Sam, meet Dora

Samuel Huntington, Mr. “Clash of Civilizations”, has his knickers in a twist once again. This time, it’s over the alleged “threat” that Hispanic immigrants pose to “America’s identity, value, and way of life.”
Writing the lead piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy mag, Huntington twitters on about the fact that this wave of Hispanic immigration is unlike any other earlier waves of immigration in that it threatens to swamp the existing culture of the country. (H’mm, wonder if the native Americans feel this is so unprecedented?)
“The use of both languages [English and Spanish] could become acceptable in congressional hearings and debates and in the general conduct of government business,” he harrumphs.
He writes of the possible or probable transformation of the U.S. into a bilingual country that it, “would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it.”
Whatever that means.
One of the few endearing things about this article is the great title that the FP team –led by Hispanic editor and publisher Moisés Naím–have put on it: “José, can you see?”
Anyway, let’s hope that Sam H either has a pre-school grandchild, or reads the Washington Post Style section as assiduously as I do. Because right there, in the lead article, is a great antidote to such fear-mongering. It’s a piece by Jennifer Frey about the enormous appeal to the pre-school and elementary-age crowd of a feisty young bilingual TV heroine called “Dora the Explorer”.
Well, I could fall for the name, for starters.
The piece is about the general Dora phenom, and it’s also about the palpable excitement at a live “Dora” show given in DC’s Warner Theater. (The “original”, Nickelodeon version of Dora is a cartoon character.) Here’s what Frey writes:

    It’s Wednesday night at the Warner Theatre, the clock hovering around the normal bedtime hour for this preschool-and-up set, and the kids are on their feet. Screaming. “Vamos a la casa! Vamos a la casa!” From the balcony, it looks like a commercial for cultural diversity — or perhaps just an ad for Benetton Kids — the crowd so multiethnic that it seems possible to map your way through the hemispheres, excited face by excited face…


    “Dora the Explorer” has since grown so popular that the network recently surpassed $1 billion in merchandising sales of Dora-related products. In the preschool demographic, Dora sells more footwear than Barbie. She sells more pajamas than Pooh. She sells more Band-Aids than Spider-Man, and she even tops those Disney princesses — Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella — when it comes to children’s apparel. The Dora Popsicle is Good Humor’s bestseller…
    Dora happens to be Latina. And bilingual. Not that kids seem to notice much. Or, more to the point, not that kids care. Ask what color Dora is, and they’ll say things like “she has a pink shirt.” To them, Dora is just a 7-year-old girl who spends her days embarking on adventures with her friend Boots the monkey and evading the evil fox Swiper . . . all the while effortlessly switching between English and Spanish.

So I would say, loosen up a little, Sam. Quit reading your Robert Kaplans and your other prophets of doom and decline, and start enjoying the multiculturalism that’s all around you.
And by the way, Sam, you ever tried reading the proceedings of South Africa’s democratic parliament? They have something like a dozen official languages there, and MPs have the right to speak in any one of them. Some of those languages don’t even use the Roman script… But they manage. In fact, they get along just fine with it all.
I have a little theory here, as it happens. My little theory is that the era of monolingualism is really just a tiny blip in the whole march of human history: the blip that corresponds, in some limited parts of the world, to the consolidation of the monolingual nation-state. Benedict Anderson and all that.
But in most parts of the world, even today, people are not monolingual. Go to Africa, or Asia, or much of Latin America, and people as a matter of course and daily habit switch easily between three, four, five, or six different languages. And now, in Europe, the former, often strictly policed monolingualism has been replaced by a high degree of fluency in, and switching between, anywhere between two and five language.
That will– I hope–be the future for all of us. It’s not difficult; it doesn’t have to undermine democracy; indeed, it often can enhance it. Heck, there are things I only know how to do in French, Arabic, or Lebanon’s inimitable Frarabic. Like natural childbirth or discussing car repairs.
So Sam, why don’t you do yourself a favor and start playing with and listening to your grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Greet them with a friendly “¡Hola!” Ask them what they think of Dora.
I think this would do a lot more for your general state of wellbeing than sitting around looking for signs that “America as we know it” is about to fall apart. You would no longer have to comb through the works of Robert Kaplan in order to find the one source he quotes who “proves” some part of your thesis. That would be “Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona,” whom Kaplan quotes as saying that, “he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in ‘education and hard work’ as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to ‘buy into America’.”
And you think that that scraping of the barrel of anecdotalism is evidence of anything at all??
How about the evidence of your own eyes and ears, Sam? Who is it who does the yardwork in your neighborhood? Who is it that does most of the scut work on construction crews? Who pulls the graveyard shift at the local Macdonalds? And those folks “don’t believe in hard work”??
Gimme a break.
I’m off to find me a tape of “Dora’. This is something I knew nothing about before I read today’s piece in the WaPo Style section. Is this a great country, or what?

22 thoughts on “Sam, meet Dora”

  1. Writing the lead piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy mag, Huntington twitters on about the fact that this wave of Hispanic immigration is unlike any other earlier waves of immigartion in that it threatens to swamp the existing culture of the country.
    Oh, fer…
    Doesn’t he realize that this has been said about every wave of immigration that has ever washed over American shores, not excluding whichever one left his family on the beach?

  2. Well, I gotta start watching Dora, if only to annoy poor old Sam H!
    But I have something that would send that poor old xenophobe, Sam, into permanent apoplexy. My two year old grandson is a mixture of European (various), Iraqi Muslim and (horror of horrors!) Lebanese Maronite (you should have been at the wedding!). His principle language is American English because everyone speaks that fluently. He can read and recite the whole Arabic and English alphabets, ditto numbers. He understands both Lebanese and Iraqi dialects, and when prompted will speak in either dialect. He also understands a modicum of French, and frequently requests to be read to in French. Two of his current favorite videos are in Arabic and French respectively. He can count to twenty in all the above languages, plus Spanish and Russian.
    He has been enrolled in a French preschool in which 80% of the instruction is in French, and which has an after hours Arabic language program.
    What IS this country coming to?!

  4. Gordon,
    It is never too late to learn a new language. I am currently spending a couple of hours a week helping a 70 something year old friend learn to read and write Arabic.
    But you WOULD likely be better off in the language department if you were one of those backward Eyerackians the Bushies are so eager to introduce to civilization. As an example, one of my closest friends, a Kurd from Iraq, speaks, reads and writes fluent Kurdish (of course), Arabic (since autonomy was granted not all Kurds know Arabic – a separate and interesting topic), and English – all three of which he learned in Iraq (instruction and textbooks in Iraq in engineering, technology, science and medicine are all in English, so fluency in English is a must). After emigrating from Iraq to Sweden, he quickly became fluent in Swedish, and after living and working as a software Engineer in Germany for five years he is fluent in German.

  6. If you are interested in taking up a new language, I have found that it can be a wonderful way to understand not only what people say, but how they think.
    I consciously studied one language from each of the major language groups (French, Hebrew, Japanese and Hindi). The fact that these various languanges are so different is largely a result of the cultures evolving independently of each other.
    On the one hand, you keep on having to relearn the rules of grammar, but on the other, I really believe that understanding the language is a useful way of understanding the ‘other’.

  7. What Jonathan said. I live in California (grew up in Los Angeles, now work in Concord) and what mysttifies me is why Huntington is accorded any respect at all (I have this problem with Bernard Lewis, actually). I’ve read articles by him, and he’s basically a metrosexual Archie Bunker.
    The impact of Mexican immigration on the United States becomes evident when one imagines what would happen if Mexican immigration abruptly stopped. The annual flow of legal immigrants would drop by about 175,000
    This is Huntington’s wet dream.
    Illegal entries would diminish dramatically.
    Certainly, if one waved a magic wand.
    The wages of low-income U.S. citizens would improve.
    Too bad Huntington can’t quit his day job and become an economist.
    Debates over the use of Spanish and whether English should be made the official language of state and national governments would subside. Bilingual education and the controversies it spawns would virtually disappear, as would controversies over welfare and other benefits for immigrants.
    Huntington hates debate, understandably. It makes him look like an ignorant bigot. I mean, who wants a bunch of Yanks runing around who speak TWO LANGUAGES! However, Huntington doesn’t have his facts straight about which groups receive benefits.
    The debate over whether immigrants pose an economic burden on state and federal governments would be decisively resolved in the negative.
    If Huntington’s fantasy involves some legislation he has up his sleeve, no, it’s manifest he can’t even follow his own arguments. If a society excludes a plurality of its immigrants it has decided that debate in the affirmative.
    The average education and skills of the immigrants continuing to arrive would reach their highest levels in U.S. history. The inflow of immigrants would again become highly diverse, creating increased incentives for all immigrants to learn English and absorb U.S. culture.
    Let me get this straight: he wants more diverse immigrants by excluding a plurality of them? And this, so they will all become the same as Huntington? I’m surprised he hasn’t joined the Raelians.
    And most important of all, the possibility of a de facto split between a predominantly Spanish-speaking United States and an English-speaking United States would disappear, and with it, a major potential threat to the country’s cultural and political integrity.
    Of course, this possibility is slim in the first place. This sounds like something he culled from “Stormfront.”
    I waited for the article to improve, to redeem itself, but Huntington resorts to tawdry rhetorical tricks that are a disgrace and a mockery. He refers to the Statue of Liberty “symbolizing” previous waves of immigrants, then compares it to “the reality” of Mexican immigration. In other words, he compares his own fantasy of orderly northern European herrenfolk dilligentky filing into the country past Ellis Island, learning English, adopting Protestant Christianity and some ineffably pure wonderbread culture, to his febrile nightmares of ranks of swarthy Catholic breeders who actual bring debate to the country.
    Of all the urgent problems in the world which need to be confronted, I would rank the passing of Huntington’s whites-only fantasy land as the dead last.

  8. An excellent article Helena, and you’re spot on with this comment especially:
    “I have a little theory here, as it happens. My little theory is that the era of monolingualism is really just a tiny blip in the whole march of human history: the blip that corresponds, in some limited parts of the world, to the consolidation of the monolingual nation-state.”
    I agree totally. If anything, I’ve come to sense that the perception so many Americans have of previous waves of immigration– that they arrive in the US, learn English, and then (along with their kids and grandkids) progressively forget their original languages and cultures, speaking only English– is flat-out false. Scott Martens debunks this myth thoroughly (http://pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000481.html) and demonstrates that the US has more often than not been a multilingual society.
    And, most importantly, he shows that the English-Spanish bilingual issue in the US has become a concern precisely *because* of the US annexation of half of Mexico’s territory after the Mexican War, in 1848. The price of this annexation (along with that of Puerto Rico in 1898) was that the US effectively became a bilingual society, and the resulting Hispanic social networks (many of which stretched back to the 1500s) are being further exploited today.
    The world in general has been multilingual and is becoming even more so today with modern communications and population movements. And as you note, many societies– Switzerland, South Africa, North African countries, many small European states carved out of post-Napoleonic conferences– are multilingual and are probably enriched for it.
    It really does stretch and exercise one’s brain to think in a different language; whenever I communicate in Spanish, French, Mandarin, Persian, or Japanese with an immigrant on a bus or train, I absorb something that I couldn’t do if these people had been linguistically and culturally Anglicized. And if the US truly does wish to remain a world power as it currently is, parochial monolingualism is a fool’s elixir. In any case, whether or not one welcomes bilingualism in the US, it’s here to stay; in the hospitals and law offices around here in New England, it’s often difficult to secure even basic employment without a commanding knowledge of Spanish.
    Just one final point: While I don’t agree with Samuel Huntington’s thesis, in Sam’s defense he raises provocative points that often go ignored. Even if one differs from his conclusions, the *facts* that he brings to the surface inspire quite informative discussions on oft-neglected topics (like those here). And please, don’t blithely slap on the paranoid xenophobe label onto him; he’s a professorial BMOC here at Harvard (a political science professor) and, whatever disagreements you may have of him, he does not remotely fit the stereotypes. He’s a remarkably cerebral guy who marshals mountains of evidence for his theses and notes subtle departures from the conventional wisdom that are often missed. So even if you don’t assent to Sam’s points (I don’t), in all fairness the guy at least deserves credit for opening up productive avenues of debate on topics that too often are swept under the rug. And making them catch on.

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