Spanish fluency declining among California Latinos

“Liminal” is the word poet Ernesto Garay keeps coming back to when he talks about walking the line between Spanish and English his entire life.

“My writing often focuses on my identity of living in a liminal way, in between two languages,” the Sebastopol writer and teacher says. “It’s a reflection of who I am. I would call it a cultural hybridity. It can be either/or — and all these things at the same time.”

It’s a space shared by younger Latino generations often caught between two cultures and two languages within one country. In California, the proportion of Latinos proficient in English has increased from 76% in 2008 to 83% in 2018, according to Hans Johnson at the Public Policy Institute of California, sourcing data from the American Community Survey. In Sonoma County, the share of accomplished English speakers in Latino households has increased from 73% to 81%. Over 90% of younger Latinos are proficient in English.

At the same time, Spanish fluency is declining. Between 2005 and 2015, the share of Latinos in Sonoma County who spoke mostly Spanish fell from 37% to 20%, according the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

If culture and identity are often passed down through language and that native language is being spoken less and less, what does that mean for future generations?

‘A tremendous loss’

“When you’re bilingual, it’s like having access to twice the amount of imagination and images and literature and poetry. It’s like having access to another world of knowledge,” says Francisco Vazquez, a retired Sonoma State professor who started the Latino Student Congress in Sonoma County high schools.

“When you don’t have that, there is an entire world that is inaccessible. There are things I can talk to a Spanish speaker about in ways that I cannot talk to my own children about. So it can be a tremendous loss.”

Research shows it typically takes about three generations for an immigrant culture to lose its native language to a dominant language, he says. “In the 1950s, there was a very conscious effort by a whole generation of Mexican Americans to suppress the Spanish language. They would not want their children to speak Spanish because they wanted them to be accepted in American society. Ironically, that generation grew up to fuel the Chicano movement and was very proud of being Mexican and speaking Spanish.”

Vazquez’s older children are now 41 and 47 and don’t speak much Spanish. But his 32-year-old daughter learned Spanish and speaks it with her grandmother at least once a week. If she wasn’t able to communicate with her grandmother, who speaks only Spanish, Vazquez fears “you could lose a whole treasure of family memories.”

In recent discussions with Sonoma County artists and academics, they point to the ubiquity of back-and-forth switching between Spanish and often “Spanglish” in novels, poems, radio programs and even television dramas that help keep the language and culture alive, often across generational divides.

“I am my language,” author Gloria Anzaldua wrote in her classic semi-autobiographical work “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” It’s a book Sonoma State University professor Natalia Villanueva-Nieves is teaching in her Latinx Philosophy course this semester.

“What she’s talking about is a linguistic representation of what we are,” Villanueva-Nieves says. “And it’s important that nations like the United States and Mexico recognize these linguistic ‘in-betweens’ are an important part of the national context.”

It’s a familiar but sometimes scatterbrained space that Garay explores in his poem “Tongue Split”: “My tongue occasionally behaves like binaries/and goes berserk/not grasping which one ought to be talking/which one paraphrasing/My tongue split into two/US Customs barges in the center/questioning my words/asking for my California ID/asking for me to speak Ingles.”

Radio, telenovelas

At KBBF, the first bilingual public radio station in the country, board president Alicia Sanchez is always looking to engage the next generation of listeners.

“I always tell young people, this is your station too, this is a resource,” Sanchez says. “Come over here to KBBF and learn some things, and one day we will pass it on to you.”

During the 2017 wildfires and subsequent crises, the station earned a reputation as the go-to Spanish news outlet for the latest information about evacuations and available services. Now they’re trying to help get out the word about the importance of the U.S. Census.

“Our vision is to continue to create a multilingual voice to empower the people, now more than ever,” Sanchez says. That aim drives programs ranging from “The Roseland Report” and “Lideres del Futuro” that can jump back and forth between Spanish and English to a program as unique as “Radio Autóctona Indigenista,” spoken in Spanish and indigenous languages Triqui and Mixtec.

While Spanish literature in the U.S. has had a huge cultural impact, from Rodolfo Anaya’s “Bless Me, Ultima” and Sandra Cisneros’ “House on Mango Street” to Erika L. Sanchez’s “I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter” and “House of Spirits” by Chilean-born author Isabel Allende, who writes only in Spanish and lives in Marin County – today’s Spanish radio stations reach a far wider audience on a daily basis.

“For people working in the service industry and the fields and in construction, Spanish radio is on all day long,” says Claudia Mendoza-Carruth, a former DJ at Radio Romantica in San Jose and longtime La Luz board member who also runs MC2 Multicultural Communications in Sonoma.

“It’s ingrained in the culture. It’s a very stronger driver and vehicle of Spanish transmission, preservation and moving along the generations, more so than I would say literature, unfortunately,” she says.

Beyond radio, she’s seen the lure of telenovelas, the highly addictive Spanish-language soap operas that cross generations and bring families together around the TV. “It might sound trivial, but the force that novelas have in preserving language is incredible,” says Mendoza-Carruth, who grew up in Colombia reading magical realism by national treasure Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.

“The other day at La Luz, I was in line with a group of ladies and a conversation started about the plot of some novela that was at a burning point of ‘Oh my God, I can’t wait for Monday.’ And I happened to know what that novela was about, so I engaged in conversation with them, which otherwise I wouldn’t have, because we didn’t have anything in common, and now there was an instant bond. That is a very strong thing that really holds a tradition (in) language.”

The spicy dramas have become such a conversational tool that “The Telenovela Method” is widely used by language learning programs to teach Spanish to novice speakers.

Even as a poet, Garay knows better than to ignore the popular TV shows. He regularly visits his 85-year-old mother, who never learned to speak English and still lives in San Francisco where he grew up. “There are times when she’s watching a novela and I just sit with her and we watch together,” he says. “It’s beautiful bonding.” Sometimes, afterwards, they talk about the class hierarchy at play in the drama or how the love stories are “cheesy and funny,” but engaging nonetheless.

He considers himself lucky to be spending the time together. “There are a lot of Latinos that never learned how to speak Spanish and sometimes I see the expression on their face when people ask, ‘Do you speak Spanish?’ And they say, ‘No.’ I view it as a painful experience, when you don’t know your parents’ first language, because language is the carrier of culture.”