In a single sentence, Rolando Hernández moves between English and Spanish with agility. His narration is not interrupted even though he switches from one language to another. He doesn’t do it to translate what he says in English or vice versa; he simply assumes that whoever is listening to him will understand. This Cuban-American, 26 years old, is trilingual: he not only speaks English and Spanish, but he also speaks spanglish, a variety of hybrid speech that is born from the combination of Anglo and Hispanic. In his neighborhood of Miami, Hialeah, where three-quarters of the residents have Cuban roots and 95% of the population is Hispanic, the spanglish (in Spanish too Spanglish) queen: “It is everywhere, from the drive through from the nearest McDonald’s to the galleries of Wynwood,” says Hernández.
Although it is difficult to determine how many people speak spanglish, it is estimated that like Hernández there are 35 to 40 million Hispanics in the United States who communicate in this way, more than half of the 62 million Latinos who live in the country. This is a figure that will only increase as the Latino community grows in the coming years: by 2060, one in four Americans is expected to be of Latino origin. “It is the fastest growing hybrid language in the world,” says Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latin Culture at Amherst College (Massachusetts).
There are different types of spanglish, influenced by the country of origin of the community that speaks it. Puerto Ricans in New York speak nuyoricana spanglish that combines Puerto Rican words with mostly African-American English, while Cubans in Miami communicate in cubonics and the Mexicans of California have their Chicano version. Apart from these nuances, this language generally manifests itself in three ways, explains Dr. José Medina, linguistic researcher and educational consultant, who works with school districts across the country to create and develop bilingual programs.
![Rolando Hernandez.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/KGJY6QJOCZEIXLTGCRNGM3GHDQ.jpg?auth=ca0c3fb578a8743386040dd52673e6ddb50b76a17829941af5c5dbaeca75d557&width=414)
“The first type of spanglish It arises from alternating between the two languages. That is, I can start in a language and quickly move to the other because that’s the way My mind works.” The second way is to combine words or take an English word and convert it into Spanish and vice versa. Medina gives an example: “My favorite word is planingthe mix between ironing and ironing”.
“And the third way to mobilize the spanglish is by focusing on the syntactic, as when a student says in English, ‘the blue car is going fast‘. This doesn’t mean I don’t understand. It means that he understands too much because he is mobilizing the order of the words in Spanish: the blue car. In Spanish, the noun always comes first and then the adjective, but in English it is different.”
For Medina, the people who speak spanglish They have a “superpower”: translanguaging, or the ability to move fluently between several languages. “We all have a linguistic repertoire and our job is to mobilize the parts of that linguistic repertoire that we need at different times. Translanguaging gives us the opportunity to understand that when we mix languages it is not wrong. We are truly teaching our knowledge at high academic levels because we can use both languages at the same time, something that not everyone can do,” he explains.
Be from here and there
For decades, people who spoke spanglish They were viewed with rejection, both in the United States and in their countries of origin. Many felt they were not Puerto Rican or Mexican enough, but not American enough either. On the one hand, Latin American society told them that they spoke supposedly incorrect Spanish and, on the other, in the United States they were reprimanded for not perfecting their English. His Latinidad—and identity in general—was constantly questioned, and the spanglish It was seen as an intermediate step in the process of assimilation into American culture and English. Something temporary, something that people would overcome when they learned English.
![Signs in English and Spanish on a streetlight in Bushwick, New York, on May 23, 2024.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/WIESQOLJR5HK3BYUFFULR47ZQA.jpg?auth=f60d10c1fd9d190f0b55f00e4964350bc59692d9396524b962030a196b3681f7&width=414)
That hostility towards spanglish It was overwhelming: it was born within the migrant communities themselves and infected even homes. In Medina’s house, when he was a child, his parents, who had migrated from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to the United States, always told him “either in English or in Spanish.”
The school system also played a large role in the demonization of this language. Medina exemplifies this with an anecdote from when he started first grade in Texas in the late seventies: “Not only did they change my name from José to Joe, but they also tried to force me to transition to English and forget the Spanish language.” . They even tied me to a stretcher. I urinated and like that, on the urinated stretcher, they took me to my first grade class.”
Faced with this general aversion, the spanglish It prevailed as “a way to adapt to the United States without losing the original culture,” explains Ed Morales, professor at the Center for Ethnic and Racial Studies at Columbia University in New York and author of the book Living in Spanglish (2002). For Morales, speak spanglish It does not mean that a person is “neither from here nor from there”, but rather “it is about being from both places”, “about being fluid”. “It’s a hybrid identity that takes parts of both and moves into the future,” he adds. Stavans agrees: “The spanglish It is not a step in the process of acquiring English, but rather it is a recognition that the Latin culture has its own language that is not Spanish nor is it English.”
For Rolando Hernández, whose family migrated from Cuba to Miami in 2007, the spanglish “It was everything to try to fit in in a new country.” Her parents did not speak English and although Miami is a fairly Spanish-speaking city, “there were educational or professional environments” in which her parents could not participate due to their lack of English proficiency. “It was a big obstacle,” she says. For him and his sister, it was necessary to talk spanglish at home in front of their parents so “they could expand their vocabulary.” “But it was also important to keep the culture alive while adapting to the new environment, the spanglish “It allowed us to do it,” he adds.
‘Spanglish’ becomes ‘mainstream’
A way of speaking that was born in the 19th century on the border of the United States with Mexico, today it is a global phenomenon. The first version of spanglish It was developed during the war between the United States and Mexico of 1846-1848, when the first linguistic encounters between Spanish and English speakers occurred in the conflict. He spanglish It continued its expansion through another war: the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the United States arrived in the Caribbean. From that moment on, “a great migration began to take place, and in the round trip a Hispanic condition was created outside the Caribbean in which both languages were linguistically mixed,” explains Stavans. This is how, throughout the 20th century, the spanglish It grows in its scope and goes from being just a border way of speaking and also becomes a migratory linguistic variety, with the arrival of thousands of Latin American migrants to US soil.
![Charity of Light 'The Witch'.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/W4CX4JBUJVE5HCBCGCP5WJ5WNQ.jpg?auth=52b46d838eb3d843eba16a87ee458fda852464d59d2dd0ccc553bf44d9390e91&width=414)
Since those beginnings and after all the rejection he suffered, in the last decade the spanglish “It has moved from the cultural periphery to the center,” according to Stavans. When the academic began to study this linguistic phenomenon, at the beginning of this century, he remembers that people laughed at his work. “Nowadays, when I give a lecture, people no longer laugh. People assume it as something normal, they may be in favor or they may be against it, but they no longer see it as something strange, something foreign. They see it as something everyday,” says the writer.
The expert explains that this acceptance is due to “the media army” that this way of speaking has. It refers to plays, music heard around the world, movies, novels, children’s books and all types of artistic manifestations. Latin artists—especially from reggaeton and the urban genre in general—have taken the spanglish to the top of the music charts, with lyrics that have in turn propelled its use in all corners of the world. There are also social networks, applications and websites that promote its use and consumption and many corporations and businesses that have also adopted it. “Toyota and Colgate have commercials in spanglishHallmark has a line of cards in spanglish…”, exemplifies Stavans.
While mixes like the portuñol, of the border between Spain and Portugal, or the frañolon the Franco-Spanish border, are purely border varieties, with a very defined projection, the spanglish It has managed to overcome borders and migratory routes to become a global phenomenon exported to other countries. “If we put the population of the United States together with the population of Latin America that uses it, there will be about 50 million people who speak this language in one way or another,” says Stavans.
![Edwin Sánchez, a young Chicano resident in Los Angeles (California).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/BLNIHKHTPBBLDFQOKNPLO5DAOU.jpg?auth=103385ed5ae20db89acd95eca69619bb507692b45633ab95a97791864fc4841e&width=414)
There is no correct Spanish
The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) incorporated the term spanglish (either Spanglish) to its dictionary in 2014, defining it as a “modality of speech of some Hispanic groups in the United States in which lexical and grammatical elements of Spanish and English are mixed.” He has also incorporated words like Parkthat comes from ““to park” and it means to park; typethat comes from “to type something”, or type something; either checkthat comes from “to check something”, or check something. However, and despite the rise of spanglish In recent years, some continue to view it with disdain. In more conservative and traditional circles, it is still considered that spanglish It is nothing more than a way to dirty Spanish.
For Stavans, however, “there is no correct language, there is the aspiration for a correct language, but to survive they always have to adapt.” “We have this utopian dream that there is a correct Spanish and that is why there is an institution like the Royal Spanish Academy that is supposed to protect Spanish as such. The curious thing is that English, despite being one of the most popular languages in the world, does not have a Royal Academy,” says the expert. “English has institutions that are descriptive rather than prescriptive. The Royal Academy tends to be prescriptive, that is, how Spanish should be spoken, while in the United States dictionaries are descriptive, they reflect how people speak. I think that he spanglish “It has been created with so much dynamism thanks to English, because English does not dream of crushing everything that comes from below, but rather of giving it a certain mobility and flexibility.”
He spanglish It is also seen as a tool of decolonization, with a political background: “ending the way the Spanish want us to speak Spanish,” Morales points out. de todas formasfor the majority of its speakers it is a question of identity and, simplyhis way of talking.
Credits
Image: Eva Marie Uzcategui, Carlos Rosillo, Brenda Maytorena Lara
Video edition: Angel Villegas
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