Language and Threat

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Currently in the United States we’re facing an environment of fear, headed by a government regime directing state forces to detain people on the basis of the color of their skin and the language they speak. These forces aren’t enacting judicial orders, nor enforcing any state law, they’re not even carrying out any criminal investigation in service of their detentions. In fact, the government forces that have committed abuses, including murders, have not been investigated, nor punished.

They are terrorizing communities to terrorize them. It is a xenophobic and racist campaign that has very little to do with enforcing any sort of immigration law or civil violation of having or not having legal documents.

Beneath a climate of suspicion, language has become one of the threats to the structures of government power. What is the point of profiling and attacking based on the language one speaks if that person doesn’t represent a threat to your identity? To the followers of the regime, immigrants represent a threat to the white, English-speaking identity.

Hate has achieved an importance higher than the assimilation, economic or human advantages the immigrant resident provides society. Neither does civil reform to regularize the status of millions of workers who have already assimilated and contributed, over decades, to the US economy yield any progress. 

Of course, the campaign of terror doesn’t only touch the immigrant community - legal or not, rather all residents in the vicinity of the occupation. The threats to power are also those who confront and challenge the regime - citizens themselves.

Opposing the actions of the regime means, in itself, to be a traitor. The act of protest, showing up to a protest, or publicly denouncing can get you labeled an ‘enemy’ or ‘terrorist’. The simple action of existing in a certain place or having a certain last name, or skin color, speak with an accent, or even worse, speaking Spanish, could be the thing that results in your detention. Concern for the wellbeing of your community makes you into some kind of radical or criminal deserving of pursuit. The regime simply projects and accuses others of the criminality they themselves perpetuate or try to perpetuate. It is pure cruelty masked as security. 

Beyond the physical persecution, there is another more nefarious - the intellectual. For the past ten years we’ve been living in an environment hostile to any attempt to discuss and resolve our social, economic, and political problems in a civil, honest way, based on a shared reality. In place of this, we sequester ourselves within networks, guided by algorithms, controlled by billionaires, that work to isolate us even more, giving us a sense of identity, suspicious of anyone who questions our personal expertise on any matter.

Meanwhile, we’re angry because life becomes more and more expensive, the world more and more unjust, the political class more and more unravelled, large corporations more and more oppressive, and the rich, of course, more and more and more rich. On this we agree. The difference lies in who we blame. 

The regime would very much like if you blamed the immigrants, those with a different appearance from you, those that speak another language, those with a deeper poverty than you, your neighbor, your co-worker, the one with another opinion, because in the fog of our rage division flourishes and we relinquish control. Anger, we find easily and they understand this well. 

We fight amongst ourselves while the regime takes our rights. Civil rights like protest, expression, voting are obvious, but even the more day to day - personal security, dignified work, a living wage, a healthcare system that doesn’t ruin entire lives, and a free time to dedicate to our personal selves - are all threatened.

This is all in danger when we yield to the rage and those deranged values they impose on us. They’re hoping we lose our humanity like them. They hope we turn on ourselves and blame the most vulnerable for the problems they’ve created because, there, the system remains intact, well calibrated to maintain their interests, their power, their wealth, and our perpetual drift.

I write all of this not because it aligns perfectly with the idea of language as a central threat, but because everything happening in the country can be reduced to something so simple, so unusual and so uncontrollable as the circumstances of your birth. The world punishes or rewards you for something you neither chose nor could control. It’s absurd, no? Moreover, we punish those coming to our country in search of a dignified life, those adopting our values, integrating into our culture, learning our language (shame that it is just one), paying our taxes and working to grow our economy. 

One of the most amazing feats of US social evolution is the ability to absorb people from everywhere. This is to say, our most outstanding brand is our transcultural nature. We’re a nation made up of immigrants (some involuntary), cultures, and languages that came not only to find a better life, but to help develop a project that had never before existed in this form in history. Much of the history is indeed dark but through many centuries and much blood and labor, the country has managed to assimilate its many distinct parts, and it continues to do so. All of this makes the current situation even more concerning. Why reject a functional assimilation system that has worked, albeit imperfectly, for centuries? One hypothesis is that assimilation has always been accompanied by a colonialist attitude.

Returning to the language paradigm, the concept of language as threat isn’t new. In many historical cases language has been used as a colonial weapon to reinforce a nationalist identity and oppress the people that try to challenge it. Some examples include the repression of Catalan, Basque and other languages of the Iberian peninsula during the Franco dictatorship, indigenous schools in the US in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that forced indigenous children to abandon their language, learn English and assimilate into Anglo-American culture, and the colonialism of the Caribbean - after the Spanish-American war in 1898, the US took control of Puerto Rico as a territory and tried to force English as a primary language.

In the US, the case of Spanish is unique given that the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century - long before the English - and the history of the American territory is as much one of Spanish conquest and settlement as it is one of English. Moreover, the representation of citizens with Latin American origin and immigrants from the region over the course of the modern era and centuries before would allow the Spanish language to have more consideration in the cultural and historic identity of the territory.

The little discussed fact of official languages of the country shows this sentiment. Some figures first: Spanish ranks fourth as a world language in number of speakers. In terms of diversity and reach - with four continents, it could be second behind English but for the populations of China and India, respectively, casting Spanish into fourth place behind Mandarin and Hindi. 

This is, in itself, incredible. In the US alone approximately 45-60 million people speak Spanish - a figure that touches between 14-16% of the population. The country has the second largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, after Mexico. Spanish is also the most studied foreign language in the country’s schools. 

All of these figures bestow upon Spanish a significance such that it ought to be considered a second official language of the country. 

But it isn’t nor will it be in the near future. 

Instead, it embodies the threat of diversity. Authoritarians have always been threatened by multiculturalism, tolerance, and co-existence. They thrive on division, intolerance, and chaos. Language often exists on the front lines of this campaign.  

Language, in general, exists as a bridge towards freedom for whoever is willing to board it, something that connects us not only through the mechanical act of transmitting information, but through the uniquely human - sharing and recounting using common words.

Nevertheless, as it persists as threat for those intendening to suppress this humanity, this freedom, and for this, we must continue to fight. 

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