Description
1. In Chapter 10, Lozano studies the relationship between language and citizenship in the
United States in what two places?
2. [Which state?] had the sovereignty to determine its own school code and agenda and to
use tax money to fund bilingual primary schools, but in [this island], the U.S. government
resisted Spanish-language education.
3. What was Senate Bill 3 (S.B.3)?
4. What was the purpose of New Mexico’s Tentative Program for Teaching Spanish?
5. Lozano writes, “Native Spanish speakers used the language as a political gift.” How did
Puerto Ricans use that gift?
6. What became an important civil rights goal in California, Arizona, and Texas for middle-
class educators and activists after the war?
7. Which public figure employed Spanish to organize and unionize farmworkers throughout
the 1940s and 1950s?
8. While Mexican Americans and Chicano activists fought for civil rights, they approached
things differently. [Which group?] aspired to assimilation, while [which group?]
embraced racial identity and Brown Power.
9. Which group used Spanish as a language of activism and pride, making it once again a
political language but with new meaning?
10. Added onto the Voting Rights Act in 1975, Lozano writes that this amendment is one of
the most important examples of a successful federal language rights provision. Be able to
identify that amendment.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
chapter 10
Competing Nationalisms
Puerto Rico and New Mexico
El uso del castellano era el único medio de conservar la cultura y tradiciones de
Puerto Rico.*
—Summary of F. J. Richardson’s testimony, La Prensa, February 21, 1943
WHEREAS, in the present unsettled condition of the world affairs it is essential, . . .
that our citizenship acquire a thorough knowledge of the Spanish language.
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—1941 N.M. Laws 517–8
In 1942, the U.S. Senate possessed a single native Spanish speaker, Dennis
Chávez of New Mexico. Born a U.S. citizen in 1888 to monolingual Spanishspeaking parents in Los Chaves in New Mexico Territory, Chávez’s language
skills and cultural background made him an important player in the U.S.
government’s wartime bid for Latin American alliances. In 1942, for example,
he traveled to Mexico City at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller, head of
OCIAA, and later met Latin American dignitaries when they visited Washington, DC. Chávez attempted to leverage the federal government’s newfound
interest in the Spanish language for the good of his constituents. “Our role in
New Mexico seems to be naturally cut out for us. We must use the priceless
gift of the Spanish language which God has given us in the cause of National
and Hemispheric Defense,” Chávez proclaimed. But Chávez was not arguing
for New Mexico’s return to a culture dominated by Spanish. Instead, he saw
* “The use of Spanish was the only way to conserve the culture and traditions of Puerto
Rico.”
232
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competing nationalisms
. 233
instruction in English as the priority for students in his state and in Puerto
Rico. Spanish held a singular place among modern languages in the United
States, but it remained “foreign” nonetheless.
The politics of how and what languages should be taught in schools, especially primary schools, offers insight into the relationship between language
and citizenship in the United States. This chapter explores the divergent
stories of educational language policy in New Mexico and Puerto Rico, two
areas that retained monolingual Spanish speakers well after their incorporation into U.S. territory. Despite their geographic distance from one another,
Puerto Rico and New Mexico have many historical similarities. Both experienced (and one continues to experience) a prolonged territorial period during
which the federal government proffered U.S. citizenship status to residents—
New Mexicans with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and Puerto
Rico through the Jones Act of 1917—without giving those citizens full control
of their affairs. This status separated New Mexicans and Puerto Ricans from
the vast majority of noncitizen Spanish speakers in the United States, most
of whom were immigrants from Mexico. The educational systems in both
locations was spotty and inadequate, the victim of perpetual funding shortages
and U.S. government control. Both retained Spanish in all aspects of life
during their first forty years as U.S. territories.
New Mexico’s ascent to statehood in 1912 set Spanish speakers in New
Mexico and Puerto Rico on different paths. Even though the state’s school
code was enforced unevenly, the state legislature’s decision to endorse English
as the language of instruction for primary schools in 1919 meant a rapid decline
in the number of monolingual Spanish speakers. By the 1940s—thirty years
after statehood—New Mexico’s government and schools primarily operated
in English. Still, the state’s long-held political commitments to Spanish speakers thwarted a linear loss of Spanish in the state. New Mexico became an
important model of bilingual education at the most basic level—teaching a
second language in the primary grades. As a state, New Mexico had the sovereignty to determine its own school code and agenda, and its legislature had
the power to tax its citizens to fund the schools. The state’s political and
educational leaders lobbied for support for bilingual education even while
seeking national recognition of New Mexico’s potential contribution to the
nation’s hemispheric goals.
A different path emerged in the territory of Puerto Rico, where locals’
efforts to retain Spanish-language schools in the face of intense resistance
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234
. a political language
from the U.S. government contributed to a stronger sense of national identity
on the island. After four decades of U.S. influence, mainland native English
speakers made up less than 4 percent of Puerto Rico’s population, educational
funding was sparse, and few Puerto Ricans supported statehood. Puerto
Rico’s commissioner of education was appointed by the U.S. president, which
made local rule less feasible. The presidentially appointed governors did not
always consider the preferences of puertorriqueños, but neither did puertorriqueño teachers and administrators always implement the government’s
demands.
Both New Mexico and Puerto Rico revisited the role of Spanish in children’s education in the 1940s, a period of heightened national interest in the
relationship between language and citizenship. In 1941, legislators in New
Mexico considered a bill that mandated Spanish-language instruction in
primary school classrooms. The pedagogical debates surrounding the bill
reveal how the role of Spanish had changed in New Mexico and expose divisions among the native Spanish-speaking population. In 1943, a group of U.S.
senators held a series of hearings in Puerto Rico—similar to the 1902 Beveridge
hearings—that focused on the island’s social and economic conditions but in
actuality had a lot to say about the use of Spanish. To understand why these
nearly simultaneous discussions produced such different outcomes, the
remainder of this chapter offers detailed case studies of the role of Spanishlanguage instruction in New Mexico and Puerto Rico in the mid-twentieth
century. New Mexicans ultimately positioned themselves as U.S. citizens
whose ties to Pan-Americanism would aid the nation, whereas Puerto Ricans
claimed Spanish-language instruction as a non-negotiable aspect of island
identity.
a bilingual future in new mexico
As the leader of the Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs
and the senior senator from New Mexico, Dennis Chávez provides the link
between Puerto Rico and New Mexico and their sanctioned language policies.
Chávez remembered being “in the third grade before I learned to speak English.” Although he found his lack of English hindered him in school, his
fluency in Spanish facilitated his entrance into politics. Chávez began his
career as a court interpreter; in 1911 he interpreted the elected governor’s
speeches for Spanish-speaking crowds. Even so, Chávez was an early propo-
Lozano, Rosina. An American Language : The History of Spanish in the United States, University of California Press, 2018.
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competing nationalisms
. 235
nent of English-only educational policies. A largely unknown Chávez entered
the political fray in 1919 by opposing Governor Octaviano Larrazolo’s support
for bilingual education. He proclaimed that “a nuestra juventud no debe
enseñarsele sino la lengua americana” (our youth should not be taught any but
the American language). While Chávez altered his views after 1919, his early
support for English-only instruction became typical of New Mexicans in the
1920s.
Chávez’s appointment to the Senate in 1935 came during a period of renewed
public interest in Spanish-language instruction. Just five years earlier,
Santa Fe’s county superintendent of public schools, Nina Otero-Warren, had
hoped to secure a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to “preserve the
Spanish-American people and their culture.” Otero-Warren tied language
to cultural identity to argue that New Mexican children could be educated
best through the “beauty and charm” of their native Spanish language. She
believed that bilingual education would provide an escape from the “fate of
all small Colonial Groups” whose vocational options were limited due to their
inability to speak the dominant language well and whose cultural identity was
erased by a curriculum that omitted any substantive discussion of their
culture, art, or literature. Educators’ efforts to reintroduce Spanish to New
Mexican classrooms came at precisely the same moment that nativists throughout the country focused on other forms of education that emphasized an
“English-first” mentality. In a move that recognized the importance of
English-language instruction but also valued Spanish, Otero-Warren and
others advocated for their mother tongue as a cultural gift to the nation.
During the 1930s, other New Mexican educators had joined Otero-Warren
in a broader movement to return Spanish to New Mexico schools. Lloyd
Tireman, an educator with a strong belief in the benefits of bilingual education, set up a “laboratory school” in San José, New Mexico, in 1930 to bring a
bilingual curriculum to students in New Mexico. The University of New
Mexico offered him the institutional support to create these schools. But while
Tireman’s experimental schools in San José and, later, Nambé were the best
known of these experiments in Spanish-language instruction, they served a
minuscule number of nuevomexicano students. The need for more languagesensitive curricular policies in the state was vast. In Taos County, 70 miles
northeast of Santa Fe, the county schools enrolled some 3,500 students, fewer
than 3 percent of whom spoke English. The teachers’ association fully embraced
the benefits of bilingual instruction. Taos County supervisor Ruth Miller
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236
. a political language
Martínez justified bilingual education using familiar pedagogical arguments
from 1919 but with an added layer of Pan-Americanism. New Mexico was in
an “ideal situation” to support successful Spanish teaching due to its history,
geographic location, and linguistic opportunities, she said. She deemed Spanish the “language of the Americas” and rejected the state’s existing educational
policy, which officially dismissed Spanish, in favor of a Spanish-first policy
that positioned English as a foreign language until students learned the basics
of reading and writing.
Martínez and other Taos County educators advocated for statewide educational language policies that embraced Spanish, but their position stopped short
of favoring Spanish over English. At the 1938 annual meeting of the Taos County
Teachers Association (TCTA), members adopted five resolutions relating to
language. These resolutions departed from Otero-Warren’s 1929 stance: “The
first and most important step in the education of these children is . . . the learning of English.” Even so, the TCTA recognized the reality of a Spanishspeaking student population and therefore endorsed better teaching strategies
that would leave students with a strong base in both Spanish and English. The
TCTA’s resolutions called for teachers statewide to prove their bilingual proficiency. Members recognized the lack of sound instructional practices regarding
bilingual education; for that reason, they wanted to see additional experimental
schools in the county to develop “the bilingual method” and requested that the
state universities add teacher education courses in both languages. A final resolution suggested that “all Curriculum Revision Committees in the State of New
Mexico” consider the possibility of teaching Spanish by the start of third or
fourth grade. By calling for bilingual instruction statewide, the TCTA encouraged a broader shift in the way New Mexicans viewed and taught Spanish.
These discussions took place at a moment when the state’s official educational policies increasingly emphasized the importance of an English-only
approach. Few state educators had previously supported teaching Spanishlanguage courses outside of high school. Since few native Spanish-speaking
students ever reached high school, most had little opportunity to learn the
formal mechanics of their native tongue. Many New Mexicans in positions
of power simply saw Spanish as unimportant for the economic and social
future of students, and they refused to acknowledge how their policies affected
monolingual Spanish speakers. These English-only requirements left native
Spanish speakers uncertain not only about the place of Spanish in classrooms
but also about their place in U.S. society.
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competing nationalisms
. 237
Under pressure from both the state’s teachers and the broader PanAmericanism movement, New Mexico legislators began to reconsider its
opposition to Spanish-language instruction in 1941. The previous year, Governor John E. Miles recommended the gradual implementation of Spanish
courses in New Mexico’s grade schools; the state teachers’ convention, meanwhile, endorsed Spanish instruction starting in the seventh grade. The
Spanish section of the New Mexico Education Association (NMEA) resolved
to support compulsory Spanish classes in elementary schools. At the 1940
annual conference of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and
Portuguese in Albuquerque, Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent a message
of “Pan-American cultural unity.” Beyond New Mexico, the secretary of the
National Defense Council, a nonprofit foundation, emphasized Spanishlanguage instruction throughout the country as “a part of the national defense”
effort. Similarly, L. S. Rowe, director general of the Pan-American Union,
tasked U.S. Spanish teachers with improving hemispheric relations. These
instructors carried the “burden of creating ‘a better appreciation’ ” of the contributions of Latin America. For very different reasons, Spanish-language
instruction was gaining defenders from different sectors of society.
In this optimistic climate, state senators Joseph M. Montoya and Ralph
Gallegos in January 1941 proposed Senate Bill 3 (S.B. 3), which would require
Spanish instruction for all students in the fifth through eighth grade. Born
in the tiny northern town of Peña Blanca in Sandoval County in 1915, Montoya
joined the state legislature in his early twenties, quickly becoming the majority floor leader in 1939. He became a state senator the following year. Native
Spanish-speaking senators were staging and supporting a Spanish linguistic
revival. To pass, S.B. 3 would need the votes of the English-speaking majority.
Meanwhile House members introduced their own legislation, House Bill 24
(H.B. 24), which would require all students to take a single Spanish course
prior to graduation. The bill’s sponsors, Representatives Calla A. Eylar and
Albert Gonzales of Doña Ana County, felt that compulsory Spanish in the
elementary schools lacked universal popularity and that their bill stood a
better chance of being signed into law. The fact that this bill was introduced
by legislators from the southern counties suggests some regional differences
on the question of bilingual education; additional splits soon emerged.
S.B. 3 immediately gained a supporter in Senator Chávez, who now fully
recanted his previous support for English-only education. In a letter to state
representative Concha Ortiz y Pino written in early February, Chávez outlined
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238
. a political language
the reasons for his support. He emphasized New Mexico’s possibly “immeasurable” importance to strengthening Latin American relations, the growing
national interest in learning Spanish, and making Spanish a “second official
language in order to be good neighbors.” He concluded, “New Mexico should
be the last State to oppose the trend.” New Mexico, the home of so many
prominent native Spanish speakers, should advance, rather than hinder, the
nation’s pursuit of Spanish-language expertise.
Prominent legislators and administrators organized public roundtable
discussions of S.B. 3 in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces to promote
and debate the bill. The individuals invited to the roundtable in Santa Fe, held
at the historic La Fonda Hotel, included former governor Miguel Antonio
Otero Jr., Superintendent of Public Instruction Grace Corrigan, Governor
Miles, Representative Gonzales, and Senators Montoya, Gallegos, and George
Armijo. Nina Otero-Warren, too, hoped to attend, as “the teaching of Spanish in the elementary grades of the Public Schools of New Mexico is . . . not
only desirable but necessary.” She saw language as the “strongest tie” between
school and home. Publicity for the high-profile New Mexicans planning to
attend S.B. 3 roundtables demonstrates the strong feelings the proposed
legislation elicited and the visibility of nuevomexicanos in the discussion.
S.B. 3 encountered some opposition from educators, particularly those
involved in higher education. Prominent opponents included the presidents
of four state universities—NMHU, UNM, Eastern New Mexico College
(ENMC), and the New Mexico Military Institute—and representatives of
the Spanish-American Normal School at El Rito. Most educators concurred
that the bill would have little real impact in the schools without adequate
teacher training, financial support, and preliminary studies of Spanishlanguage instruction. The significant population of native Spanish-speaking
students at NMHU and the Normal School did not influence its representatives’ fiscal and logistical concerns about the bill. With the exception of
Donald McKay, president of ENMC, the university presidents agreed with
this assessment. McKay, in contrast, based his objection on his belief that
Anglos would oppose compulsory courses in Spanish.
The roundtables and other public meetings contributed to a highly charged
debate already occurring among native Spanish speakers. Some parents who
had attended schools with language restrictions were upset by the prospect
of their children learning Spanish even in the 1930s. As one scholar related
about Tireman’s experimental schools, “The teaching of the Spanish language
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competing nationalisms
. 239
and singing Spanish songs seemed to Spanish-speaking parents . . . to be
attempts to keep the children in an inferior, depressed status.” Regional civil
rights organizations expressed similar concerns. LULAC, founded in 1929,
favored an English-focused assimilationist model that supported student
advancement, with a stated preference for students to receive Spanish and
Latin American cultural instruction at the higher grade levels. LULAC
declared its opposition to the senate bill during its national conference, which
in 1941 met in Albuquerque. Benjamin Moya, a high school teacher in Santa
Fe and chair of LULAC’s educational committee, advocated for standard
Spanish-language instruction among adults. He blamed parents for New
Mexican children’s poor Spanish skills. LULAC relegated Spanish to the more
private sphere of the home, with parents as the instructors. At that same
meeting, however, LULAC passed a conference resolution that required teachers in New Mexico to have Spanish knowledge and spoke of the importance
of sending emissaries to Mexico who could speak Spanish “well” and not “in
a strictly New Mexican manner.” LULAC supported bilingual teachers in
primary grades for transitional reasons rather than for Spanish-language
maintenance.
LULAC’s opposition to the bill placed the organization at odds with other
political and educational leaders within the nuevomexicano Spanish-speaking
community. State representative Concha Ortiz y Pino rejected the “unintelligent group” when she condemned LULAC’s move to “throw cold water on
one of the greatest opportunities people of Spanish extraction ever had to
serve their country.” Ortiz y Pino subsequently resigned her LULAC membership. In championing S.B. 3, she outlined reasons to learn Spanish that transcended the home. She explained the role of the language in commercial
transactions, hemispheric relations, and increasing the cultural pride of the
state’s native Spanish speakers. Leo Amador, president of the Central Branch
of the NMEA and supervisor of Rio Arriba County Schools, supported as
much Spanish as could be taught in schools and claimed LULAC’s position
was “in direct conflict with the aims and purposes of the league.”
S.B. 3 passed into law on April 16, 1941, with an assist from Chávez. The
senator spoke at a joint session of the legislature to push legislators to implement the compulsory Spanish-language bill and make New Mexico a “leader
in international good will.” Chávez argued that not passing the bill would be
a missed opportunity for New Mexico “of doing for the United States what
no other state can do.”
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240
. a political language
As signed into law, S.B. 3 required Spanish instruction in the fifth through
eighth grades in schools with at least three teachers or ninety regularly attending students. The State Board of Education would be responsible for enforcing the act, but “Governing Boards of Education” could name exceptions each
school year. The bill also permitted parents who objected to Spanish-language
instruction to remove their children from Spanish courses. All of these provisos meant that the originally proposed “compulsory” law was diluted by
political compromise. The law’s second section outlined new Spanish-language
coursework requirements for fifth- to eighth-grade teachers. In the first three
school years following passage of S.B. 3, employed teachers would need six,
then eight, then ten semester hours of Spanish. The state also passed a small
aid bill, S.B. 129, to support the implementation of S.B. 3. It created a Spanish
research fund that provided $5,000 a year for two years to test, identify, and
learn to teach effective Spanish-teaching strategies.
New Mexico’s leaders celebrated passage of the bill, suggesting that New
Mexico’s schools could model a Spanish-language program that could be
implemented throughout the Southwest. They also promoted the state’s role
in Latin American relations. A joint memorial from New Mexico’s House
requesting financial aid from Congress recognized Spanish as the “native
language” of almost all of Latin America and pleaded for federal funds to help
enforce language training as it “will be of great assistance to our people and
to the people of the United States.” New Mexico’s House defined “our people”
as largely speaking Spanish—and having done so for “several hundred years”—
which continued as the language of “a large percentage of the school children
of this state.”
Too often, New Mexico’s politicians, including Chávez, focused on the
state’s exceptionalism to further the cause of Spanish instruction. Chávez
reinforced the idea that New Mexico’s native Spanish speakers could serve as
invaluable national assets to either cultural or intelligence agencies. Ortiz y
Pino agreed when addressing the bill’s detractors: “New Mexico should be a
focal point for the betterment of pan-American [sic] relations.” These arguments served Ortiz y Pino and Chávez as they came up against fiduciary and
ideological opposition to teaching Spanish widely. Instead of suggesting that
all Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens had the right to be bilingual—an approach
that would include Spanish-language coursework at every stage of public
schooling—the state legislature encouraged only successful students in the
higher elementary grades to learn Spanish. Policy makers supported language
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competing nationalisms
. 241
figure 11. Children in a schoolroom in Questa, New Mexico, in Taos County, 1943. John
Collier. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
instruction patterns that reinforced U.S. language norms. Only after native
Spanish-speaking students learned English—and only after they mastered
English—could they learn to read and write in the language of their ancestors
and home.
As George I. Sánchez wrote in Forgotten People, published in 1940, the year
before the language debates, nuevomexicano students attended chronically
underfunded schools where teaching practices often ignored their needs. (See
figure 11.) He likely would have argued that the new law failed to do enough,
as he believed a student’s “limited proficiency in that language [Spanish] is
not used as the base for the new language or for the development of proficiency,” which contributed to the state’s high dropout rate. New Mexico’s
bill disregarded the needs of the state’s rural Spanish-speaking students. Some
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242
. a political language
of the state’s educators nevertheless hoped to use the state’s new willingness
to endorse Spanish-language education as a stepping-stone to help the rural,
poor, and monolingual Spanish speakers in the state’s remote areas.
One of these champions for New Mexico’s rural Spanish-speaking populations was Antonio Rebolledo, the NMHU professor who cofounded the
Institute of the Air. With funding from S.B. 129, Rebolledo led the statesponsored New Mexico Research Project to identify the best strategies for
teaching Spanish. He advocated more far-reaching Spanish-language practices than S.B. 3 mandated, particularly when teaching native Spanishspeaking students. Rebolledo encouraged language-based segregation in
schools with a majority of native Spanish speakers. He believed a heterogeneous classroom of both monolingual English and Spanish speakers would
hinder the types of curriculum changes necessary for successful teaching and
would only benefit Anglo or monolingual English-speaking students.
Upon submission of the New Mexico Research Project’s findings, the state
legislature created the new position of state supervisor of Spanish in 1943. But
New Mexico did little to enforce Rebolledo’s suggestions, and the few mentions of Spanish-language instruction released by the state superintendent of
instruction suggested that the new program was largely for the benefit of nonnative Spanish speakers. A curriculum development report submitted by
the state superintendent of public instruction, Georgia L. Lusk, presumably
distributed to New Mexico’s educators, emphasized the critical role of Spanish instruction in bilingual fluency. A “Tentative Program for Teaching Spanish” detailed the four general objectives of Spanish language courses:
1. To develop proficiency in speaking and reading the Spanish language.
2. Teaching children to appreciate other peoples’ culture.
3. Realization on the part of the students that they possess the ability to
learn another language.
4. A better understanding of Latin Americans through a knowledge of
their language.
These objectives described a program largely envisioned as a way to form a
deeper cultural understanding of Latin America. Lusk expressed a definite
desire for students to become bilingual, but the Tentative Program’s objectives
downplayed the importance of Spanish to the state itself or to its residents.
In fact, the phrase “other peoples’ culture” implied that students who came
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competing nationalisms
. 243
from an English-speaking background would continue to view Spanishspeaking culture as different and inferior. Lusk also privileged Englishspeaking students’ presumed monolingual experience over Spanish speakers.
Spanish-speaking students would not realize that they “possess[ed] the ability to learn another language” by being taught their mother tongue.
Over time, it became clear that S.B. 3’s measured approach to incorporating Spanish into the primary school curriculum had the unintended consequence of rendering Spanish a foreign language, ironically proving more
effective at this task than the state’s prior English-only regulations. An
NMHU grant proposal to the OCIAA from this period suggested that the
implementation of the law had forced schools that had previously conducted
classes in Spanish to now treat the language as foreign rather than instructional. NMHU made a plea for funding an English-language instruction
program that would work in a community with few English speakers. The
proposal identified pockets of San Miguel County as having 95 to 98 percent
Spanish speakers. NMHU educators used the discriminatory response to
Spanish in the broader community as one reason that an OCIAA-sponsored
project was needed. The proposal referred to the small number of Spanish
speakers who passed the early primary grades and pointed out that those who
did enter ninth grade arrived unprepared as “many of them have been taught
in Spanish, however illegally.” The very existence of this proposal to work on
English-language instruction supports that the state’s prior attempts to professionalize and regulate the school system had not fully dislodged Spanish as a
language of instruction in New Mexico’s schools. However, NMHU’s summary of the situation since the bill passed described a real shift in the use of
Spanish in the schools. While it was never the intent of New Mexican educators that compulsory Spanish-language instruction after 1941 would benefit
Anglos over native Spanish speakers, that was the ultimate effect on New
Mexico’s midcentury educational policies.
a spanish stronghold in puerto rico
In New Mexico, some Spanish-speaking residents opposed state politicians’
push for Spanish as a “compulsory” school subject. In Puerto Rico, citizens,
educators, and many territorial officials opposed U.S. po
