2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics  (Page 4/17)

This was the beginning of the end: the end of a respect toward parents who vainly made an effort and only obtained ridiculous situations and laughable sounds in English; the end of the intergenerational communication; and the end of the diglostic balance between the two languages. But there is something more. When a language is permanently associated to segments of a poor and ignorant population, to the lowest groups of the occupational scale, that language becomes a negative label of the speaker, a mark of social stigma. The perverse equation of where there is poverty and ignorance there is Spanish, makes the opposite equation true: where there is social promotion and academic preparation, the Spanish language disappears and English is implanted. In both equations, the popular stereotype associates Spanish with poverty and English with social ascent, which diminishes the self-esteem and increases the linguistic auto-hatred toward Spanish at the same time that it incites a strong feeling of linguistic loyalty toward English. This definition of Spanish as a mark of social stigmas is another form of making the language to which the lower culture corresponds in the diglostic distribution negative. And this is down through the school, as Rubén Salazar confirms again:

Finally, the day in which your teacher - that person who has taught you the important things in life – tells you that speaking Spanish is an error. Then you go home, you kiss your mother and speak a few words in Spanish. Then you approach the window with a lost glance, while your mother asks you:

“What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing, mother,” you answer, because you cannot understand where the error is (1992, p. 329).

The disqualification of the subordinate language in the diglostic situation can be more blunt. As Salazar testifies in a report presented to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in San Antonio, Texas, December 1968, many students of the North American southwest have seen how their language was defined as a dirty language, of dirty words and thoughts; in short, a language of disgust. All of this derives from feelings of alignment and hostility, confusion of identity, and low self-esteem. As the state senator of Texas, Jose Bernal, said, “People in charge of education have tried to rid our language, to the point that the Mexican-American children feel ashamed to speak Spanish and to be Mexican” (Sandoval, 1992, p.331).  This devaluation of Spanish, with its lack of emotional affection and linguistic loyalty, is the natural consequence of a situation that reflects the asymmetric relations of domination and subordination between both languages. The conviction of the role of Spanish in the U.S. is that there are second-generation Latinos, perfectly bilingual, that affirmingly ask, “In the University of Madrid, the classes are in English, right?” One of discoveries that exchange students from the University of California does after their nine months stay in the Universidad Compultense is that Spanish, besides being used at home, serves to speak about politics, demography, and sociology in public spaces. And they decide not to feel shamed anymore when speaking Spanish with friends in Islos ; that is to say, in the district of East Los Angeles.