Last February, in an essay called “Spanish Is Different,” which
appeared on the American Enterprise’s website,
I took one exception to the English-first idea, an idea with which
I am generally sympathetic. In “Spanish Is Different,” I argued
that we in the United States should not be surprised to find some
30 to 35 million of our countrymen speaking the other main language
of the Western hemisphere, Spanish. And I said we should learn
Spanish, too, to welcome this newest and biggest ever group of
foreign language immigrants.
The more of us learn and speak Spanish, I argued, the more of
them will learn English faster and adapt quicker to American ways
and English-speaking culture.
I’m doing my part.
While we lived in New Jersey, we ran through a series of
babysitters, some good, some not so good, but none that lasted.
They were all female. Then one day, on impulse, I asked Raul, one
of the busboys at our local coffeeshop, if he’d like to try it. I
talked often to Raul, who was an ambitious young man studying
computer programming at Union County College. I knew he took
whatever work he could get. Initially, dubious, Raul said yes.
There started one of the great friendships of our time in New
Jersey.
The boys took immediately to their big new friend. Raul could
pick them both up at once and wrestle with them. He told them
stories about his childhood, partly spent on a jungle plantation in
Brazil. He invented games for them to play — one, that quieted our
jumpy older son Bud down like a charm, involved writing letters on
Bud’s back and having Bud guess what they were. He found himself
helping to unknot and soothe the sibling conflict that had reared
up when we brought Joe home from Guatemala at age nine months.
By the time Raul’s girlfriend Sandra had come over from
Colombia, we had grown to love this young man so much we would have
done anything for him. Take over a room in our house? Fine, go
ahead. Give him a car? Fine. Knowing a new semester in school was
coming up, we offered to pay Raul’s babysitting months in advance
so he could cover his tuition — an offer he turned down. I would
often, at that time, look back on the hassle that Linda Chavez had
had treating an immigrant that same way we were treating Raul, and
shake my head in astonishment that people could have doubted the
genuineness of the relationship.
Raul and I used to have long talks as I drove him home to
Elizabeth: about the economy, about politics, about music (Raul is
a jazz buff), about jobs and education and opportunities, about
immigration, about race. “I consider myself black,” Raul often
said. “My grandfather was black. My grandmother was blonde. But the
way some American blacks behave, I want nothing to do with that.”
About elections in his country, Colombia, and about terrorists.
“You can’t deal with those people. You have to keel them.”
Most often, Raul talked with Sally and me about what he could do
to get ahead, to pursue his career in web design and computer
graphics. There was no question Raul did a fine job at school. He
got promotion after promotion at his scholarship job at the
University computer lab, and ended up virtually in charge of his
overnight shift. Over and over again, Sally and I would tell him,
“Get your English in really good shape. You don’t have to lose your
accent entirely, but learn to speak perfect English, and learn to
write it, too.” As often as we said that, Raul didn’t quite get how
important that was.
People popularly employ the word “devastated” —- it’s a staple
of the Oprah culture, so much so that I never use it. But it’s the
only one here. Raul was devastated when he found out we were moving
away. As the day approached for our move, he would shake his head.
“It came so fast,” he said over and over. “It came so fast.”
The last time I drove Raul home, I made him a bet, a bet I had
talked over with Sally. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars,” I said to
him, “that in one year I can learn to speak perfect, unaccented
Spanish. And your part of the bet is to beat me, to learn perfect
unaccented English in that same year.”
He thought about it slowly. “Okay, okay,” he said slowly. And we
talked about some of the fine points of speaking a foreign
language, about the position of the mouth at rest, the tendency to
emphasize certain vowels in certain ways.
Raul has taken me seriously, I know. In his e-mails, I can see
him working on his English syntax and grammar and vocabulary. Over
the last several weeks of the move to Massachusetts, I haven’t had
any time at all to study Spanish. But I’m settled in now.
Cuidado, Raul! Yo lo alcanzo ahora!*
