He makes a very clear distinction between a family’s “intimate” language and the schools’ “public” language, then deliberately casts that difference as though it were a difference in tongues. But were this the case, then no English-speaking child could reasonably be allowed to speak her/his native tongue – English – in schools any more than a Spanish-, Chinese-, Japanese-, Finnish-, Russian-, or French-speaking child could reasonably be allowed to speak her/his native tongue. In casting this initially valid point in terms of tongues rather than usages, Rodriguez implies that those who speak English at home can indeed take their personal, private language into the public arena.
Rodriguez, like so many others arguing for total assimilation, starts with a very cogent and reasonable argument and convolutes it into something quite different. In his case, Rodriguez begins with the question of private versus public languages – a rhetorical consideration – and convolutes it into a question of native versus public tongues – a sociolinguistic/psycholinguistic consideration. He turns a question of language usage and meaning into a question of grammars, lexicons, structures, and dialects, and, in the process, he hands power to a specific group of native speakers: those who speak English.
Rodriguez writes of the dichotomy of his language experience before entering school. He tells how he associated the low, soft, intimate tones of Mexican Spanish with his family and his home life; how he experienced Spanish, Español, as a private language – one that made him feel those who spoke it were related to him – and the higher-pitched, sharper sounds of English as a public language connected with los gringos. He never sensed Spanish as a public language, even in church or on the radio, like he did English.
From his writing, it becomes clear that as he entered school there was a profound sense of social class associated with each of the languages (Rodriguez, 1982, pp. 12-13). This led to a personal struggle between the two languages and resulted in English being difficult for him to learn. For the young Rodriguez, Spanish was a private, personal language rich with sounds of gentleness and emotion, while English was a public language used only in schools, supermarkets, and when otherwise “necessary”, harsh with sounds of tension and demand. Home and Spanish were a sanctuary from the rush and the strain of school, the marketplace, and English.
Adding to this conflict were the barrage of racial slurs during Rodriguez’s youth and his resulting awareness that his darker skin set him apart from los gringos. Rodriguez learned to associate Mexicans and their Spanish language with degradation, menial labor, and rejection.
Rodriguez would say, I think, that he suffered from profound anomie.
But what does this say for the English speaker? It says the English speaker has no private language. It says, if the Spanish speaker is denied a public language and must learn English, then the English speaker never had a private language and cannot gain one. Perhaps this suggests why Rodriguez later insists that it is necessary and right to force non-English-speaking children to give up their non-English language, even at home. By denying the non-English-speaker her/his private language and forcing her/him into the strictly public (by Rodriguez’s apparent understanding) language of English, Rodriguez indicates we can make everyone the same, and thus equal. He observes, “Clearly it is not healthy to hear such sounds so often. It is not healthy to distinguish public words from private sounds so easily” (Rodriguez, 1982, p. 17). He draws on his own experience and claims that the constant difference between Spanish and English and between the respective cultures of those languages caused confusion and frustration. He says he used sound as an escape from the cultural and language conflicts. “I remained cloistered by sounds, timid and shy in public, too dependent on voices at home” (Rodriguez, 1982, p. 17).
But this denies something that Rodriguez himself intimates. Rodriguez compares the Español he heard at home with that he heard at church and on the radio, saying that the private language he heard was a ghetto Spanish. One begins to understand, even at this early stage, the main point Rodriguez makes (yet contradicts) throughout his book, that the marked difference between the private language of the home and the public language – at school, in the market, and at work – goes far beyond simple tongues; it is a matter of usage. This is what he suggests taking away from the non-English speaker, or even the non-standard-English speaker. But what of the native English speaker? Doesn't the native-English-speaker also go home and speak a ghetto English? What Rodriguez does, in fact, is deny the non-English-speaker and the speaker of non-standard English what he permits, by default, the native English-speaker: one's private language alongside the public language. Rodriguez’s plan may appear to make all equal, but it actually makes society more unequal by denying a large segment its basic humanity of a private home language.
Rodriguez (1982, 1995a) claims that the language confusion, though not the racial slander, began to end when the nuns from the school came to his house. They were there out of “concern” for “poor” Richard, who was having trouble keeping up in school. They wanted him to start speaking English exclusively, ostensibly for his own good, not only in school, but also at home. His parents complied.
He tells that, after his parents acquiesced, there was an immediate and growing shift away from the intimacy which had been such a part of family life. He writes of coming home one day to find his parents speaking Spanish in the kitchen, only to hear them immediately switch to struggled English when they saw him. When he ran to another room, he found his siblings speaking English. The private escape into Spanish was gone. He says the intimacy eventually returned in other ways, generally non-verbal, though never as profoundly as when soft, low Spanish had been the home language, and he holds that this shows intimacy is not dependent on a specific spoken language, but rather on people and circumstances, and I agree with him wholly. He further claims that, thus, the loss of the Spanish in his private life was no loss at all; on this I reserve judgment for the moment.
Rodriguez attributes his ease in American society, his professional success, to his overcoming of this bifurcation (a term he never uses), to his Anglicization. He thanks his own determination to succeed, the “need” to function in English-speaking society, and obsessive reading and practice, for his ultimate scholarly and social success. He tells how on the day described above he determined to learn classroom English and how he soon after voluntarily volunteered to use English in school for the first time. He refers to his later extensive reading and “knowledge” gathering as a “scholarship boy” mentality, quoting Richard Hoggart, and defines this as being a student obsessed with achieving the perfection demanded (often subtly) by the teachers.
He also tells of losing his awareness of accents and of individual voices. In other words, he lost the sensitivity he says is unhealthy, but which any good teacher knows is essential.
He lost something else, too: his name. The teachers were so bent on English language and U.S. American culture as the only viable classroom options that they insisted on calling him Rich-heard instead of Ricardo, which was the name he knew himself by. He now refers to himself as Richard, because that is what others call him. But he has lost his identity, regardless of his own claims (1993, 1995a, 1995b) otherwise, and this is indicated by the loss he feels for the past, which he discusses later in the book (Rodriguez 1982, 1993). I resent such denial of a person's humanity, one’s personal identity. Experience has shown me how many times I introduce myself as David and/or refer to myself as David, only to be addressed as Dave. That's not my name. That’s not how I know myself. And I stand to correct anyone – even Rodriguez – who promotes such disrespect.
It's not that Rodriguez didn’t gain anything. He says, “at last, seven years old, I came to believe what had been technically true since my birth! I was an American citizen” (Rodriguez, 1982, p. 22). He gained a sense of belonging in the community. But this was allowed to occur only at the loss of his sense – at least for a long while – of being an intimate member of his family, a sense which he has never totally regained (Rodriguez 1982, 1993, 1995a). Only his sense of a racial and cultural identity was regained (Rodriguez, 1993). I shall show later, when I look at Anzaldúa’s (1987) story, that this is not always the case, that it may not even be the case the majority of the time. And I shall show, when I examine the two original case studies, that there are yet further variations on this theme of identity and belonging; Rodriguez’s experience is by no means the only, or even the majority one.
Rodriguez does distinguish between private individuality – that which he lost – and public individuality – that which he claims to have gained by being able to speak up in the public tongue, to blend with the crowd, and to have a public voice. Again, however, when we look at Anzaldúa’s experience and at the two case studies, we will find other trends.
And it is in the comparison and contrast of these experiences and trends that we will move toward the final conclusions of this paper.
Rodriguez effectively reaches back to the melting-pot image perpetrated by Roosevelt (1917). But this is a convoluted form of the melting-pot mentality; it is not a melting pot at all. In a true melting pot, several distinct elements initially blend with each other into a semi-uniform mass. Conformity appears to occur naturally. But then, a curious thing happens. Some elements rise by their own lightness to the top; others, by nature of their heaviness, sink to the bottom. And in between can be found numerous layers of varying weight and density. Each naturally finds its own place, without being regulated, directed, or dictated by any other. Each takes a place in the whole, yet each remains distinct. What finally is formed is a continuous, consistently flowing, yet heterogeneous whole. What’s more, each time a new element is added to the melting pot, it may at first appear to be lost in the mass of the whole, but it eventually emerges as its own distinct layer, thus changing the overall construct of the molten mass.
But this is not the melting pot which is presented today or to which Roosevelt (1917) referred. That “melting pot” is an impossibility. It is one in which all the elements melt together and remain blended, ultimately taking the predetermined form of only one of those initially distinct elements. And each new element which is added is expected to conform exactly to the pre-existing mass. In terms of the metaphor, this is called assimilation; in terms of cultures, religions, lifestyles, languages, and philosophies, it means assimilation of each new element into the preselected culture, religion, lifestyle, language, or philosophy. No longer does the melting-pot image refer to a natural blending, yet distinguishing of elements, but to a very unnatural annihilation of all elements accept one self-appointed as the whole. Such an unnatural melting pot cannot exist; it eventually will explode.
This approach in no way resembles the true melting-pot image, where each element has its own power and serves a unique place in the whole. This approach resembles a theory of dominance and subjugation, so familiar to the peoples of this continent, its southern neighbor, and Africa during the past five centuries, to the peoples of Europe and Asia long before that, and to women over the last seven to nine thousand years.
These issues and arguments present a confusion between rhetoric and linguistics. Rhetoric – as I have said – is the use of both verbal and nonverbal communication to persuade, or as Purves (1988) states, “the choice of linguistic and structural aspects of discourse – chosen to produce an effect on an audience” (p. 9). Rhetoric is the choice, the usage, not the linguistic and structural aspects themselves, not the grammars and lexicons.
What's more, Rodriguez is either grossly uninformed – which seems highly unlikely for one so well-educated and book-read – or a liar. Bilingual education is not “a scheme proposed in the 1960s by Hispanic-American social activists.” As we have seen, bilingual education has been alive in this country at least since students were being taught in both German and English in the schools of Pennsylvania before the American revolution and later in the schools of Minnesota. Rodriguez appears to be deliberately misrepresenting the facts of history, then using his misrepresentations as grounds for his rhetoric against bilingual education. Some of my colleagues suggest that Rodriguez’s greatest dilemma is that he is not politically correct, but that one can still understand his position considering the pain he experienced growing up bilingual. But I say that Rodriguez's greatest dilemma is that he presents a very real picture of the pain and crisis of identity which can occur in the bilingual – of his own pain – but distorts historical reality.
Rodriguez uses his fallacies to mislead his reader. Adding insult to injury, he establishes a false class distinction – just like the founding fathers of this country – by labeling non-English-speaking children as “many from lowerclass homes.” There are as many English-speaking children from “lower-class” homes, and many of the non-English-speaking children are recent immigrants from “middle” and “upper-class” families. Rodriguez seems to deliberately mislead his reader with half-truths.
I will give Rodriguez this. He makes it relatively clear at the beginning story that he is telling only his own experience. He intimates that others’ experience may not be his.
But then he makes his book, based on one man's unique experience, an argument for denying all non-English-speaking students – increasingly the majority in this country of immigrants – the use of their first language, even in their private lives. He writes with a duplicit pen that one suspects is tainted by his own social climbing, much as the founding fathers, themselves immigrants and children of immigrants, were tainted by their own power lust and economic climbing.
Nonetheless, it is the convoluted image of the melting pot that we see playing out in this country throughout the course of this century.
Those Who Agree with Rodriguez
Before moving to Anzaldúa and the case studies, I have to emphasize that Rodriguez is not alone in his view. His position is also the position of the Official English/English Only movement. The late Sen. S. I. Hayakawa, founder of U. S. English, wrote in 1985,
What is it that has made a society out of the hodgepodge of nationalities, races, and colors represented in the immigrant hordes that people our nation? It is language, of course, that has made community among all these elements possible. It is with a common language that we have dissolved distrust and fear. It is with language that we have drawn up the understandings and agreements and social contracts that make society possible. (excerpted in Crawford, 1992c, p. 94)
Hayakawa refers to the melting-pot image – the convoluted one promoted by Roosevelt – then makes an additional suggestion that bilingual education is actually directed toward isolating non-native-English-speakers.
Sensitive as Americans have been to racism...no one seems to have noticed the profound racism expressed in the amendment that created the bilingual ballot. Brown people...red people...and yellow people...are assumed not to be smart enough to learn English. No provision is made, however, for non-English-speaking French Canadians...or for the Hebrew-speaking Hasidic Jews...who are white and are presumed to be able to learn English without difficulty. (excerpted in Crawford, 1992c, p. 96)
Hayakawa apparently had not read this county's history, or he chose to ignore it. I already have mentioned some of the legislation against non-English-speaking whites, and these are only part of a trend (Zinn 1980, Chomsky 1993).
An editorial in the San Francisco Examiner of October 24, 1986 picks up on Hayakawa’s sentiments, stating that people who want to succeed need to learn the common language, quickly and thoroughly. It is a message of practicality, not of ethnicity....[T]he citizen who does not become proficient in English is lost in the competition for high achievement in this state. (excerpted in Crawford, 1992c, p. 136)
And Senator Walter Huddleston (D-KY), ignoring history as thoroughly as Rodriguez and Hayakawa, said in Congress on September 21, 1983
previously unquestioned acceptance of this language by immigrants from every linguistic and cultural background has enabled us to come together as one people...But in the last fifteen years, we have experienced growing resistance to the acceptance of our historic language, an antagonistic questioning of the melting pot philosophy...Bilingual education has gradually lost its role as a transitional way of teaching English....They and their parents are given false hopes that their cultural traditions can be fully maintained in this country... (excerpted in Crawford, 1992c, pp. 114-115)
I say that Huddleston, too, ignores history, because the early settlers and founding fathers indeed proved that “their cultural traditions can be fully maintained in this country” when they forced their own language and customs on the Native Americans and on the imported African slaves.
Those who support a lingua franca, a common language, for education are at least on the right track; they understand the need for a common meeting ground. However, it is questionable whether monolingualism is that common ground. (I will discuss later the fine line between having a common language for education and making this country monolingual.)
Unfortunately, unification through a common language is not the only issue here. This is not the true goal of the monolingualists. As well-meaning as Rodriguez may be personally, and although some of the Official English/English Only advocates demonstrate the unifying power of a common language in education, both Rodriguez and the Official English/English Only advocates ultimately promote the mandating of the exclusive use of English in all public and private functioning. Most of the Official English movement’s stances, including those put forth by U. S. English and the late Hayakawa, are sounded from half-truths and misrepresentations. Ultimately, the goal of the leaders of this movement is not unification and enfranchisement, but conformity, along with discrimination against those who are different or think for themselves.
We already have seen the conformist tendencies of Huddleston's remarks.
U. S. English activists often point to Hayakawa’s immigrant status, implying that as a transplanted Asian-American, he understood the position of his racial siblings. But Hayakawa was an English-speaking immigrant from Canada and his concerns about linguistic conformity were always, at some point, directed against Hispanics.
We see this same tendency also in a March 28, 1983 column by Guy Wright of the San Francisco Examiner.
The resistance comes from leaders of ethnic blocs, mostly Hispanic, who reject the melting-pot concept, resist assimilation as a betrayal of their ancestral culture, and demand government funding to maintain their ethnic institutions....This anti-assimilation movement...comes at a time when the United States is receiving the largest wave of immigration in history. This influx strains our facilities for assimilation and provides fertile ground for those who would like to turn language minorities into permanent power blocs. (excerpted in Crawford, 1992c, p. 128)
U. S. English has circulated a partial reprint of this column as part of its direct-mail fundraising campaign. But in so doing, that organization has deleted two key passages from the original (Crawford, 1992a). The direct-mail material reports Hayakawa as U. S. English’s founder and honorary chairperson and quotes the above passage. The following paragraph, however, in the original column but not in the U. S. English version, clearly identifies the attitudes of the organization's actual chairperson, John Tanton:
Chairman is Dr. John Tanton, a Michigan physician whose years of concern about population trends and immigration – he founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform – led him to embrace this kindred cause. “With an organizational structure in place, we may at last be able to gain some ground.” (excerpted in Crawford, 1992c, p. 128)
The other missing passage, towards the end of the column, states the fourth objective of the movement. The first three stated goals – included in the reprint – are to 1) adopt an Official English constitutional amendment at the federal level, 2) repeal laws mandating multilingual election materials, and 3) restrict government funding for bilingual education strictly to short-term transitional programs. The fourth goal reads, “Control immigration so that it does not reinforce trends toward language segregation.”
Additionally, U. S. English’s basic fundraising publication (U. S. English, 1984) from 1984 to 1988 stated:
English is a world language....Historic forces made English the language of all Americans, though nothing in our laws designated it the official language of the nation....English is under attack, and we must take affirmative steps to guarantee that it continues to be our common heritage.
This is the real agenda of the Official English movement.
The historic forces referred to, as I have shown, were forces of oppression, discrimination policies, and the use of socio-psychological ethnic blinders by most of this nation's leaders over the last 500 years (Chomsky, 1993; Zinn, 1980), and these policies continue (Chomsky, 1993)
Rodriguez (1982), too, contradicts himself. After speaking of being cloistered by sounds (quoted above), he goes on in his very next sentence to say:
And yet it needs to be emphasized: I was an extremely happy child at home. I remember many nights when my father would come back from work, and I’d hear him call out to my mother in Spanish, sounding relieved. In Spanish, he’d sound light and free notes he never could manage in English. Some nights I’d jump up just at hearing his voice. (p. 17)
The Results of Assimilation
So the question arises, why is it so unhealthy to hear the distinction of sounds, to understand the difference between private, intimate communication and public, forced verbiage? Rodriguez never answers this question. He does, as noted earlier, attempt to use the non-language-oriented nature of intimate communication as an argument against bilingualism. He fails to acknowledge, however, the personal and interpersonal damage done by the intermediate forced move away from intimacy. Even in pointing out that intimacy was found in other ways, he betrays its denigration, perhaps by circumstance rather than by consequence of language, and such denigration never is justifiable in human relations.
What comes through Rodriguez’s writing very strongly is the joy of his childhood before his language came into question, as opposed to the loss of forced monolingualization. When he was bifurcated, stuck between two cultures and two tongues, he still had a sense of home. He did not, in fact, suffer from anomie, even though I have noted he might claim such suffering. Once he lost that bifurcation, that diglossia, through forced replacement of English for Spanish, he became obsessively practical, placing efficiency and societally-recognized success above his humanity and his family's.
Such confusion, played out as it is in our schools, courts, businesses, and sociopolitical systems, puts the non-English speaker, the non-Christian, the non-white, and ultimately one gender or the other at such a sociological disadvantage as to demand a psychological price as well.
While I disagree with Rodriguez’s conclusions and solutions, I find his description of the psychological effects of social isolation – discussed below – to be quite poignant and relevant.
But the sociological ends of the convoluted melting-pot approach are distinctly classist, with a dominant-versus-subjugated theme, and this can have profound psychological effects on those who are isolated, either by subjugation or by the mandate to remain “on top” as members of the “ruling class.”
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our classrooms, particularly in our composition and speech classrooms, where only American rhetorical forms are promoted and accepted, non-American rhetorical forms go unrecognized, the similarities and differences of these various forms remain primarily unutilized as teaching tools, and when the bridge-building between rhetorics breaks down, teachers, parents, administrators, and politicians blame linguistics – grammars, tongues, structures, gendered language, and non-standard dialects – rather than their own rhetorical failures. Thus, we end up at a debate over multilingualism, rather than at a consideration of comparative rhetoric as a teaching focus. Sooner or later, the voice of the Official English/English Only movement is heard ringing through academia and government, and the voice of comparative, interactive rhetoric – the building block of mutual understanding and cooperation – is drowned in the clamorous flood.
Such pushes for uniformity can only lead to isolation on a much larger scale than even Rodriguez portrays.
First, our schools will become elitist bastions where students either conform or are pushed out. In such a case, both groups of students are isolated from each other. Second, those who conform and assume the accepted leadership roles of society – to which such conformity leads – will find themselves isolated from an increasingly international, intercultural, interlinguistic, interdependent world which they cannot understand because they have learned to not hear other voices. Finally, this isolation of the leaders ultimately becomes isolation of the nation from world society.
And when such isolation of the nation occurs, there is only one place left to turn: inward. When there is no contact with the outside world, one turns in on one's self. With a uniform, conformed nation, this might seem a very comfortable solution, but human nature does not work this way. Even within conformity, people are still feeling, thinking individuals who dream of possibilities not realized. When diversity lacks, people ultimately seek it, either by distinguishing themselves or by pointing to differences in others. When this happens, conformity breaks down, and when conformity breaks down, people draw increasingly further apart until they discover that it is their differences which unite them, which give each incomplete individual something to draw on in another. Then, perhaps, they realize that in recognizing differences, in viewing their different rhetorics and languages as distinct parts of a heterogeneous whole, they can build a complete unit with all its parts naturally finding their respective places.
And it is at this point that we wind up back at the two people standing face-to-face, one being direct, the other being suggestive and abstract. They might blame their failure to communicate on differing languages or tongues. Or they might recognize differing cultural and rhetorical backgrounds which can complement and enhance each other. Then they might reach out and attempt to understand each other’s modes and usage, thus laying the structure for necessary bridge building.
This is what the question of multilingualism, multiculturalism, and comparative rhetoric ultimately boils down to. And in the end, the choice is ours – everyone – and the greatest responsibility lies with the teachers in the classrooms.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Story – A Different View
Bifurcation is not necessarily solved by such forced substitution of one language for