Absolut Vodka recently withdrew an ad that featured a map of North America as it appeared before the Mexican-American War, when a large chunk of the Southwest was still under Mexican dominion. Many patriotic Americans, especially in the desert states, were offended by it, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me.
Given that the ad was run only in Mexico, one explanation is a fear that the disenfranchised populations of our neighbor to the south would rally together in an effort to reawaken the glory days of the Mexican general Santa Anna.
Yet the Mexican-American War ended 160 years ago, which seems like eons in a nation whose self-reflective powers can only conceive of 50 states — never more, never less. Herein lies a fundamental paradox: Twenty-first century America seems so oblivious to its own past, and yet its citizenry actively lives out the sentiments that inspired war during so many chapters of American history.
The anti-Mexican resolve of the 1840s was largely a phenomenon of southern Democrats, whereas the Whigs opposed the idea of resolving border conflicts with military action. The former believed strongly in the concept of Manifest Destiny as a reason to assume geographical (and cultural) control over foreign territories and thereby solidify a pro-slavery West. How would people of Anglo- European descent currently residing in the Southwest react to the knowledge that their region’s inclusion into the U.S. was sought after with the intention of expanding slave labor?
Given the patriotic fervor with which Santa Anna fought to retain Mexico’s northwestern reaches, I suppose it makes sense that today’s white Americans would feel threatened by a “Mexicanization” of the states. Our neighbors to the south posed a veritable military threat to the fledgling U.S. At the time, we sought to push them out of the Southwest in the interest of national solidarity.
Today, our motives for barring illegal immigrants are more or less the same. Most citizens of the Tom Tancredo school of thought argue that illegal immigration undermines the quality of life for legal citizens. He and many of his colleagues must have been longing for a job picking lettuce before the greedy Mexicanos swarmed in.
Fortunately, there is hope on a national level. Barack Obama has steadfastly argued that the U.S. must develop a stronger multilingual character: “We should have every child speaking more than one language,” he said last week. This sentiment comes from a man who is acutely aware of his own inability to speak any language other than English, which, for me, is a welcome indication that at least one presidential candidate can think beyond his own intellectual context.
In any event, the U.S. will one day come to be a predominantly Latino country. This is seldom disputed across the political aisle. Where liberals and conservatives are divided is on the issue of whether this is a bad thing.
This is where the role of language enters in. English has done an excellent job (nefariously or not) of spreading itself across the globe. There’s nothing wrong with that, really, even from the standpoint of multicultural preservation. We forget that the human brain is capable of so much more than is ever demonstrated in an average lifetime. With that said, foreign people can learn English in the interest of global understanding and still retain their native languages.
Great. But why don’t we ever apply that axiom to ourselves? Worldwide, Spanish is the second most-spoken language by native speakers, Mandarin being first. The reason for it? Communicative integration.
We owe it to ourselves, and to our ideals, to dissolve the cultural barriers that discourage one language in favor of another. That is in no way a value judgment: No language is inherently better than any other. It just seems that we might try to embrace the inclusion of Spanish into our cultural lexicon, not only because it’s a beautiful language, but also because a harmonious future likely will depend on it.
Collin Reyman (illuinfyre@hotmail.com) is a graduate student of Spanish at the University of Colorado Denver.
