Proposition 63 — the proposed state constitutional amendment on the Nov. 4 ballot that would make English the state’s official language — continues a long dispute about the role of Spanish and other foreign languages in California’s official life.

That view emerged from a series of interviews with historians, linguistic experts and legal authorities and from recent scholarly writings on the subject.

The original 1849 California Constitution was written in both English and Spanish — 8,000 copies were printed in English, 2,000 in Spanish — according to German scholar Heinz Kloss, whose 1977 book, “The American Bilingual Tradition,” is thought to be one of the best historical accounts of language in the United States.

Rachel F. Moran, acting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said the original Constitution stipulated that all laws should be published in both English and Spanish.

An office of state translator was established in 1849 and survived until 1897, Moran said.

In 1879, she added, the state Constitution was revised to require that the state’s “official writings” and “judicial proceedings” should be “conducted, preserved and published in no other than the English language.”

However, a conflicting law, passed in 1876 and kept on the books until 1933, called for the printing of some legislation in Spanish as well as English.

“So we were printing some laws in Spanish, even though the 1879 version of the Constitution said we shouldn’t,” Moran said. “What this means is that there is real uncertainty over what it means to say that English is the ‘official language.’ “

In its ambivalence about language, California has mirrored the nation.

From the days of the Constitutional Convention, when there was a debate about publishing the proceedings in German as well as in English, to present-day battles over bilingual education, the country has held conflicting views about language.

‘Desirable Goals’

Stanford University socio-linguist Shirley Brice Heath wrote about these contradictions in “Language in the U.S.A.,” published in 1981.

On the one hand, “Americans overwhelmingly believe that English is the national tongue and that correctness in spelling, pronunciation, word choice and usage, as well as facility in reading and writing English, are desirable goals for every U.S. citizen,” Heath wrote.

“Nevertheless, numerous diverse languages and varieties of English have been maintained in communities across the United States, and there has never been federal legislation to eliminate them.”

She pointed out that in the nation’s early years, churches, clubs, private schools and sometimes even public schools, conducted their affairs in Dutch, German, Norwegian, Polish and other languages, sometimes without English being spoken at all.

Indeed, as late as the 1950s, one could move through sections of Detroit and hear mostly Polish being spoken, just as one can hear little but Spanish or Chinese or Korean in some parts of Los Angeles today.

However, the tolerance toward other languages that marked the nation’s first 100 years or so began to fade in the late 1800s, Heath wrote.

Since 1906 aliens have been required to speak English in order to become naturalized and, since 1950, have had to demonstrate an ability to read and write English as well.

Industry joined the learn-English crusade early in this century, according to Heath, because “new state compulsory compensation laws were making employers liable for accidents which occurred as a result of immigrants’ inability to read signs or understand instructions about machinery operations.”

Although Jane Addams and other early 20th-Century reformers argued that practical information about everyday living should be available to immigrants in their native languages, increasingly such guidance could be obtained only in English.

From 1920 to the 1940s, Heath wrote, “growing xenophobia” led to “repressive measures” against German, Japanese and Chinese speakers. During and after World War I, feelings were especially strong against those who spoke German.

Some states declared English to be their official language, others passed laws requiring schools to offer instruction only in English and a few even forbade the teaching of foreign languages.

A Nebraska teacher was convicted of teaching German in a private school in the early 1920s, but in Meyer vs. Nebraska (1923), Heath wrote, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the conviction, ruling that the teachers’ 14th Amendment rights had been violated.

Although California history is filled with examples of discrimination against immigrant groups, especially against Chinese and Japanese, “language usually has not been the focal point for these nativist anxieties,” said James Gregory, who teaches California history and American social history at UC Berkeley.

But there have been exceptions.

In 1855, only six years after the California Constitution was adopted, the state Bureau of Public Instruction was ordered to require that all teaching be done in English.

‘Great Deal of Hostility’

“There was a great deal of hostility between Hispanics and the new Anglos,” Gregory said, “and this was directed at areas where the expected process of cultural assimilation was not taking place as fast as some would wish — Santa Barbara, San Diego and Los Angeles.”

In 1924 a law was proposed that would have required all California children of a certain age to attend public, not private, schools and also would have mandated the use of English only at these schools.

But the idea was dropped after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Nebraska case.

Even without language disputes, however, immigrants often have received rough treatment in California.

“Antagonism against Asian immigrants began almost with the Gold Rush,” Gregory said, “steadily escalating through the 1870s and coming to a boil in the 1880s with a steady stream of bloody pogroms against Chinese in San Francisco, Los Angeles, the mining towns and in the Central Valley.”

Laws were passed forbidding Chinese males to wear their hair in the traditional queue and banning traditional Chinese burial practices.

In 1870, in what Gregory called an attempt to “destroy Chinatown,” the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that made it illegal to occupy a room with less than 500 cubic feet of airspace per person.

Police jailed several hundred people, but the jails then became so crowded that the inmates were violating the airspace ordinance, too, so “a judge finally called the whole thing off,” Gregory said.

Until as late as 1952, some Asian-born immigrants were not allowed to own land in California.

And, of course, during World War II Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps, and in numerous cases their property was confiscated.

‘A Real Tradition’

“So there’s a real tradition here,” Gregory said. “It seems to pop up every generation or so, as the demographic arrangement of California shifts and some new group appears. . . . There’s always a sizable group that reacts, that worries the society cannot survive too much diversity.”

Proposition 63 has arrived, in Gregory’s view, because “once again, there is a sense that California society, like American society, is changing fairly rapidly.”

“For people who are used to a white-dominated society and who are watching San Francisco become more heterogeneous and Los Angeles becoming more Hispanic, it seems that their world is disappearing,” he said.

For such people, the professor said, Proposition 63 becomes “a symbol — not a real issue at all but a way of saying, ‘We don’t like the color of the new population; we don’t like the political influence that Hispanics and Asians are developing; we don’t want to share California with people who are not like us.’ “

But Caltech political scientist Bruce Cain disagreed, at least in part.

“There may be an element of symbolic racist politics” in Proposition 63, Cain said, “but, at the same time, I think there are a lot of reasonable people out there who are worried about what’s going to happen to California society if we have too many people who don’t speak English, who have a genuine concern about whether the fabric of society can absorb so many new people.”

Perhaps the best hope is that California, like the United States, will continue to muddle through with a bewildering but thus far workable mixture of English and other languages.

Wrote Stanford’s Heath: “Historical accounts of the place of English in the language heritage of the United States should reassure those who believe language and ethnic maintenance . . . has to lead to cultural or political divisions.”



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