Spanish disquisition: or, how a bookish Gringa learned to stop worrying and love el idioma

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2002 by Liesl Schillinger

Like the girlfriend, today's politicians have found that a Spanish vocabulary is useful for disguising silver-spoon roots and expressing solidarity with the masses. Our president, George W. Bush--who comes from a famously privileged background and had a diplomat-class upbringing--demonstrated this in May at a press conference in Paris, when he scolded an American news reporter for having had the effrontery to ask President Jacques Chirac a question in bench. Bush huffed to the crowd, "Very good, the guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he's intercontinental." When the reporter, stunned by the hostility, countered that he knew many more than four words of French, the president's disgust only mounted: "I'm impressed. Que bueno (how great)," he said snidely. He clearly meant it to sting--a not-so-veiled suggestion that the reporter was a member of the effete liberal class that was responsible for all that's wrong with American politics. At his birthday this July in Kennebunkport, Bush wore a baseball cap printed with the words "El jefe" (the chief). The message was clear: French is poncey, show-offy, elitist. But Spanish is all-American.

And yet, even as Bush deploys Spanish to shore up his regular-guy bona fides, a significant portion of the nation's elite still does not look forward to an America when "Yo quiero Taco Bell" will lisp from every television screen, and Shakira will replace Edith Piaf as soundtrack of choice for smoky cafes. Joseph Epstein discovered how strong the resistance to pro-Spanish peer pressure can be in late June, when he discussed his snobbery book on the National Public Radio call-in show "Talk of the Nation." "A woman called up who was a high school French teacher, and she seemed ticked off at the spread of Spanish," Epstein recalled. "She said she felt Spanish was being emphasized at the expense of French and that it was being emphasized in a kind of multicultural, and--oddly enough--non-Western way. She felt there was a kind of `We must all learn Spanish now because we have so many Spanish countrymen' thing going on that had a kind of rudeness about it--whereas she felt French was a more highbrow, grander language."

Amores Perros

I can sympathize with the French teacher. As I grew older, I chose again and again not to study Spanish, preferring languages that to me seemed more exotic. The notion that the comparative ease of the Spanish language might actually recommend it for study eluded me--in the superego phase of life, what does not seem hard can seem not worth doing. When my open-minded father learned Spanish, I stopped my ears when he played his language tapes and repeated perro (dog) 20 times. I loved foreign languages, but didn't think Spanish counted as one. In Oklahoma, where I went to high school, many of the Hispanic kids in the high school took Spanish for an easy "A" or "B" because they already spoke it at home. "Villa Allegre" was on television, and on "Sesame Street" they taught us abierto and cerrado and peligro. Ads for sazon Goya ran alongside ads for Coca-Cola and Cottonelle. What was exotic about that?