Should Mexico make Spanish the Official Language?

            On a night flight to Mexico recently, I heard soft voices in Spanish and English and I thought about how they all seemed to blend together.  It occurred to me to wonder, in the midst of all the language debate in this country, what kind of a statement it would make if Mexico were to make Spanish its official language.  It seemed fitting somehow, a reciprocal action to what so many want to see here.  By the time we landed in Mexico City I had forgotten about it, but the question would come back to me.

            Our expatriate friends met us at the airport and ushered us through the process of finding a safe and reasonable taxi to the hotel they had reserved for my wife and I.  They were our first Spanish teachers fifteen years ago and they had retired to Mexico both because they are fascinated by the country and because they could make their retirement money stretch farther there.  Not only are they both quite fluent in Spanish but they had also lived in Mexico for periods of time, especially in the Michoacan city of Pátzcuaro where they now lived and which would be our destination.

            The bus ride to Pátzcuaro lasted about six hours, a long spell to sit but the view as we passed in and out of mountains was great while the sense of being in another culture was overwhelming.  Although I teach Spanish, there were many unfamiliar words on signs and the traffic had a different feel altogether, a sensation of being very, very close to every other vehicle.  The buses are comfortable but movies blare in English with Spanish subtitles, so I didn't feel inclined to start a conversation with anyone across the aisle from me.

            It's really fun to have the excuse of wanting to show one's students Mexican culture when one sets out to record a trip on video.  I managed to do a number of small interviews with various artisans in their shops, but the question of the official language stayed in the background while I learned that the native Indians of the area still speak Purhépecha, a pre-Columbian language which has undergone a bit of a revival lately; there are now several bilingual radio stations in the area featuring it.  I was told that it is a great feat to master it and I presume that like many ancient languages, it is more complex than our modern ones, as Guy Deutscher explains in his fascinating book The Unfolding of Languages.  It was comforting to know the Spanish Conquest had not wiped out the language, even though they had called the natives and their language Tarascan.  Perhaps they could not pronounce the Indian names, but huge numbers of them remain in Mexico, such as the nearby city of Tzintzunzan, which means hummingbird in Purhépecha.  Indeed, most of the names of towns and some cities seemed to be something other than Spanish.

            On my last day in Pátzcuaro, I had arranged an interview with the local librarian, but she wanted me to talk to the students who were studying there, which was great because I really wanted my students to see and hear from someone their own age.  It happened that she introduced me to a group of four of them who were busy with an assignment detailing the native languages of Mexico, and they explained to me that there were originally 55 of them and that 45 are still spoken today.  None of them spoke the local language and they said that it was difficult to learn because those who knew it were reluctant to use it in school for fear of being laughed at, but they told me a few words. 

            I had noticed that there were two real estate offices in the city, Century 21 and ReMax both, and I gathered that their business was mostly with Gringos coming south to buy property in the area.  I had also heard complaints that too many of those folks were just not trying to learn any Spanish; they could get by hiring someone who had learned English in the U.S. to translate for them.  This is happening in many parts of the country, driving up the price of real estate in many areas, till the locals are priced out. 

            This really fueled my desire to see how the idea would play of imposing a law requiring such immigrants to learn Spanish, and I tried it out on these four kids.  They looked at me like it was a goofy idea.  No, it wasn't a big deal, no they weren't worried about the influence of English.  They were interested in English; they had been required to study in for years in school.  Hearing this I offered to practice a little English with them only to find out that their comprehension is very low.  They could neither understand nor respond to simple questions like what is your favorite subject in school or what is your favorite thing to do.  They readily told me that they had had very little practice actually speaking the language or listening to it.  The only girl in the group wrote down a sentence for me as I was about to depart and asked me to translate it.  It said "I love you with my whole heart."  When I translated it into "Te amo con el corazón entero" they responded as if I had unlocked a magic riddle.

            I was perplexed, for I had heard both complaints about immigrants not learning Spanish and apathy, but mostly I sensed that the whole idea would not easily get off the ground in Mexico.  I also felt a little humbled because I had no idea how many native languages there were in the United States before colonization or how many were still alive today; no one had ever mentioned the idea during my schooling  Maybe Mexico, being an older country than ours, is somehow aware of its own inherent diversity at a deeper level.  They've already had Spanish imposed on them and don't see a need to make it any more dominant than it is.  Perhaps the Spanish were not as intent as the British on destroying the native cultures, as long as they were willing to adopt Catholicism.

            There is something about being in Mexico and so much enjoying the ability to speak at a high level with people for hours on end that activated some deep sensation for which I do not have clear words.  It's a sense of intensity in the mixture of land and people, something almost volcanic, waiting.  It was also on this trip that I learned that Mexico is the only third-world country on the planet that borders a first-world country.

Maybe there is something in me that wants Mexico to stand up to the U.S. for once and thumb its nose at us a little, since we stole half of their country in 1848 and have basically walked all over them several times in their history.  They may do that someday, but I don't think it will be by rattling their language sabers at us.