Bilingual Initiative Likely to Fracture Coloradans
Charles Roos
Colorado voters may get a chance in November to decide the fate of bilingual education by an initiated amendment. That's direct democracy in action, of course, but I fear such a campaign would be bitterly divisive. That isn't what sponsors would want, but I think it would happen, no matter who "won" or "lost" at the polls. The big losers could be some 25,000 Spanish-speaking youngsters in the present program. Tom Tancredo, the state's 6th District congressman, and Linda Chavez, of Washington-based One Nation Indivisible, want Colorado basically to substitute an "English immersion" system - a year of intensive study for Spanish-speaking kids - for the present, multi-year system of instruction in both English and Spanish. The sponsors say bilingual education "bottles up" some children in a program they no longer need, wastes money and encourages dropouts. Opponents say if non-English-speaking children don't learn in their native language as well as in English many will end up illiterate in both. So what's the harm in a statewide campaign on that? Well, it would sharpen ethnic biases that already exist and probably dredge up new ones. It would needlessly polarize thinking on public education, equal opportunity, immigration. It would revive an old argument over " official English" that's been largely forgotten for more than a decade. Back about then, in 1989, ex-Gov Dick Lamm expressed a popular view: " We're Americans now. There are different cultural values than the old country. It's time to leave the old country behind." In other words, we're the people who settled here and our culture rules. Of course "we" - northern Europeans, "anglos," whatever we are - were late- comers in the American Southwest. We settled it by killing and penning up the indigenous peoples we now call "native Americans." We did it by overwhelming the Spanish settlers and clerics who were truly the first Europeans to put down roots hereabouts and whose names are indelibly fixed on our land: Pueblo, Trinidad, Alamosa, Baca, Huerfano, Conejos, Costilla, Sangre de Cristo, Rio Grande, on and on. Author George R. Stewart, in Names on the Land, points out that in 1598 a half-starved band of explorers led by Juan de Onate found food at a friendly Indian pueblo on the Rio Grande in what is now New Mexico. The grateful Onate called that place "Socorro" (for "succor") a name that has endured, intact, for four centuries. Of course the old Spanish has been mispronounced, twisted and abbreviated. "Santa Fe" was originally "La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco." A small stream in southeast Colorado known as "Las Animas" (Spanish), " Purgatoire" (French) or "Picketwire" (Cowboy English) was originally "El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio" - for a band of roughneck Spaniards who died there, unshriven and with bloody hands, along about 1594. It's ironic, isn't it, that a new wave of concern over immigration policy, expressed by such public figures as Lamm and ex-Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, seems to be caused by a fear that the Hispanic minority of the American West, long ago overwhelmed by "anglo" numbers - may some day become the majority? Whose language and cultural values would rule then? And some people of today's cultural majority seem greatly concerned about how to "get along" with the growing Hispanic community in the American Southwest. If they'd take a look around at the changing composition of the U. S. labor force they'd realize they don't know how to "get along" without it. |