Latinos

I've been thinking about Latinos in the United States, mostly because I have so often heard complaints about them—us, I should say, since I am one of them.  One complaint is the criminal activity associated with Latinos.  If only we would go away, the crime rate would plummet.  The Chicago Post agrees:  "Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country."  But then, the Post was complaining about Irish immigrants in 1870, not Latinos in 2014.

As is true for Latinos nowadays, Irish poverty and criminality went together.  The Post affirmed the connection:  "Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic."  The religious prejudice was more notable in the 19^th than it is in the 21^st century, but Latinos too are tarred with the religious brush, albeit indirectly, as in the complaint that we breed like rabbits.  In fact, we breed like Catholics.

The poverty of Latinos, like the poverty of the Irish in the 19^th century, has at least two roots.  First, immigrants then as now came to the U. S. because they were dirt poor in the old country.  Second, once we were in the U. S., the work that immigrants got, then as now, was the lowest paying, least desirable of jobs.  After the Civil War, when the country was flexing its transcontinental muscles, the Irish did work that other Americans, except for the newly enfranchised African Americans, simply would not do.

As if echoing the racially charged comments by so many conservative commentators, Jim Kinsella points out on his web page that the Irish in the 19^th century, "became chamber maids, cooks, and the caretakers of children.  Early Americans disdained this type of work, fit only for servants."  As a result, continues Kinsella, the Irish immigrants came into economic conflict with African Americans, who "were the first to call the Irish 'white nigger.'"  As time passed, the Irish became politically and socially powerful, and finally economically successful.  Noel Ignatiev traces the process in How the Irish Became White.  The vicious racism of the 19^th century aside, one expects that Latinos will follow the same trajectory, and that the criminality of the present will become the dignified success of the Irish have in America for the last sixty years.

In my first trip to downtown Reading, back in 1989, I learned another element of the complaint against Latinos:  "Why don't they learn English?"  Fortunately for the Irish, most of them spoke English, so they were not subject to this complaint.  That was not true for the Italian immigrants who started arriving in the U. S. in large numbers in the 1870s.  For them, as the Virtualitalia web page puts it, "Overcoming the language barrier was a difficult obstacle."  Michael Musmanno explains the consequences of the language barriers in The Story of Italians in America:  because Italians could not speak English, "Many people were under the misconception that an Italian possessed only limited abilities for unskilled labor."  Given only the poorest of jobs, Italians fell into the same cycle of poverty and criminality that the Irish had earlier in the 19^th century and that the Latinos have more recently.

Feeling excluded from the dominant culture, Italians formed organizations that provided continuity with their Italian cultural and linguistic past.  As Musmanno says, "The organizations also served as places for social gathering at which the culture, language, and food of Italy could be shared."  Just as Latinos do now, the Italian immigrants celebrated their culture and spoke their native language.

And then the Italian immigrants set about learning English.  Second language acquisition is not easy.  Study after study shows that it takes about seven years to become proficient enough in a second language to use it with ease, and that's true specifically for people who are well educated in their native language.  For the poverty-stricken and for the most part illiterate Italian immigrants of the early 20^th century, it took longer.  In some cases, if the person was too old, it never took place at all.

The same is true for the current crop of immigrants.  Depending on their sophistication in their native language, like Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, or Swedes, Latinos will take somewhere between seven and ten years to learn English well.  Because Latino immigrants are constantly entering the country, however, it may seem that they never learn to speak English.  But in fact, like previous groups of immigrants, Latinos struggle to learn English.  As that process unfolds, and as was true for previous immigrant groups, the struggle is reflected in the economic difficulties that afflict Latinos generally and the academic problems that affect Latino children in particular.

A nostalgic sense of the past makes it Gospel truth that our Latvian, Norwegian, Slovenian, German ancestors were quick to learn English, and that their success as Americans was a consequence of their advanced language skills and, no doubt, superior intelligence.  They, it seems, were just far more adept and capable than are current immigrants.  In fact, as Judie Haynes points out on her Everything ESL web page, "In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Service found that 77% of Italian, 60% of Russian, and 51% of German immigrant children were one or more grade levels behind in school compared to 28% of American born children."  In short, our ancestors were no quicker, and no more adept, at learning English than are today's Latinos.

Haynes notes that second language acquisition is easier for children who hear their native language spoken at home.  The reasons for this phenomenon are many, but most significant is the fact that adults speak in more sophisticated and more challenging ways in their native language than they do in a new language.  The greater sophistication stimulates their children to develop language skills generally, and that is what makes acquisition of a second language easier.  So next time you hear an older Latino speaking in Spanish to his or her child, don't ask when they will learn English.  Instead, pay attention to the unsurprising fact that the child is responding in English.