Alien Speech, Incorporated: On the Cultural History of Spanish in the US

Abstract

Over six million people file into US classrooms each year with the aim of learning Spanish. They are met by a dazzling array of textbooks, videos, interactive software, and monetized online resources targeted not only at tuition-paying consumers, but also at a substantial, if uncountable, number of learners outside the formal space of the classroom: the ambitious self-teachers and brusher-uppers who are also served by this segment of the multibillion-dollar educational publishing industry. In the face of this formidable market, let me pose a naïve question: why don't these would-be learners walk instead to a nearby location where they are likely to find one of the nation's twenty-eight million Spanish-speaking persons—a lettuce field in Salinas, a slaughterhouse in Ottumwa, a cable-company service center in Hoboken, a restaurant kitchen pretty much anywhere in the country—and instead hire a native speaker to teach them? Competing against those low-wage labor markets, the enterprising student could surely strike a smart educational bargain.1