Abstract
Over the past 500 years, a debate has raged in America over whether immigrants’ cultures and languages should be allowed to exist alongside the “native” culture and language of the “host” country to which the immigrants have emigrated, whether they should be subordinated or replaced by the “host” culture and language, or whether they should be allowed to dominate and replace the “native” culture and language.
Growing out of this debate, this essay deals with the cultural, linguistic, and social alienation that occurs when one is set aside, ostracized, or made an outsider because of one’s culture, language, or skin color. Specifically, it covers multilingual education and the surrounding social issues in terms of cultural identity versus assimilation.
This essay takes a position sometimes politically correct; sometimes politically unpopular; sometimes in agreement with past writers, researchers, and autobiographers; sometimes at odds with these same people.
Throughout this document, I take issue with the avid assimilationists and with the Official English/English Only movement.
After an extensive historical review, I focus on the work of Richard Rodriguez, who is openly opposed to bilingual education and suggests that assimilation is the only viable option, and on the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa, who advocates full multilingualism and multiculturalism.
I then move into two original cases studies which, along with Anzaldúa’s experience, demonstrate that it is possible to maintain one’s native language and culture even while learning and using the common language (in this case Standard American English) in school.
Finally, I suggest a balance between the common language and comparative rhetoric in education, a balance between monolingual education and a multilingual society. This balance is founded in the results of the two case studies, as compared with the experiences of Anzaldúa and Rodriguez, and is closely tied to the National Language Policy of the Conference on College Composition and Communication to the English Plus movement.