Becoming Bilingual, Becoming Ourselves: Archival Memories of Spanglish in Early Californian Epistolary Texts

Abstract

In the early 1960s, Dr. George I. Sanchez, a pioneer in the education of Mexican-American students explained that acculturation means that Mexican-Americans have the obligation to become Americanized and have the obligation to become (Salazar and Garcia 1995: 90-91). Sanchez's comment is ironie in the ideologically monolingual English-speaking United States following the conquest and annexation of the Mexican speaking territories of North America in the nineteenth Century. However, there was a time when Anglos living in California, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico routinely became—and in fact, embraced becoming—Spanish-speaking Anglos who communicated freely in with Spanish-speakers and in richly bilingual practices with other Mexicanized or Mexicanized Yankees. Examining letters written in the 1830s and 1840s, here, I explore the bilingual language practices (Spanglish) and identities of two prominent Anglo immigrants in Mexican Los Angeles, Hugo Reid, and Abel Stearns. This study is part of a larger project to reassemble the historical presence of in what has always been complex multilingual ecologies of language use, policy, and ideology in California. In order to re-establish the place of Spanish, language educators and linguists need to rethink and Spanglish beyond English-centric memory. Language use in California has always been about complex between speakers with diverse and different practices of language, culture, and identity. In an ever-changing contact (Pratt 2008), speakers in California inhabit complex ecologies (van Lier 2004) that extend well beyond the common-sense ideology of discrete language-community-identity and beyond notions of bilingual language-identity-culture practices that would conceptualize Spanglish as the mixing of supposedly pre-existing unitary English and Spanish languages and cultures. English-speaking immigrants began coming to Alta California upon Mexican independence from Spain in the early decades of the nineteenth Century. Most early immigrants like Reid and Steams became naturalized Mexican Citizens and Catholics, which enabled them to do business, marry into propriety-owning Mexican families and hold elected office. Juridically, linguistically and culturally, for example, Hugh Reid, an immigrant from Scotland, became Mexican using his baptismal name of Perfecto Hugo Reid. This archivai evidence suggests that the languages we learn are deeply connected to shifting spaces of speakership and personhood. Despite the thinness of the archivai record from the Mexican national period of prestatehood California, appears to have been the lingua franca among immigrants. Officiai correspondence in Mexican California was a sort of Spanish-only zone in which gringos demonstrated their skill in successfully navigating monolingual conventions of written genres as they wrote letters, both in their officiai capacities as elected officiais and as Citizens, directed to Mexican governors and other officiais. Education was almost synonymous with bilingual, even multilingual, competence and literacy, which was highly valued throughout the and Mexican periods. This bilingual competence was grounded in literate practices, as well as spoken communication, that opened doors to engaging in commercial ventures and holding public office where knowing how to read and write in was required by law. This highly valued bilingual competence and multilingual literacy extended into the very early years of US statehood.