May 10, 2007
Memo From Mexico,
By
Allan Wall
How A VDARE.COM Article Landed Me A Cameo Role In
A PBS Documentary
Thanks to a VDARE.COM article I
wrote several years ago, I
was invited to appear in a documentary on the
state of the English language in
America.
In February 2002, in
Spanish and the New Conquistadors, I pointed out
that the growth of Spanish in the United States is
frankly perceived by prominent Mexicans as a conquest.
As a result of this article, I was
asked if I’d be willing to be interviewed
for the projected Robert
MacNeil documentary
Do You Speak American? I agreed.
So, in March of 2003 I traveled by bus from my home
somewhere in Mexico to
Laredo, Texas, where I linked up with the production
team. I was interviewed for the documentary and filmed
crossing the bridge on foot. They put me up for the
night in a nice riverside hotel
and treated me to a few meals. It was the first time I’d
ever been involved in anything like that, giving me a
small glimpse of how a
documentary is
produced.
Do You Speak American? was
released some two years later, in the beginning
of 2005—about the time I was
flying out to the
Middle East with my National Guard unit.
After arriving to Iraq, I began to
hear reports of the completed documentary. A fellow
Guardsman actually told me he’d seen me in it, since it
was aired on the Armed Forces
Network. A friend in my hometown sent me
DVDs of the 3-part documentary and its companion volume
. So I
watched the documentary and read the book for the first
time, while
in Iraq. [VDARE.COM
patient shrug:
Needless to say, we’re not credited in the documentary,
but, hey, we got Allan on, didn’t we?]
Do You Speak American?
narrated by Robert MacNeil,
explores the contemporary state of American English. It
is organized in the form of a cross-country journey,
spanning the 3 DVDs: "Up North", "Down South"
and "Out West". It’s a sequel to The Story of English,
also
narrated by MacNeil,
released in 1986.
Robert MacNeil
begins from his native
Nova Scotia, takes a bus to
Maine, and from there travels by car, train, boat
and plane across the Midwest, the South, to
Texas and eventually to California and
Seattle. At the end of the show, he is on a ferry on
Puget Sound, heading to some
undisclosed location.
A number of topics are discussed in
the film: attitudes about American English, language
change, dialects of American English and how they are
perceived,
Black American speech,
Valley Girl and
Surfer Dude speech—and the
Spanish Question.
In Episode
I, while visiting New York City,
MacNeil
encounters a Hispanic lady selling food on the street
and discovers she has lived 19 years in the city and
doesn’t speak English.
In Episode II,
Robert MacNeil
arrives in
Texas, and begins to discuss the
influence of Spanish. That’s the part in which I
appear, crossing the bridge on foot, passing from
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to
Laredo, Texas, U.S.A.
In the narration,
MacNeil talks about the
heavy border traffic and says that "It was so
snarled up on the day we met Allan Wall that is was
easier for him to park on the Mexican side and walk
across to the U.S.A. " (The book says something
similar.) [Transcript
of Allan Wall Episode]
But that’s not correct. I walked
across the bridge because it was part of the
show; I’d been instructed to
do this, so they could film me walking across the
bridge.
After all, I had previously crossed
the border by bus, and linked
up with the production team on the American side. Then I
was told to walk back to the Mexican side, turn right
around and walk back so I could be filmed.
Besides, it
would have been impossible for me to have
parked my car in Nuevo Laredo, since I left it
hundreds of miles inside Mexico. When I travel to the
border alone, as I do almost every month for my Texas
Army National Guard drill, I
nearly always take the bus.
Still, I felt
my interview with MacNeil
went well, and was represented fairly in the documentary
and book. I spoke of the importance of English as our
civic language and what should be done. Here is an
excerpt from the book describing my interview:
“Allan
Wall …said that
living in Mexico had given him a
different perspective on the inroads of Spanish in
America. He recalled a Congress of the Spanish Language
in
Madrid in 2001. One of the speakers was Vicente Fox,
the president of Mexico, who commented that Mexican
immigrants who continue to speak Spanish in the United
States are doing their patriotic duty to Mexico. [Text
of speech, in Spanish.] Another speaker was
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps the
leading literary figure in Mexico. "He said that
there is a silent reconquista of the United States. He
didn’t even limit it to the Southwest, as many do; he
just said ‘of the United States’."
I also pointed out what I believe
must be done. This is how the
book reported what I said:
“To
prevent this, Wall wants immigration reduced, to
give legal immigrants time to assimilate. He not
only wants English made the official U.S. language, but
wants all government business to be in English. If
people don’t understand English, they will be motivated
to learn, he believes, because some Hispanics are
‘impeded’ from learning by U.S. government policies,
such as the
translation of documents, bilingual education, and
bilingual election ballots. He sees American
politicians pandering by speaking Spanish themselves to
woo Hispanic voters—one of these being George W. Bush.
Wall faulted
Bush, as governor of Texas, for not taking action,
like cutting off state funds, after the El Cenizo
ordinance. [El
Cenizo, a small town in south Texas, made
Spanish its official language in 2001 and announced
it
would not permit the enforcement of federal immigration
law]. He also noted that Bush, as president, was
on record as opposing the English Language Amendment.”
I pointed out that Mexico would not
allow
Americans to take over a Mexican town, make English
the official language, and ban cooperation with
Mexican immigration officials.
After my interview,
Episode II ends with Robert
MacNeil posing this question: "Does the large
Hispanic immigration, legal and illegal, really threaten
American English, or like immigrant groups before are
Latinos merging into the mainstream?"
Episode III takes the show to
California. The host interviews
Patricia Lopez, VJ of the
Mex 2 the Max program in LA. She
boasts that "You can get by not speaking it [English]
here in the States."[Transcript]
This is followed by an interview
with linguist
Carmen Fought. [Email]
At first, Carmen talks about Chicano
English as a dialect of American English. But
suddenly the topic jumps to the question of Spanish
supplanting English. Basically, this segment is designed
to contradict what I said in Episode II.
Carmen Fought assures
MacNeil that there is no
need whatsoever to be concerned regarding Spanish as a
threat to American English! Then Robert
MacNeil assures the viewer
that, "Like Carmen, other linguists believe Spanish
is no more a threat to English than
German or
Italian, which once provoked similar fears."
This is accompanied by soothing,
peaceful music, to put the viewer’s mind at ease as the
segment fades away.
Since Carmen
Fought was interviewed in California (Episode III), and
I had been interviewed previously in Texas (Episode II),
I had no opportunity to respond to this. But now, here
on VDARE.COM, I can.
Is "Do You Speak American?"
correct in confidently
assuring us that Spanish is no threat to American
English? Is that really a
foregone conclusion?
In speaking of previous
German and
Italian immigration, we are
really talking about the Great Wave of Immigration, the
Ellis Island Days, from the 1880s to the 1920s.
So in order for
Spanish speakers to continue assimilating as did
those famous immigrants of yore, then the conditions now
must be similar to those of the Ellis Island days.
The problem is,
they most assuredly are not.
