BY LEONEL MARTÍNEZ
LA VOZ DE KERN
From La Voz de Kern, 10-22-2009
Sometimes, I’d like to be a time-traveling sociologist.
That way, I could go back to the turn-of-the-century U.S. and research
the type of claim I hear from people all the time: My grandfather came to
the U.S. from Europe in 1901, immediately shed his immigrant culture,
learned flawless English in five minutes and became a professor of
Shakespearian literature at Princeton.
OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea. And these
claims usually end with the question “Why can’t Hispanics do that?”
In other words, “Why don’t Latinos assimilate?”
Countless hard drives brimming with data from the U.S. Census Bureau
and dozens of well respected think tanks say otherwise, but why let actual
facts and data change your mind?
Those who pose these questions usually believe that in some ideal past,
European immigrants assimilated almost instantaneously. But they argue
that their Hispanic counterparts resist assimilation because they are
spoiled by bilingual education in the schools, the prevalence of
Spanish-language media, and the increasing number of businesses that cater
to Spanish speakers.
Did past immigrants assimilate quickly? Fewer people crunched numbers
back then, and it’s hard to reconstruct the habits immigrant groups that
existed more than a century ago. How can we verify any of this without
boarding a time machine to the past?
A Wisconsin college professor did the next best thing. He plowed
through census data, newspapers, books, court records and other materials
from 1839 to the 1930s, focusing on the characteristics of German
immigrants in his state.
And guess what he found? Many German newcomers took their time learning
English or never learned it at all and lived in communities that spoke
only German. In fact, many thrived for decades while speaking only the
mother tongue.
So much for instant assimilation.
University of Wisconsin-Madison instructor Joseph Salmons and recent
UW-Madison German Ph.D. graduate Miranda Wilkerson published their
findings last year in the academic journal “American Speech.” They
found that German remained the primary language of business, education and
religion in parts of Wisconsin well into the early 20th century.
Amazingly, some second- and third-generation German adult immigrants born
in Wisconsin still spoke only German.
More amazingly, they did it without being stalked by CNN’s xenophobic
commentator Lou Dobbs.
Sorting through numbers from the 1910 Census, the researchers also
discovered that in many Wisconsin communities, approximately one of four
residents spoke only German. In fact, after 50 or more years in the U.S.
many of these immigrants were still monolingual.
A few of the study’s other findings:
- People who complain that too many people speak a foreign language in the U.S. workforce should hear this: Things weren’t much different at the turn of the century. In fact, speaking only German in Wisconsin didn’t prevent most people from getting and keeping a job. That’s because many teachers, clergymen, retail merchants, blacksmiths, tailors, yard foremen, surveyors, farmers and laborers also knew only German.
- Folks who wring their hands over the number of grade-school students who don’t speak English should realize that in the 1890s, some correspondence from Wisconsin school districts to the office of the state school superintendent was still entirely in German. And this is after the passage of an 1889 law that required schools to teach in English.
- Those who gripe about the increasing number of Spanish-language television and radio stations and newspapers should know that Wisconsin had more than 500 German newspapers throughout its history, including many that published through the 1940s.
Professor Salmons deserves a hearty “danke schön” to for digging
out these facts. While they won’t settle the assimilation debate, they
at least show that assimilation in the past was more complex and
time-consuming than we were often led to believe.
As for Latino immigrants, they will continue to assimilate despite the
horror stories circulated by Dobbs and his buddies. They know that English
is the language of success in America.
They only need what their European counterparts had at the turn of the
last century: Time.
