Spanish is American

An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States
by Rosina Lozano

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.
376 pp. $29.95 paperback.

Reviewed by
Gretchen Welle Young

An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States reestablishes the nineteenth century presence of Spanish in the United States and reclaims America’s heritage as a multilingual nation. Organized in two parts, An American Language traces how treaty citizens (those granted U.S. citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) used Spanish to retain land and power, their gradual loss of Spanish language rights, the shifting perception of Spanish speakers in the United States, and the fight by Spanish speakers to defend and regain cultural and political power. In the process, Rosina Lozano makes treaty citizens a more visible part of the story of the Southwest.

   Treaty citizenship is part of the expansion of the United States. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, expanded the United States to Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, parts of Wyoming, California, and recognized Mexicans in these territories as citizens of the United States. Lozano demonstrates how Spanish continued to be the language in state and territory-level policy even after statehood. The book traces the geographic spread of a nativist movement in the West, which pushed to make Spanish into a “foreign” language and made treaty citizens into “outsiders.” Lozano starts her analysis regionally, showing how treaty citizens used their political power in their towns and territories language to keep Spanish as a working language, then she shifts to the ways language debates shaped statehood, education, and trade questions through the first half of the twentieth century. Lozano argues for the central role of politics over culture, demonstrating how government and politics performed as the principal driving agent of social change for its speakers. Thus, Lozano argues for the political history of Spanish as both a language of governance as well as a form of culture and communication.

   An American Language demonstrates how language became a marker of power for treaty citizens across the Texas and the greater Southwest. In part one, she studies treaty citizens such as Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Pablo de la Guerra in the early politics and governance during the U.S. occupation. California and New Mexico provide the most robust evidence for this analysis. By comparing census data, land grant documents, and legislation, Lozano shows how large waves of Anglo settlers in California limited Spanish-speaking Californios' political clout, whereas the lack of Anglos in New Mexico reinforced Nuevomexicanos’ political power. In an incredibly engrossing chapter, Lozano shares codeswitching and ‘spanglish’ that she finds as she translates dozens of letters and diary entries to reveal treaty citizens’ personal feelings and motives for retaining or losing their native language. Her informants point out various benefits to both languages, depending on the setting. Her comparison reflects two realities within America. In California, English allowed ascension in local politics and business; in New Mexico, Spanish maintained its importance in state politics and business, with English relegated to federal business.

   The strength of An American Language is the regional context it provides to an already well-known period of nineteenth century America. The rampant xenophobia towards European immigrants along the East Coast extended to the Southwest as midwestern migrants to the region started excluding Spanish from their "American" construct. Beginning in the 1870s, Spanish, a language that predated English on this continent, began to be seen as "foreign." With this view, treaty citizens and Spanish speakers in the Southwest slowly lost political power. Lozano cogently demonstrates this by tracing the movements of U.S. senators visiting New Mexico to determine if the territory deserved statehood. By collating their journal entries to newspaper articles outlining their tour, she reveals the senators denied New Mexico statehood in 1903 precisely because most of the state spoke Spanish and were too "culturally different."

   In part two, Rosina Lozano claims educational policy is “the most important arbiter of citizenship” due to its impact on the next generation. As such, she traces the negative impact Americanization in schools had on Mexican American children. School districts often segregated Anglo students from Spanish speaking children, with methods varying by region. School districts in Los Angeles gerrymandered school boundaries along racially segregated residential lines. Schools in Texas simply denied Mexican children entrance into white “American Schools.” By the mid-1930s, 85 percent of schools in the Southwest segregated their children, with Mexican schools typically underfunded. Even in integrated districts, administrators often placed Spanish speaking children in special education classes and tracked them to enter vocational schools, limiting their career options and economic mobility. Culturally, by segregating schools, children learned about citizenship and America’s diversity in separate settings; segregation allowed the proliferation of stereotypes, stigmatized Mexicans, and made Spanish speakers “perpetually foreign.”

   Educators in the twentieth century responded by expanding Spanish language instruction in schools. Comparing New Mexico to Puerto Rico, the author shows how educators either used Spanish education to reinforce U.S. citizenship or encourage separatism. New Mexico used the American government’s Pan-American desire for trade with Latin America to bring back Spanish education in their schools. Although this was a victory for language activists it had negative side effects; ironically, by requiring Spanish in schools, New Mexico reinforced the perception that it was a "foreign language” and not native to the state. Whereas New Mexico used teaching Spanish to prove the language’s usefulness to America, Puerto Rico resisted teaching English to protect their culture and remain separate from the United States. Spanish remained a permanent part of Puerto Rico’s identity, and the territory has retained its autonomy as a territory for over a hundred years. In both cases, midcentury educators fought to teach Spanish in their classrooms and asserted the importance of affirming children's culture and identity at school.

   By tracing political gains and losses for treaty citizens in the early nineteenth century and educators in the twentieth century, Rosina Lozano examines the role language plays in the politics of nationalism. Plenty of historians have studied how the meaning of “citizenship” has evolved in America, but there is little research on the changing conditions for the Spanish speaking treaty citizens in the Southwest. By studying their role and the transition of Southwestern territories into states, Lozano counters the view that Spanish is a foreign or immigrant language in the United States and instead shows its historical roots as a language of American politics. In An American Language, Lozano affirms that Spanish not only belongs in America, it is American.

Gretchen Welle Young is a graduate student at Texas State University.