While on a trip to Florida in the summer of 2007 I encountered and must admit, enjoyed the easy availability of Spanish all over the Sunshine State. In many public places, restaurants, theme parks, government buildings, it was fairly easy to move away from English and speak español with total strangers.

I also encountered an undercurrent of ignorance and fear among some non-Spanish speaking Americans. The most common complaint I heard from non-Hispanic Americans was that these people needed to let go of that foreign language and embrace English, America’s language.

This rejection of Spanish as an outsider’s language was manifest in a number of interesting ways. One bumper sticker I saw read Welcome to America: Now Speak English.  During the time I was visiting Florida, California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, publicly encouraged Hispanics to turn off their Spanish language television shows and learn English if they wanted to achieve the American dream. Being an Austrian native who came to America and became successful beyond most people’s wildest dreams Arnold is, without a question, a fine role model for mainstream assimilation.

Now, there’s no question that learning good English is at the heart of economical, social and political equality in the United States. However, there are two questions here that need to be addressed. First, are Spanish speakers truly foreign to the good old US of A? Second, should Hispanics abandon their native Spanish in order to acquire English?

Regarding the first question, the answer is no. Spanish did not come to the United States. The truth is that very often the USA went to the Spanish speakers. Just look at the names of states and cities all over the nation. Colorado, means red. A Nevada, is a snow storm. Florida, means in blossom and Montana, is a degeneration of the Spanish word for mountain, montaña.

The same pattern can be seen in the names of American cities. Los Angeles, as most people know, means ‘the angels’. The prefix ‘San’ is Spanish for ‘Saint’ thus we have San Francisco, San Diego, San Augustine and San Antonio. We could go on and on with this but that would be unnecessary. The point is clear, in many, many areas Spanish, not English, was the first language of countless thousands of Americans. The only people who can make a claim to a more ancient American linguistic heritage are the Native Americans.

How did this all happen? Well, when President Polk started the Mexican American war in 1846 he forcefully occupied and annexed nearly 52% of Mexico’s national territory. This allowed him to add nearly 1.2 million square miles to the United States’ territory. These lands were not empty. There were thousands of families that were living in Mexico one day and were Americans the next morning. The Treaty of Guadalupe made the annexation permanent and large parts of Texas, California and New Mexico were now part of the United States.

Near the end of the XIX century, in 1898, one General Miles invaded the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. Again, the Spanish speakers did not come to America. America went to them. By 1917 the more than one million inhabitants of the island were made American citizens with the Jones Act. So, as a matter of fact all adult Boricuas are forth and fifth generation Americans, not foreigners at all. My grandfather, Don Esteban Guzman, became an American citizen when he was about 15 years old without ever having to leave his native Puerto Rico. So, you see? Historically speaking there’s nothing foreign about a Spanish speaking American.

Now, does this mean that Hispanics should build linguistic and cultural ghettos and resist the acquisition of English? Of course not. On the other hand, should the acquisition of English imply the rejection of Spanish? No, it shouldn’t. To put it bluntly, monolingualism is the disease and bilingualism is the cure. Linguistic research indicates that the better you master your native language, the easier it’ll be for you to acquire a second language. This is due to the fact that many of the concepts, grammatical structures and thinking skills that you already know in your first language can be transferred to the second language. Thus a person who can understand, speak, read and write English well, for example, is much better equipped to learn a second language than a person who has a poor mastery of these skills.  The same is true of any other language.

In the case of Spanish in America there are many very practical reasons for not abandoning it. Spanish, not English, is the most spoken language in this hemisphere. Just look at a map of the Americas and count the countries that speak English and the ones that speak Spanish. With the exception of Brazil, which speaks Portuguese, almost all other American countries speak Spanish.

Add up the number of people involved and you’ll see that if this nation is serious about establishing good will among its American neighbors it would be a good idea to promote linguistic inclusion, instead of xenophobic exclusion. At a time when the development of strong economic and political ties with our Latin American neighbors is a matter of national security this becomes all the more important. Furthermore, there are already about 40 million Spanish speaking Americans. Given the fact that Hispanics are, by far, the fastest growing segment in the USA everything indicates that Spanish is here to stay.