Tag-Archive for » self-identity «

Infrastructure fractures

Cruis­ing west on Cen­tral, past Coors, is never going to be the same again. I’ve watched it change, pas­sive eyes scan­ning the long, brown flats chock full of weeds green or brown as the sea­sons changed, from 5th grade through…well…now. Granted, I’m the pas­sen­ger less often, and par­al­lel to that there is less dirt, cov­ered over by con­crete foun­da­tions and tidy, American-dream-achieved homes. Just as many weeds though, they just grow closer together.

Regard­less, it used to be a hel­luva ride. First from 98th, where we turned east out of West­gate to head to church on 57th street every Sun­day (every Sun­day– every one), to later on when 86th was cut out of the dunes and later paved. They even­tu­ally put some side­walks, too. The long-awaited side­walks were the indi­ca­tion of civ­i­liza­tion. For almost a whole decade we lived, seem­ingly stranded, sep­a­rated from the city and its ameni­ties by an ever-swirling spring wind storm, with­out much more than the infor­mal con­crete curb to mark the place where peo­ple should drive, ver­sus the place where peo­ple should tromp through the sand in the awk­ward way sand makes one do so; it has the same sense of humor as snow piled up in substance-less drifts. 

West­gate was for a long time before we ever arrived a neigh­bor­hood tucked out of the way, a micro-system that I par­tic­i­pated in as a ten year-old child and middle-schooler. My imme­di­ate, prac­ti­cal world view finally expanded while I attended West Mesa and ran around the greater north­west part of town. Coach Gee would lit­er­ally makes us run around all over the west side; from the ditch banks of the South Val­ley to the bike paths of Unser, in front of the pet­ro­glyphs, near St. Pious and Fly­ing J on 98th. Cross-country was my own per­sonal tour of the place where I lived, a place with which I suf­fered a con­flicted, slightly angry rela­tion­ship. Still, those places are for­ever embed­ded in my mind and in my emo­tional landscape.

As is Cen­tral; wide and dark, fast and dirty. It was an inevitable road in my life, the only way out of West­gate long before Unser, Blake, Tower and Bridge net­worked and expanded. 98th and Cen­tral, to Cen­tral and Unser, Cen­tral and Coors. To free­dom, new expe­ri­ences and the vast land­scape of a brand new coun­try, lan­guage and adven­ture. Sun­light enter­tained day­dreams and the deep­en­ing shad­ows cush­ioned dark fears as asphalt, white lines and adolescent-tall tum­ble­weeds rushed in place past us.

The ride from Cen­tral and Coors to Cen­tral and 98th was the per­fect stretch of road to lull one to sleep with a mind full of final, tired thoughts. After Wednes­day night church meet­ings, after long days of extra-curricular-related activ­i­ties, on the way home from friends’ houses or shop­ping expe­di­tions. The wide road curved up 9 Mile Hill in the dis­tance, vehi­cles of all sorts motor­ing their way steadily into the set­ting sun.

Ver­i­zon rose out of the desert sands behind Albertson’s and gave us a traf­fic light. The fash­ion spread like 21st cen­tury eco-mindfulness. Now, between Unser and 98th, there will be two more work­ing sem­a­phores. One is at as-of-yet uncar­ved inter­sec­tion, where the desert imme­di­ately south of Cen­tral is still curbed and unde­vel­oped. The other is at 86th and Cen­tral, the inter­sec­tion which became, unex­pect­edly, a rivulet of life & traf­fic, with the dol­lar store and the gas sta­tions rep­re­sent­ing the cul­mi­na­tion of human need for the dusty beings that live on the dunes, tucked away and oppos­ing the Sandias.

I’m not say­ing that there shouldn’t be traf­fic lights. First of all, BCFD Divi­sion Com­man­der Boris would, almost imper­cep­ti­bly and only momen­tar­ily, raise an eye­brow in dis­ap­proval of my fast and loose take on pub­lic safety. Hor­rific events play in my head, past human costs for the priv­i­lege of dri­ving fast in a metal death trap under the influ­ence of chem­i­cal inhibitors, cut­ting across the as-of-yet unlit roads of Albu­querque in the dark like a furtive noc­tur­nal rodent. 

When I was in 7th grade I cov­ered the Gor­don House deba­cle for the Tru­man Mid­dle School news­pa­per, crap­pily imi­tat­ing the AP style in my first attempt at jour­nal­ism. My young mind gained its first rudi­men­tary under­stand­ing of drunk dri­ving and how it affects life in the wild west. The traf­fic lights are good, nay, nec­es­sary. It makes sense to inter­rupt the con­stant flow of machin­ery at high speeds. It’s good we can’t ramp it up to 65mph by the time we hit 98th from the healthy 45mph we were doing down Unser. The ride now takes a bit more delib­er­a­tion down that stretch as a frown­ing red sig­nal mod­er­ates the urge to push on the gas pedal, just a lit­tle further.

Yet I can’t feel but a bit of nos­tal­gia as I stare down Cen­tral for the nth time in my life, the engine faith­fully fir­ing as I man­age the lane change to the inside lane, visu­al­iz­ing the lean­ing turn onto 86th in t minus 5 min­utes after I turn off Unser. I no longer see an open road of poten­tial, as gen­er­a­tions before me saw it in the shim­mer­ing sun­set light that cast the mun­dane real­ity of every­day liv­ing in a con­tin­u­ous golden dream light of romance and adventure. 

Route 66 is just that more civ­i­lized now as it courses through the lit­tle big out­post town of Albu­querque, New Mex­ico. We must be so proud to be so grown up.

I grew up like a

wild west weed wan­der­ing
tall and round, spiky.
dried and hol­low, drifting.

shot out of loose sand home,
dull fibrous bit­ter green.
raises a stink when torn.

sun dries to a hard snap
pro­tec­tive, razor lances.
scrape skin, embed in nap

Lots, gar­dens, street edges
squeeze, wrenched brown dry while
winds woo the wiry wenches.

Writing to Remember

Things have been pretty busy, but SenoritaRuth.com has been on my mind, and I want to make sure that I keep up with it, even if it has to be with small, off-topic posts like this one. I mean, I have a mil­lion great ideas that I even­tu­ally plan on fin­ish­ing up or start­ing, but there’s some­thing to be said about being a lit­tle spon­ta­neous and hon­est too. I mean, in the sense of writ­ing for the sake of actual com­mu­ni­ca­tion with read­ers. I have a hard time with you, reader, because I don’t know who you are, or if you even exist. I mean, I don’t know what it means to have read­ers. But what­ever, you’re only part of the rea­son why I write.
While I won’t go on and on here about writ­ing, because I don’t do nearly enough of it to war­rant me hav­ing a pub­lic opin­ion, I will say that I have a lot or writ­ing to do for school. I’m enjoy­ing the chal­lenge but feel­ing some intense pres­sure. This is all self-inflicted, have no doubt, and that helps me keep my whin­ing to a dull roar (quit yer bitchin’!).
I’m also try­ing to remain keenly aware of the real world around me. Spring is such a redeem­ing sea­son, and it’s very easy to take from the new growth and impe­tus in the form of metaphor to do the same. This year I’m bat­tling a huge amount of iner­tia; more, it feels like, than ever before. How­ever, regard­less of how far back I feel set, I’m pretty sure things are gonna end up okay. Hav­ing said that, a cou­ple of quick points.
If you want to hire me, I’m look­ing for a job. Writ­ing, edit­ing, teach­ing, I’m open to a num­ber of dif­fer­ent options. Don’t get me wrong, I’m apply­ing and offi­cially job-searching, but I don’t sup­pose there’s a rea­son to not men­tion it here as well. I’m down to do off-beat, quirky projects, tackle big orga­ni­za­tional tasks, or strike out on a research adven­ture. The only dif­fer­ence between now and then is that I’d like to get paid now too.
Sec­ondly, I’m really in need of a fris­bee part­ner. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’ve started the Fris­bee Lovin Fix­ers on the Duke City Fix in hopes of start­ing up some sort of inter­est group. I’m think­ing Sun­day after­noons are gonna be a good time to get out of the house for an hour or two. I wish I was fast enough to be able to run and catch my own throw, but as it stands, I’m def­i­nitely gonna need fris­bee play­mates.
Well, it’s back to the grind. Glad I decided to do this. I have some awe­some sun­set pics to post from my favorite pirate, Ms. Brid­gette.
Also, I quizzed some of my friends for your ben­e­fit. If you’ve ever had ques­tions about school, work, and grow­ing up, then keep an eye out on how some of my col­leagues are makin it after high school, col­lege, or grad school. The paths are many, all filled with chal­lenges and the unex­pected twists and turns of life. Suf­fer­ing from sometimes-intense bouts of panic about life post-grad school, it’s nice to remem­ber that I’m not the first or the only ques­tion­ing my role in life and soci­ety. For­ward move­ment and excel­lence in effort are bound to land me where I need to be.

Last minute thoughts: still pon­der­ing the offer to do some sort of polit­i­cal right wing vs. left piece of web­lish­ing. Not sure how I feel about it yet. Part of me twitches with antic­i­pa­tion, but another part of me is wary of con­tribut­ing, on how­ever small a scale, to com­bat­ive or con­fronta­tional polit­i­cal dis­course. Maybe it sounds like I’m pussy­foot­ing, but at the same time I see lim­ited ben­e­fits in fram­ing infor­ma­tion like that. Sean, you’re gonna have to do me some con­vinc­ing if you want to do this thing. Like I said, I like the idea but it has to be con­struc­tive dia­log.

Mr. Draven and I are gonna get together to make some music. I’ve decided. It should be fun. This is a back­burner project but I fully intend to post what, if any­thing, we record.

Okay, now really back to impor­tant work. Peace out.

Señorita Ruth on: Benito Juárez

Tales from the Old Country 

Every Mon­day I will regale you with sto­ries from the old coun­try, my beloved Mex­ico. This weekly effort was moti­vated by my reflec­tions on the his­tor­i­cal fig­ures I learned about in my short time in the Mex­i­can edu­ca­tional sys­tem. Since com­ing to the U.S. I’ve become iso­lated with many parts of my own his­tory and back­ground, and I hope to reestab­lish some con­nec­tion for myself and oth­ers who may also feel there are cer­tain aspects of their self-identity that are murky or miss­ing. For the rest of you, this is a les­son in inter­na­tional his­tory and context.

O~o~O

Mexican President Benito Juarez
Ben­ito Juárez: Zapotec lawyer and Pres­i­dent of Mex­ico, 1858 –1872 

I imag­ine that the name Juárez con­jures up amongst my south­west­ern broth­ers and sis­ters assorted sor­did tales of a bor­der city where all your car­nal desires (and some not so desired) can come true. Tales of lost week­ends and lost free­dom in Mex­i­can jails have come my way since I was in high school. Not that I’m think­ing of any set in par­tic­u­lar *ahem NMSU*, but en masse migra­tions south of the bor­der to Ciu­dad Juárez dur­ing week­ends and breaks are not uncom­mon, and also not rec­om­mended, but we’ll save that for a future Col­lege Sur­vival in the South­west 101 entry. I myself have spent time in and trav­el­ing through Juárez. Every trip to the U.S. when I was a lit­tle girl required haz­ard­ing the crazy traf­fic, and I went to sum­mer camp at Vino Nuevo Church when I was fif­teen. My fam­ily has long-standing rela­tion­ship ties there, and its sig­nif­i­cance as a land­mark on the bor­der is long-established.

Yet, this ini­tial link between name and city has hid­den in its folds one of the gems of Mex­i­can his­tory. Indeed, Cd. Juárez, along with dozens of other cities through­out Mex­ico, is named after one of the country’s most hon­ored lead­ers, Ben­ito Juárez. He was a states­man and a pres­i­dent, famous for his staunch defense of human rights and his per­se­ver­ance in the face of many adver­saries and ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents.

Ben­ito Juárez rose from indige­nous poverty to the zenith of the Mex­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem in his life. A Zapotec orphaned by age three, he struck out from his home in the vil­lage of San Pablo Gue­latao in the state of Oax­aca at age 12 to ful­fill what at the time was a vague yearn­ing for greater learner and what later would become a legacy. Involved in a polit­i­cal sys­tem that expe­ri­enced a tumul­tuous 19th cen­tury, his career stretched from defend­ing land­hold­ing rights for indige­nous peo­ples as a lawyer at the local and state lev­els begin­ning in 1834 to fed­eral judge posi­tion (1842), gov­er­nor of Oax­aca (1846–1852) and even­tu­ally as the leader of the Mex­i­can nation from 1858 to 1872, the year he died.

While in each of these posi­tions he cham­pi­oned and was the voice for the peo­ple in rural areas. He was respon­si­ble for strip­ping the Catholic Church of its exten­sive land hold­ings, build­ing roads and cre­at­ing schools. He worked in offi­cial capac­i­ties under both Con­ser­v­a­tive and Lib­eral admin­is­tra­tions, turned down posi­tions offered to him as Mex­ico faced the threat of becom­ing part of the French Empire between 1864 and 1867 (more about this on the Cinco de Mayo edi­tion of Tales from the Old Coun­try), and expelled an emis­sary sent by the Con­fed­er­acy in 1861, since sup­port­ing an entity that kept almost half of its pop­u­la­tion in bondage directly con­tra­dicted his phi­los­o­phy and work. He estab­lished reforms and a con­sti­tu­tion that guar­an­teed rights of free speech and press, among oth­ers.

Like any per­son, much less a national leader, his ide­o­log­i­cal stance was com­pli­cated and has since been heav­ily scru­ti­nized. Some his­to­ri­ans con­demn him of abus­ing exec­u­tive power by remain­ing pres­i­dent for nearly twenty years. How­ever, his ded­i­ca­tion can be under­stood as a reac­tion to the many lead­ers, includ­ing Por­firio Díaz and Anto­nio López de Santa Anna, whose ideas of Mex­ico were less demo­c­ra­tic and more dic­ta­to­r­ial. He has been rec­og­nized across the Amer­i­cas and across the world as a cham­pion for causes that res­onate across ethic and national bound­aries. His rela­tion­ship with the U.S. was multi-faceted, as he spent time in New Orleans as an exile under Santa Anna’s rule.

Over­all, he was a man of intel­li­gence and fore­sight, with staunch beliefs by which he stood and acted. It is impos­si­ble to unravel him from the mod­ern incar­na­tion of Mex­ico, which owes him many advance­ments and land­mark turns for the bet­ter. An exam­ple of the deter­mined human spirit, he per­se­vered and returned to his bat­tles, even where oth­ers might have called it quits. A legacy deserv­ing of the honor to have streets and cities named after him. Some which might do well to look to his life for inspi­ra­tion and direc­tion.

Ref­er­ences and fur­ther read­ing:
http://www.elbalero.gob.mx/kids/history/html/sxix/biojuarez.html
http://www.mexonline.com/benitojuarez.htm
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Jo-Ki/Ju-rez-Benito.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Juarez

Señorita Ruth on: English Only Pt. 2

Are They Talk­ing About Me?
What are the ide­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of choos­ing an offi­cial lan­guage? What kind of under­ly­ing belief sys­tem does it betray? A major marker of cul­ture and iden­tity, lan­guage sep­a­rates worlds of expe­ri­ence. And when it’s not your own, it’s often uncom­fort­able to have to deal with. Basic ques­tions that seem both ludi­crous and star­tlingly wor­ri­some express thoughts and assump­tions that begin to sur­face along the lines of “Are they talk­ing about me?” This may appear para­noid and self-centered, but is also a reflec­tion of the lin­guis­tic iso­la­tion mono­lin­gual Amer­i­can Eng­lish speak­ers expe­ri­ence on a daily basis. The unique geo­graph­i­cal posi­tion, along with the desires of the founders of the coun­try, have com­bined to cre­ate an insu­lar envi­ron­ment for Eng­lish, much more so than in other parts of the world. In addi­tion, Amer­i­can cit­i­zens speak one of the world’s most influ­en­tial lan­guages, afford­ing them lit­tle moti­va­tion to learn a sec­ond lan­guage beyond the cur­sory high school or col­lege cur­ricu­lum expe­ri­ence. As any bilin­gual speaker will tell you, that’s not really speak­ing two lan­guages at all.

So we have a nat­u­rally pro­tected envi­ron­ment for “one nation, one lan­guage” to func­tion as the ide­o­log­i­cal as well as the policy-based modus operandi. Our fore­fa­thers did not feel it was the role of gov­ern­ment to dic­tate to the peo­ple what lan­guages they should speak. Fur­ther­more, it was not uncom­mon in the early days of this coun­try, as it is now, for legal doc­u­ments, pam­phlets, and other offi­cial or quasi-official com­mu­ni­ca­tions to be pub­lished in the myr­iad of lan­guages that rep­re­sent our multi-cultural roots. Span­ish, Ger­man, French, and Dutch are a few of the first lan­guages immi­grants brought with them to add to the cul­tural and lin­guis­tic land­scape of a coun­try made up of trans­plants. From a healthy lin­guis­tic com­pe­ti­tion, Eng­lish emerged as the early win­ner, the lan­guage to bind speak­ers of many lan­guages together. To that effect, it is the de facto, con­ven­tional and fully accepted pri­mary lan­guage.

Nested within our overtly anglo­phonic cul­ture we have a long-standing tra­di­tion of multi-lingualism. Ves­tiges of true bilin­gual­ism exist in our efforts to expose chil­dren at every level of edu­ca­tion to other West­ern Euro­pean lan­guages. Even in the face of this tra­di­tion and ide­o­log­i­cal moti­va­tions behind cre­at­ing a coun­try with­out an offi­cial lan­guage, how­ever, there is a voice that in the form of leg­is­la­tion has asked both fed­eral and state-level gov­ern­ments to adopt Eng­lish as the offi­cial lan­guage of the United States. The cur­rent efforts by orga­ni­za­tions such as U.S. Eng­lish would see Eng­lish adopted as the offi­cial lan­guage, and in such a capac­ity dis­place lan­guages spo­ken in fam­i­lies and minor­ity com­mu­ni­ties more than ever before.

What has Eng­lish done for you?
Regard­less of its (lack of) offi­cial sta­tus, Eng­lish is the lan­guage of the peo­ple. Over­whelm­ingly used as the pri­mary lan­guage in all walks of life, Eng­lish is trans­mit­ted suc­cess­fully to the kids of every gen­er­a­tion, and of every cul­tural back­ground. The Amer­i­can pub­lic school sys­tems guar­an­tee trans­mis­sion by using Eng­lish both in the class­room and in the play­ground. It’s the lan­guage of for­mal edu­ca­tion as well as of infor­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It’s present in every form of media, and is highly sought as a sec­ond lan­guage around the world and by non-native speak­ers in the U.S. Stud­ies show that even those with no for­mal sec­ond lan­guage edu­ca­tion, sim­ply by being immersed in the cul­ture, acquire a func­tional grasp of the lan­guage. Its far-reaching global sta­tus is rec­og­nized in Africa as well as Europe and Asia. It’s very appar­ent to the world that speak­ing Eng­lish is asso­ci­ated with socioe­co­nomic oppor­tu­ni­ties not avail­able in many people’s first lan­guage, there­fore it is desired. Most impor­tant to real­ize is that, even if not every per­son speaks Eng­lish in the U.S., those person’s chil­dren will. Remov­ing the abil­ity of non-fluent cit­i­zens and vis­i­tors the abil­ity to inter­act with the gov­ern­ment and within their own com­mu­ni­ties by enforc­ing Eng­lish Only doesn’t change the actu­al­i­ties of lan­guage use: Peo­ple have dif­fer­ent capac­i­ties to learn and retain a sec­ond lan­guage, but as long as that lan­guage is being taught as a first lan­guage, the sta­tus quo is nat­u­rally main­tained by the major­ity lan­guage.

English Only pol­icy seeks to reaf­firm a sta­tus that it has no right to either cre­ate or uphold. A lan­guage becomes widely used and influ­en­tial through use. Award­ing it a legal sta­tus changes lit­tle in the way it prop­a­gates through the greater cul­ture and soci­ety. Edu­ca­tion, the media, and the vari­ety of social exchanges that occur in Eng­lish are respon­si­ble for Eng­lish being the major­ity lan­guage. When under­stood in this light, the Eng­lish Only move­ment is hol­low and mean­ing­less, a mis­placed effort that could and should be used to attend to other, more press­ing mat­ters regard­ing the sta­tus of lan­guage and lan­guages in this coun­try.

Further­more, there are the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of legal­iz­ing a human cog­ni­tive facil­ity. Like many other efforts in the past to reg­u­late human behav­ior and cat­e­go­rize peo­ple accord­ing to eth­nic or genetic mark­ers, this effort will only work to strengthen the bound­aries of an arti­fice upon our cul­ture that we would do bet­ter with­out. Giv­ing Eng­lish legal sta­tus directly works against the social mech­a­nisms we have in place by which to iden­tify our­selves and each other. Gov­ern­ing people’s spo­ken lives will incur costs both finan­cial and cul­tural that we should not be pre­pared to shoul­der, and will doom yet another gen­er­a­tion to a pur­ga­tory of self-identity as the same words echo as have in the past: “I don’t know my mother tongue.” We as a soci­ety are still deal­ing with the after-effects of the Native Amer­i­cans who for­sook Navajo and other lan­guages after suf­fer­ing through board­ing schools and the rural ele­men­tary school chil­dren who suf­fered phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment for speak­ing Span­ish in the class­rooms of old Texas and the South­west. These peo­ple kept their own chil­dren from learn­ing their mother tongue to the detri­ment of their fam­ily and cul­tural iden­tity, and encour­aged them to only speak Eng­lish. The fal­lacy in these efforts is that the chil­dren of immi­grants become so quickly accul­tur­ated that any overt effort to do so by pre­vent­ing the learn­ing of another lan­guage is redun­dant and effec­tively irrel­e­vant. It should be the ideal of a pro­gres­sive, diverse soci­ety to encour­age a healthy lin­guis­tic home envi­ron­ment. Bilin­gual­ism should not have a neg­a­tive value when it comes to cit­i­zen­ship, par­tic­i­pa­tion and inte­gra­tion within the greater soci­ety.

English Only poli­cies will cast a reign of shad­ows over minor­ity lan­guage speak­ers. Legal immi­grants and Native Amer­i­cans alike who use the same ser­vices and inter­act with the same gov­ern­ment as native Eng­lish speak­ers stand to lose oppor­tu­ni­ties in offi­cial capac­i­ties. The time, effort, and money it takes to trans­late offi­cial U.S. doc­u­ments into other lan­guages has always been devoted to the same task since the 1700s, and in no way eclipses other gov­ern­ment spend­ing fig­ures which may or may not be as sig­nif­i­cant. Beyond the bureau­cratic con­se­quences, by accept­ing this pol­icy the coun­try runs the threat of expe­dit­ing the rate at which some lan­guages become extinct.

Ethics and Progress
Beyond the ques­tions of legal­ity, which on their own are sub­stan­tial, we also deal with the more abstract but just as cru­cial con­cepts that influ­enced the orig­i­nal deci­sion to do with­out an offi­cial lan­guage. It’s been pointed out that the fore­fa­thers couldn’t have pre­dicted how many lan­guages we have to deal with. Yet I won­der how sym­pa­thetic they would be to our plight if they com­pared their tech­nol­ogy to ours. We ben­e­fit from dig­i­tal media that have brought the world closer together, stan­dard­iz­ing and mak­ing avail­able more lan­guages to more peo­ple. It would stand to rea­son that we uti­lize these advan­tages to ben­e­fit all. How­ever, even these flimsy argu­ments side­step the under­ly­ing sen­ti­ment that dri­ves pol­icy efforts such a Eng­lish Only. Claim­ing patri­o­tism, these efforts eclipse more fun­da­men­tal mem­ber­ships that we should also feel a strong respon­si­bil­ity toward: Amer­i­can multi-cultural and multi-lingual cul­ture, and the human race, wherein every­one has an equal right to speak the lan­guage they were taught to express them­selves in.

Señorita Ruth on: English Only Pt. 1

Nations & Lan­guage
It’s easy to trace and under­stand the con­nec­tion between the ideas of “one nation” and “one lan­guage.” These sim­ple asso­ci­a­tions have out­lined the lan­guage poli­cies of west­ern Euro­pean coun­tries from the mid­dle of the 19th cen­tury for­ward. Even before that, con­quer­ing pow­ers have under­stood the fun­da­men­tal need to estab­lish a com­mon tongue amongst the newly con­quered, often wildly dif­fer­ent peo­ples they con­trolled. While effec­tive in build­ing a nation, these poli­cies have also neg­a­tively affected count­less lan­guages and cul­tures across the world. It’s true that the moti­va­tions for the expan­sion of any given nation or empire are usu­ally money, trade, and com­merce. How­ever, the under­ly­ing struc­ture of such endeav­ors is lan­guage. In order to suc­cess­fully inter­act with other cul­tures, even in the role of con­quer­ing or col­o­niz­ing power, the lan­guage “issue” must be addressed.

It would be dif­fi­cult to enu­mer­ate all the instances of lan­guages being aban­doned, by either will or force, for another as a result of cul­tural and social pres­sure. How­ever, I don’t have to stray far from the South­west to find evi­dence of mul­ti­ple efforts through­out his­tory to estab­lish, through force, the use of the Euro­pean lan­guage of power. First it was Span­ish, and then it was Eng­lish. The first estab­lished a trans-continental iden­tity for a large num­ber of inhab­i­tants of the Amer­i­cas, and the sec­ond rede­fined that iden­tity as polit­i­cal bor­ders changed and nations exchanged land for peace. As an exam­ple, New Mex­ico has belonged to the Span­ish Empire, the Mex­i­can nation, and of course the United States.

In this his­tory, we have instances of Native Amer­i­cans being force­fully accul­tur­ated into both Span­ish and Eng­lish speak­ing roles. A direct result of this forced accul­tur­a­tion is the loss of Native Amer­i­can lan­guages. Across the coun­try and the Amer­i­cas, the sta­tus of native tongues is dire as they are con­stantly decreas­ing in usage. This sit­u­a­tion is detri­men­tal to those that study the world’s lan­guages, but is more imme­di­ately a blow to the cul­tural and self-identity of the speak­ers. The puni­tive nature of forced accul­tur­a­tion becomes a deter­rent when peo­ple that have suf­fered pun­ish­ment are unwill­ing to pass on a minor­ity tongue to their chil­dren for fear of sim­i­lar reper­cus­sions on them.

Native Amer­i­cans were intro­duced to Span­ish in the 1600s, and it’s effected a notable dif­fer­ence in their respec­tive lan­guages from that time for­ward. Resis­tance to learn Span­ish helped pre­serve Navajo, Apache, the Pueblo lan­guages and oth­ers for 400 years. Yet it was impos­si­ble to suc­cess­fully fend off the Span­ish and later Eng­lish lan­guage influ­ences. There exist records, as they do all across the Amer­i­cas, of priests and other work­ers col­lect­ing the words and mean­ings of these unfa­mil­iar, rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent lan­guages. These records are invalu­able as lin­guists try to piece together lan­guages that are no longer fully real­ized in con­ver­sa­tion. Words and mean­ing have been lost beneath the wheels of progress in the major­ity lan­guage of the day, and even­tu­ally cen­tury.

Currently, in the same geo­graph­i­cal area, Eng­lish plays that role, sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties that speak Native Amer­i­can lan­guages, as well as Span­ish, Viet­namese, and other immi­grant lan­guages. What are the effects of hav­ing Eng­lish as a non-official major­ity lan­guage sur­round­ing Native Amer­i­can lan­guages that are on the decline in speak­ers? What are the effects of hav­ing lin­guis­tic and cul­tural con­tact with other major lan­guages of the world where Eng­lish is the major­ity and Span­ish, Hindi, Farsi, Ger­man or Korean are the minor­ity? These inter­ac­tions breed con­ster­na­tion and worry in some, inter­est and research ques­tions in lin­guists. For the sake of both, these issues must be addressed.

While the U.S. has never had an offi­cial lan­guage, a rar­ity in the day and age of the mod­ern nation-state, the ques­tion whether to adopt Eng­lish as the offi­cial lan­guage seems to remain uneasily unanswered.

Señorita Ruth on: Self-Identity

Tell me a lit­tle about your­self
I’m always hard-pressed to fill in an “About Me” blurb or make an effort to “Tell [you] about [my]rself.” It’s cer­tainly not an easy ques­tion to answer, and the more I think about it, the more com­pli­cated it gets. My reac­tion to such tasks is always the same: “Oh man. Where do I begin?”
Encom­pass­ing even some part, much less the entirety, of one’s being is chal­leng­ing for many rea­sons. Self-identity is an abstract that is often hard to artic­u­late suc­cess­fully. How we view our­selves is depen­dent on out­side fac­tors and vari­ables, many of which we have no con­trol over. We inter­nal­ize events around us, absorb­ing their effects on us and draw­ing con­clu­sions about our­selves based on those expe­ri­ences.
Self-identity is a com­plex mat­ter. Not only is the aver­age señorita plagued with ques­tions of body image and ade­quacy as a per­son and a woman, but she is also bom­barded with the meta con­ver­sa­tions regard­ing these issues. Whether or not I should be wor­ried about my weight, hair, the con­di­tion of my skin or how much money is in my wal­let; it can all get rather con­fus­ing with experts and the media also weigh­ing in. After all, the only way to get a good idea of who we might be is by look­ing at our reflec­tion on the mir­ror of soci­ety. But the images we receive as feed­back are often blurry, out of focus, or wholly ques­tion­able.
So, who or what are we?
Humans exist as a para­dox between being unique and being just like every­one else. Our indi­vid­u­al­ity is both pre­cious and com­mon­place, as it is the most impor­tant jour­ney we embark on, but only to our­selves. We talk about our­selves the most, we think about our own sit­u­a­tions more than any­one else’s, and we view the world in an ego-centric way, one that often seeks out the ben­e­fit to the self above all else.
Con­trast­ing with our self inter­est in the name of sur­vival, we’re also social crea­tures who depend on each other for many of our needs and wants. We’ve cre­ated count­less cul­tures and soci­eties to ful­fill needs that we can’t achieve on our own. Within these social groups we develop hier­ar­chies, social net­works, con­ven­tions, com­mon ground and shared expe­ri­ences, and many other indexes by which we iden­tify with oth­ers.
Lan­guage is a telling marker of iden­tity. We eval­u­ate oth­ers by their speech, and are in return also dis­sected by the things we say. Words and spe­cific ways of say­ing them announce to oth­ers where we’re from, our age group, our socio-economic sta­tus, and also betrays some of our world view. This rec­i­p­ro­cal index­ing occurs with nary a con­scious thought, most of the time, and we oper­ate in our day to day lives exact­ing very lit­tle effort to com­mu­ni­cate our needs and wants.
So, really, tell me about your­self
A quirky grad stu­dent in the busi­ness of mak­ing obser­va­tions about our lan­guage and cul­ture. An immi­grant with dual cit­i­zen­ship who’s been in the U.S. for over 15 years. A desert rat, born and bred all along the sands of north­ern Mex­ico and the south­west­ern U.S. A mother, sis­ter, daugh­ter. An aspir­ing writer inter­ested in art, music, pol­i­tics, and many other things.

This space is an expres­sion of all those things, an analy­sis of what makes you, you and me, me. If you know the com­plex­i­ties self-identity in the South­west, stick around, I’m hop­ing to unravel some of those intri­cate tapes­tries. If you don’t know what it’s like, stick around, and gain new insight into the peo­ple and places of this sig­nif­i­cant Amer­i­can region.

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