I was 3 years old the first time I mixed up Spanish and English. It would not be the last.
It was 1975, and my family had recently migrated from Peru to Northern California. Shortly after our arrival, according to Lozada lore, I asked my parents and older sisters, “¿Vamos a tener todo lo sinisario?,” meaning, “Will we have everything we need?”
Except I garbled the word “necesario,” coming up with the nonsense word “sinisario.” Everyone chuckled, so I tried to defend myself. “Es que yo no sé inglés,” I said. (“It’s that I don’t know English.”) That made everyone laugh harder, because, of course, my mistake had been in Spanish.
It was a preview of what the next five decades would bring, as the two languages jostled for primacy in my mind. Our moves back and forth between the United States and Peru during my childhood compelled me to latch on to whichever language I needed most at different times, even while striving to retain the other. Sometimes my English was stronger, sometimes my Spanish. No one had to tell me which language mattered when, or whether one or the other was “official.” Wherever I was, I knew.
In his March 1 executive order designating English as the official language of the United States, President Trump asserts that a single shared language is “at the core of a unified, cohesive society,” that it serves to “streamline communication,” promote efficiency and “empower new citizens to achieve the American Dream.”
On these points, I have little disagreement. Just about every immigrant I’ve ever known in the United States — starting with my father — has sought to learn English for just those reasons. It was relatively easy for my sisters and me to pick it up as kids, and my mother had learned it well from the beloved American nuns who taught her in Peru. But my dad, coming to it later in life, always had to work at it.
And work he did. His errors of pronunciation never kept him from speaking English, even singing it, loudly and proudly. I cringed a bit at the time. Now I cringe at the memory of my cringing.
Had English suddenly become the official language of the United States via an executive order from President Gerald Ford, I can’t imagine that my father would have learned it any faster or that he would have felt more encouragement to do so. The need to work, to provide, was all the incentive he required. Even when he lived in Miami during the final years of his life, with Spanish-speakers all around him, he kept practicing his English. He intuitively grasped that it was part of his deal with America.
So, it’s not that I reject the arguments about efficiency and empowerment; I just question the need for a presidential order to enshrine them. I was tested on my English skills when I became a U.S. citizen a decade ago, but the market tells immigrants we must learn the language, more clearly than the government ever could.
Where Trump’s order moves from redundancy to confusion to cynicism is in its statement that a single official language will “cultivate a shared American culture” and “reinforce shared national values.”
After all, what is our shared culture if not the mix of cultures — including languages — that make and remake America every day? You may as well argue that a single cuisine or a single style of music or a single literary genre is more truly American than any other.
Thank God that my immigrant childhood means I can read Cervantes and Mario Vargas Llosa in Spanish and Shakespeare and Toni Morrison in English. If I can, why wouldn’t I? I grew up with two languages, and I regret not learning a third the way other people learn a second. Think how much richer the nation would be if we all knew more languages, not fewer, if we embraced a multiplicity of influences rather than shielding ourselves from them.
And what are our “shared national values,” if not those self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence? Political equality, natural rights and popular sovereignty can be expressed, upheld and lived out in any language. Trust me that fluency in Spanish does not stall the pursuit of happiness. And it does not discourage any of us from learning English.
Worries over the corrosive influence of languages other than English have a long history in the United States. Reflecting on America’s openness to immigrants and the need for newcomers to assimilate, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that “we have room for but one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse.”
Today, nearly 80 percent of people in the United States age 5 or older speak exclusively English at home, according to the latest American Community Survey. For the others who speak another language at home, Spanish is the most common alternative, and more than 60 percent of those Spanish speakers also know English “very well,” the survey finds. Safe to say, we have yet to take up residence in Roosevelt’s boardinghouse.
In 2023, when JD Vance was serving in the Senate, he sponsored the English Language Unity Act. Yet even as he made his case for an official language, Vance unintentionally emphasized the bill’s superfluousness. Stating that English has been a “cornerstone” of American culture for more than two and a half centuries, the future vice president said that “this common-sense legislation recognizes an inherent truth: English is the language of this country.”
If that is already the case — and has been for so long — why bother to propose legislation that mandates a pre-existing reality? You may as well introduce a bill declaring water wet and the sun hot.
Under the executive order, federal agencies and recipients of federal funds are no longer required to offer translated documents and other help to people who do not speak English, but nor are they are prohibited from doing so. Yet the symbolism of the move matters enormously, aligning neatly with the administration’s campaign to slash immigration and to depict newcomers as dangerous and alienated and, as Trump has put it, a poison in the American bloodstream.
The order claims that it “celebrates the long tradition of multilingual American citizens who have learned English and passed it to their children.” But you’re not really celebrating multiculturalism if you’re trying to erode it. Being so protective of your culture suggests you’re insecure about its value.
The Trump administration is already trying to curtail what Americans can say; consider its executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and its retaliation against The Associated Press for not following along. Now, with this new order, Trump seeks to shape not just what we say but also how we say it. (It’s no surprise that he highlighted those two initiatives, back to back, in his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.) A president who treats immigrants like second-class humans is creating second-class languages, too.
But language takes unexpected turns, and its meaning cannot be fixed by presidential diktat. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico seems like a simple-minded, jingoistic move, yet the new name may not always mean what Trump wants it to mean. “Gulf of America” takes on more encompassing connotations if by “America” one includes the northern, central and southern reaches of the continent. Who is to say that someday we won’t read it that way, in whatever language we choose, and that Trump’s executive order will have set us on that path?
El Golfo de las Américas would look just fine on a map.
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