Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  Englande and España divided much of the Americas between them. England gave her colonial territories a remarkable code of civil law, a spectacular literature, a taste for sweeties, and the protean pronoun that ushered in the modern age—“I”—the lodestar for Protestant and capitalist and Hispanic memoirist. Counter-Reformation Spain gave its New World possessions nosotros—the cupolic “we”—an assurance of orthodoxy, baroque, fugue, smoke, sunglasses, and a piquant lexicon for miscegenation. Every combination of races is accounted for in New World Spanish. (Except Hispanic.) (Or Latino.)

  The numerical rise of the Hispanic in the United States occasioned language skirmishes, especially in those parts of the country where the shadow of Philip’s crown once crossed Elizabeth’s scepter. On the one hand, in the 1960s, Chicano neo-nationalists attempted to make “bilingual education” the cornerstone of their political agenda, since little other than tongue (and not even that oftentimes) united Hispanics. Anglo nativists distributed ballots to establish English as “the official language of the United States.” In truth, America is a more complicated country than either faction dares admit.

  Americans do not speak “English.” Even before our rebellion against England, our tongue tasted of Indian—succotash, succotash, we love to say it; Mississippi, we love to spell. We speak American. Our tongue is not something slow and mucous that plods like an oyster through its bed in the sea, afearing of taint or blister. Our tongue sticks out; it is a dog’s tongue, an organ of curiosity and science.

  The history of a people—their hungers, weathers, kinships, humors, erotic salts and pastimes—gets told by turns of phrase. Which is why the best history of the United States I ever read is not a history of battles and presidents and such, but H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, an epic of nouns and verbs and proverbs; things we pick up or put down by name.

  By 1850, William C. Fowler was describing “American dialects.” Nine years later, John Russell Bartlett offered a glossary of “words and phrases usually regarded as peculiar to the United States”: archaisms, et cetera. The American tongue created what Russell called “negroisms”—cadences, inflections, parodies, refusals. Our lewd tongue partook of everything that washed over it; everything that it washed—even a disreputable history. That is how young Walt Whitman heard America singing in the nineteenth century, heard the varied carols of trade in old New York harbor, heard young fellows, robust, friendly, singing with open mouths.

  Nativists who want to declare English the official language of the United States do not understand the omnivorous appetite of the language they wish to protect. Neither do they understand that their protection would harm our tongue. (A restaurant in my neighborhood advertises “Harm on Rye.”) Those Americans who would build a fence around American English to forestall the Trojan burrito would turn American into a frightened tongue, a shrinking little oyster tongue, as French has lately become, priested over by the Ancients of the Académie, who fret so about le weekend.

  In an essay published in Harper’s of April 1917, an immigrant son, M. E. Ravage, complained about the way Americans lick the oak leaves and acorns off the old monikers, so that they became “emasculated and devoid of either character or meaning. Mordecai—a name full of romantic association—had been changed to the insipid monosyllable Max. Rebecca—mother of the race—was in America Becky. Samuel had been shorn to Sam, Abraham to Abe, Israel to Izzy.”

  How Ricardo became rich: When I was new to this tongue I now include myself in, I learned some things that were true about America from its corn, its speed, its disinclination to be tied down, pretty much; its inclination toward shortcuts, abbreviations, sunwise turns. I learned from “hi” and “nope” and “OK.” We Americans like the old, rubbed phrases; we like better the newest, sassiest, most abbreviated: Y2K. The most bub bulous American word I learned early on was the unexpected word for one’s father (though not mine) and soda and what the weasel goes: pop.

  I observed parents laughing over their children’s coinages. I inferred the burden and responsibility of each adolescent generation to come up with neat subversions; to reinvent adolescence in a patois inscrutable to adults. The older generation expected it.

  But not in my family. My mother and father (with immigrant pragmatism) assumed the American tongue would reinvent their children. Just so did several immigrant Hispanic mothers in Southern California recently remark their children’s reluctance to join America. These mothers feared their children were not swimming in the American current—not in the swifts and not in the depths; not even in the pop. They blamed “bilingual education,” a leaky boat theorem ostensibly designed to sink into the American current. (In fact, the theorem became a bureacracy preoccupied with prolonging itself.) These few mothers organized an opposition to bilingual education and eventually they sank the Armada in California. Theirs was an American impulse: to engage the American flow directly and to let their children be taken by it.

  But the American current always fears itself going dry—it longs, always, for a wetter wah-wah (there used to be a night club called “King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut”); yearns now to swizzle Latin America in its maw. Spanish is becoming unofficially but truly the second language of the United States. Moreover, Yankee pragmatism accomplishes the romance of the American tongue. By the 1980s, advertising executives in L.A. and Miami were the first to describe the United States as “the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking market in the world.” Pragmatism made Spanish the language of cheap labor from fishing villages in Alaska to Chinese restaurants in Georgia to my rooftop here in San Francisco.

  Thus does official America now communicate in at least two “voices,” like a Tuva singer; three in Eurasian San Francisco. And if it isn’t entirely English, it is nevertheless entirely American.

  Press ONE, if you wish to continue in English. Pragmatism leads to Spanish signage at government offices, hospitals, parking lots, bus stops, polls. Telephone instructions, prescription instructions, microwave instructions—virtually all instructions in America are in Spanish as well as English. American politicians, too, begin to brush up their Yanqui-Dudel.

  I remain skeptical of the effect pragmatic Spanish might have on the assimilation of Latin American immigrants. Working-class newcomers from Latin America do not suffer the discontinuity that previous generations used to propel themselves into the future tense. But middle-class Americans, friends of mine, composites of friends of mine, of a liberal bent, nice people, OK people, see nothing wrong with bilingual education. In fact, they wish their own children to be bilingual. In fact, they send their kids to French schools. In fact, they ask if I know of a housekeeper who might inadvertently teach their children Spanish while she dusts under the piano.

  Nope.

  But I marvel at the middle-class American willingness to take Spanish up. Standing in the burrito line in a Chinese neighborhood, I notice how many customers know the chop-sticks of Spanish: “carnitas” and “guacamole” and “sí,” “gracias,” “refritos,” and “caliente,” and all the rest of what they need to know. And it occurs to me that the Chinese-American couple in front of me, by speaking Spanish, may actually be speaking American English.

  On an American Airlines flight to New York, I listen to the recorded bilingual safety instructions. “She” speaks in cheerful, speedo, gum-scented American English. “He” partners her every unlikely event in Spanish; makes tragedy sound a tad less unlikely. (The Latin Lover speaks, I think to myself.)

  Some years ago, I stood on a bluff on the San Diego side of the U.S.-Mexico border, watching Latin American peasants bent double and yet moving rapidly through the dark. I experienced something like the confounding stasis one dislikes in those Escher prints where the white birds fly east as the black birds fly west and the gray birds seem unformed daubs of marzipan. Was I watching the past become the future or the future becoming the past?

  Back in the 1960s, Chicano activists referred to the “recon quista” of the United States, by which they meant the Sou
thwest was becoming, again, Spanish-speaking, as it had been in the 1840s (history, therefore, a circle, and not, as America had always insisted, a straight line). Then again I might be watching an advance of the Spanish crown—Latin American peasants as cannon fodder for the advance of King Philip II; spies in cloaks who will insinuate themselves into Anglo households to whisper Ave Marias into baby’s shell-like ear.

  Sitting on American Airlines flight 64, I am not so sure. The numbers of Latin American immigrants making their way into the United States more truly honor England. Millions of Latin Americans, my parents among them, have come to the United States because of the enduring failures of Father Spain. Their coming honors England.

  Her face painted white, she receives the passenger list into her gem-encrusted hand, but does not look upon it.

  The Armada sank, ma’am.

  There is glint in her simian eye. Lips recede from tallow teeth to speak:

  They are trumped, then, My Lord Admiral.

  The airplane shudders down the runway, hoisting sail.

  What did Nixon know? Did he really devise to rid himself of a bunch of spic agitators by officially designating them a minority, entitled to all rights, honors, privileges, and obligations thereto appertaining: rhetorical flatteries, dollars, exploding cigars? (Maybe, by the same token, he could put blacks on notice that they were no longer such a hot ticket.)

  A young Bolivian in Portland giggled, oh quite stupidly, at my question, her hand patting her clavicle as if she held a fan. I had asked her whether she had yet become Hispanic. Perhaps she didn’t understand the question.

  In The Next American Nation, Michael Lind observes that “real Hispanics think of themselves not as generic Hispanics, but as Mexicans, or Puerto Ricans or Cubans or Chileans.” Lind is wrong. Well, he is right in the past tense; he is wrong in the future. You won’t find Hispanics in Latin America (his point)—not in the quickening cities, not in the emasculated villages. You need to come to the United States to meet Hispanics (my point). What Hispanic immigrants learn within the United States is to view themselves in a new way, as belonging to Latin America entire—precisely at the moment they no longer do.

  America’s brilliance is a lack of subtlety. Most Americans are soft on geography. We like puzzles with great big pieces, pie-crust coasts. And we’re not too fussy about the midlands. But American obliviousness of the specific becomes a gift of prophesy regarding the approaching mass. Our impatience has created the map of the future. Many decades before Germans spoke of the EEC or the French could imagine buying french fries with Euros, Americans spoke of “Europe” (a cloud bank, the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, any decorative ormolu, inventing the place in novels and government reports, blurring borders and tongues and currencies and Prussians and Talley rands into an abstraction, the largest unit, the largest parenthesis that can yet contain onion domes, Gothic spires, windmills, gondolas, bidets, and the Mona Lisa).

  Many European men, such as the gondolier in Venice, come home from work to eat their noonday meals (according to an American social studies textbook, c. 1959).

  Similarly, and for many generations, slaves and the descendants of slaves in America invented a homeland called “Africa”—a land before slave ships, a prelapsarian savanna whereupon the provocatively dressed gazelle could stroll safely after dark. Perhaps someday Africa will exist, in which case it will have been patented by African Americans in the U.S.A. from the example of the American Civil Rights movement. Yes, and lately I have begun to meet people in the United States who call themselves “Asians.” A young woman (a Vietnamese immigrant) tells me, for instance, she will only “date Asian.” Asians do not exist anywhere in Asia. The lovely brown woman who has cared for my parents, a Mormon born on an island in a turtle-green sea (I’ve guessed the Philippines or Samoa), will only admit to “Pacific Islander.” A true daughter of Nixon.

  It is not mere carelessness that makes Americans so careless, it is also that Americans think more about the future than the past. The past is vague to us. Tribal feuds may yet hissle and spit on the stoves of somebody’s memory, but we haven’t got time for that. The entry guard at Ellis Island didn’t have time for that. The INS official at LAX doesn’t have time for that. He is guarding the portal to individualism, the greatest abstraction the world has ever known: One at a time, one at a time—back up, sir! Only America could create Hispanics, Asians, Africans, Americans.

  The Chinese people are like Americans in many ways. They like to laugh and be happy and play games. (Same American social studies textbook, c. 1959.)

  It was only when it came to the landmass extending from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutians that Americans refused to think in terms of hemispheric or historical mass. America (the noun) became our border against all that lay to the south and north—much to the annoyance of Mexicans, for example, or Canadians. “We are Americans, too,” they said. No you’re not, you are Mexicans. And you are Canadians. We are Ameri cans©.

  Whereas Miss Bolivia, having gotten over herspanic and now surreptitiously refreshing her lip gloss, does, as it turns out, understand my question. She is not Hispanic. Ha ha no. What is she then?

  Her eyes flash. I mean, what do you consider yourself to be?

  ¡Bolivian!

  Of course, but I protest she is destined for Hispanicity. Because you live in the United States, you see.

  ¿?

  You will know more Colombians and Nicaraguans as friends, fellow religionists, than you would have known had you never left Bolivia. Spanish-language radio and TV, beamed at immigrants of provincial memory, will parlay soccer scores from an entire hemisphere. You will hear weather reports from Val paraiso to Anchorage borne on a dolphin-headed breeze. Listen, chaste Miss Bolivia: All along the dial, north and south, on Spanish-language radio stations, you can already hear a new, North American Spanish accent—akin to “accentless” California TV English—meant to be decipherable (and inoffensive) alike to Cubans, Mexicans, Dominicans, and blonds like you, because it belongs to none.

  Hispanic Spanish is hybrid, uniform. Colorless, yes. I do not deplore it. If I were Miss Bolivia, I might deplore it. One should deplore any loss of uniquity in a world that has so little. But I take the bland transparent accent as an anabranch of the American tongue. We bid fond farewell to Miss Bolivia. Who’s our next contestant, Johnny?

  The Cuban grandfather in Miami, Dick, who persists in mocking Mexicans because we are Indians, less European than he is, the old frog. We’ve put him in a soundproof booth so his Hispanic grandson can mimic for us the old man’s Caribbean Spanish, filigreed as a viceroy’s sleeve.

  I think Richard Nixon would not be surprised to hear that some of my Hispanic nieces and nephews have Scottish or German surnames. Nixon intended his Spanish’d noun to fold Hispanics into America. By the time the Sunday supplements would begin writing about the political ascendancy of a Hispanic generation, the American children of that generation would be disappearing into America. But Nixon might be surprised to hear that my oldest nephew, German-surnamed, has a restaurant in Oakland dedicated to classic Mexican cooking; the majority of his customers are not Hispanic.

  In generations past, Americans regarded Latin America as an “experiment in democracy,” meaning the brutish innocence of them, the negligent benevolence of us, as defined by the Monroe Doctrine. We installed men with dark glasses to overthrow men with dark glasses.

  As a result of Nixon’s noun, our relationship to Latin America became less remote. Within our own sovereign borders, crested with eagles, twenty-five million became twenty-seven million Hispanics; became thirty-five million. The Census Bureau began making national predictions: By the year 2040 one in three Americans will declare herself Hispanic. Leaving aside the carbonated empiricism of such predictions, they nevertheless did convince many Americans that Latin America is no longer something “down there,” like an adolescent sexual abstraction. By the reckoning of the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States has become one of the largest Latin
American nations in the world.

  And every day and every night poor people trample the legal fiction that America controls its own destiny. There is something of inevitability, too, in what I begin hearing in America from businessmen—a hint of Latin American fatalism, a recognition of tragedy that is simply the verso of optimism, but descriptive of the same event: You can’t stop them coming becomes the necessity to develop a Spanish-language ad strategy.

  The mayor of San Diego, speaking to me one morning several years ago about her city’s relationship to Tijuana, about the proximity of Tijuana to San Diego, used no future tense—Here we are, she said. She used no hand gesture to indicate “they” or “there” or “here.” The mayor’s omission of a demonstrative gesture in that instance reminded me of my father’s nonchalance. My father never expected to escape tragedy by escaping Mexico, by escaping poverty, by coming to the United States. Nor did he. Such sentiments—the mayor’s, my father’s—are not, I remind you, the traditional sentiments of an “I” culture, which would formulate the same proximity as “right up to here.” For my father, as for the mayor, the border was missing.

  In old cowboy movies, the sheriff rode hell-for-leather to capture the desperados before they crossed the Rio Grande. It is an old idea, more Protestant than Anglo-Saxon: that Latin America harbors outlaws.

  Some Americans prefer to blame the white-powder trail leading from here to there on the drug lords of Latin America. More Americans are beginning to attribute the rise of drug traffic to American addiction. Tentative proposals to legalize drugs, like tentative proposals to open the border, bow to the inevitable, which is, in either case, the knowledge that there is no border.