How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life edited by Tom Miller National Geographic Books $16.95 288 pages
In a 2005 essay in Foreign Policy magazine, Harvard's Samuel Huntington identified a cultural and linguistic shift that threatens unprecedented division in the US. By ignoring the growth of Latino immigration and the concomitant rise of native Spanish speakers, he argued, "Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish)".
Huntington, who famously coined the term "clash of civilisations", is again being cast as a cultural prophet for drawing socio- linguistic battle-lines within US borders. His themes of immigration, language and identity politics create a heady mixture sure to stir national angst.
How I Learned English offers a necessary counterweight to this pessimism. This collection of short, personal essays by prominent Latinos has a gentleness and subtlety that only first-hand experience can afford. Each contributor gives voice to a unifying theme: that learning English is the best way to survive, and the only way to flourish in America.
The immigrant experience of isolation and exclusion fuels the urgency with which English is grasped, held close, absorbed. Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman describes how he contracted pneumonia as a two-year-old boy newly arrived in the US. Three weeks of confinement in a New York City hospital forced Dorfman to learn the language of his healers. The sickness vanished and so, remarkably, did his Spanish.
Despite the contributors' eclectic backgrounds - Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and Uruguay - they share the drive to learn English. This impulse stems from a desire to speak, read and write themselves into existence in a foreign land. In the US, only mastery of English can open the right doors.
There are many funny and touching moments. Textbook English is supplemented by Frank Sinatra lyrics. The Sears catalogue provides hundreds of words to memorise. The first line of the national anthem is rendered: "O Jose, can you see?"
Josefina Lopez, the Mexican playwright, recounts a childhood story illustrating how small words can be heavy with meaning. Forbidden from going to the school bathroom, she suffers the inevitable consequences only for her teacher to remark, "Why didn't she tell us she really had to go?" Lopez concludes that "people are accustomed to being lied to, so you have to say 'really' to let them know you are telling the truth."
In his afterword, Frank McCourt pays tribute to the immigrants' efforts to learn English: "You can only admire the millions who came here and are still coming, who climb the highest mountain of all - the English language." Shouldn't that be really admire?
