By 2005, the population of Latinos in the United States had reached over 40 million (Torres). I use the moniker ‘Latino’ by recommendation of Ed Morales in his book Living in Spanglish.
“Hispanic…was designed to allow the lighter-skinned to claim a European heritage. Latino – derived from Latin America, originally coined by Napoleon-era France as a public relations ploy to explain why a French emperor was installed in Mexico City – was a mid-‘70s incarnation of the term meant to allude to separate identity from Spain…Hispanic best describes a Republican politician in Florida, a CEO of a soft-drink company in Georgia, a lawyer in Texas; Latino, a professor in California, a musician in New York, and recent immigrants all over the U.S. (2)”
As with any large immigration, Latinos have brought numerous cultural elements and traditions to the United States, perhaps the most important among them being language. Though many Latino immigrants in the United States remain monolingual or maintain distinction between Spanish and English, thousands, even millions more have adopted Spanglish as their lingua franca. The use of Spanglish comes with controversy; Spanish and English speakers alike have scorned the language as “broken” or “incorrect” and tried to halt its usage in settings more formal than the street. However, the fact remains that Spanglish is a rapidly growing form of speech that cannot be ignored in a linguistic analysis of the United States. Debates rage over whether Spanglish should be considered a dialect or language; I’ll discuss these positions as well as Spanglish’s history and many incarnations throughout this blog.
Morales, Ed. Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America. New York: St Martin's Press, 2002.
Torres, Lourdes. "Don Quixote in Spanglish: Traducttore, traditore?". Romance Quarterly: 52.4 ( 2005 Fall), pp. 328-34.
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