Benito Martínez Ocasio addressed the audience and asked, “What do you prefer? talking to me in english or Spanish (or in Spanish)?” “Spanish! (Spanish!)” the audience responded in unison. “So, you rule (you guys are in charge),” Bad Bunny replied to the thousands of people dancing reggaeton with the Puerto Rican, headliner of perhaps the world’s biggest festival, Coachella, in California’s Indio desert. Just a short drive from Los Angeles, where Bad Bunny participated in this year’s Grammy ceremony a couple of months ago and saw how the television network subtitled his performance by him with “speaking non-English; singing in non-English”, as if it was so difficult to put the lyrics themselves or even, if it was necessary to subtitle, to write, ahem, “speaking in Spanish; singing in Spanish”, lest someone wonder what language it was.
bad bunny asking ‘what do you prefer, talking to me in english or hablando español?’ and the whooooole crowd yelling Spanish ahhhhhhhh pic.twitter.com/3VpcfHPNq1
— jhope x jcole out now (@benitohoseok) April 15, 2023
Bad Bunny became this weekend the first Spanish-speaking artist to headline Coachella, where Rosalía, as has been the norm in recent years, also made a splash, addressing the audience in Spanish. Almost at the same time as the Catalan artist was making thousands of fans dance in the Indio desert, on one of the most recognized shows on American television, Saturday night Live, the Cuban-Spanish actress Ana de Armas opened the program with a monologue in guess what language to explain that she was born in Cuba and that she was about to become a US citizen. That night’s episode also featured the Colombian singer Karol G.
All this has happened in the last few days, but a couple of months ago, also on SLN, the omnipresent Pedro Pascal, the most desired Chilean — perhaps not only that — in the world, recalled in his monologue on the TV show that if he has been able to do everything he has done in his career it was because his parents fled Pinochet’s dictatorship. In what language did he say it? The same one in which Shakira sang with Bizarrap on Jimmy Fallon’s show shortly after.
The importance of Spanish — for some apparently “speaking non-English” — is not new: more than 62 million Americans are of Hispanic origin, 70% of whom use the language in the family environment. Despite the fact that Latin voices are becoming louder and louder, there is still a long way to go. Days ago, Mexican actress Karla Souza sparked a controversy on social media after telling an anecdote in which, despite her appearance as a white, blonde and light-eyed woman, in the US audiovisual industry she is still considered a minority — that is, among Afro-descendants or Hispanics, mostly Mexicans — and therefore is paid less than her white US colleagues. It wouldn’t have hurt Souza to have been careful in the way she delivered such an important message, instead of implying that she was a “person of color.”
Souza’s problem, if we can call it that, is one that comes from certain privilege. Everything that has to do with Hispanic and Latin culture, including speaking in Spanish, is just now entering a new phase in the United States. There are millions of Spanish-speaking people living in the US, and thousands of others who try to reach the country every year, who do not even dream of these problems. Discrimination and structural problems have changed little over the years, despite the fact that Latin culture is more present every day and that world-renowned artists like Bad Bunny remind us not to be afraid because, at the end of the day, “speaking non- English” means speaking Spanish.
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#Speaking #nonEnglish #speaking #Spanish