America is a bilingual nation

The airing last week on Hispanic radios of Nuestro Himno, a Spanish-language adaptation of the American national anthem, has been greeted with an unprecedented wave of denunciations all over the United States. Talkshow hosts and academics have indignantly called this loving rendition by a group of Latino artists a desecration of a national symbol. Senators - both the conservative Lamar Alexander and the liberal Edward Kennedy - have expressed that The Star Spangled Banner needs to be sung exclusively in English. And President Bush has warned the citizenry that "one of the important things here is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul".

The national soul? In danger of being lost? Because Wyclef Jean and hip-hop star Pitbull are crooning a la luz de la aurora rather than by the dawn's early light? Would such an outcry have erupted over translations into Navajo or Basque, Farsi or Inuit? Would anybody have cared if some nostalgic band had decided to record the 1860s Yiddish or Latin version of the song?

Of course not.

The streets of America are not filled with marching Eskimos or Basque patriots and certainly not with scholars ardently shouting against discrimination in Virgil's lost language. What resonated recently in Los Angeles and Atlanta, Chicago and New York, was the voices of hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding that 12 million undocumented workers living illegally in the United States be granted amnesty. And the language in which they were chanting was the same sacrilegious Spanish of Nuestro Himno.

That's why the latino version of the national anthem caused such alarm: it was a reminder that those mojados had smuggled into El Norte, along with their swarthy and labouring bodies, the extremely vivacious language of Cervantes and Octavio Paz. They weren't coming to the US merely to work, bake bread, lay bricks, change diapers, wash dishes, pick strawberries, work, work, work; Dios mío, they might decide to speak!

What differentiates these recent arrivals to American shores from earlier "huddled masses" is that they're not prepared to abandon their mother tongue. This Spanish is not going to fade away as Norwegian or Italian or German did during previous assimilated waves. Not only whispered by the largest minority in the United States, it is also being spoken, written and dreamed, at this very moment, by hundreds of millions of men and women in the immense neighbouring latino South. Spanish is a language that has come to stay.

Nuestro Himno, therefore, by infiltrating one of the safest symbols of US national identity with Spanish syllables, crossed a line, inadvertently announcing something that many Americans have dreaded for years: the fact that their country is on its way to becoming a bilingual nation.

If this prophecy of mine is right, and America will sometime in the near or distant future be articulating its identity in two inevitable languages, then the question looms: how will the citizens of the United States react to this monumental challenge?

One possibility, of course, is a nativist backlash, with more vigilante Minutemen voraciously pledging allegiance to the flag under the Arizona sun, more calls for deporting all illegal workers, more demands that an impenetrable wall be built against the foreign hordes, more attempts to dismantle bilingual education in US schools.

But others may tell themselves that the United States has been built on diversity and tolerance and that at a time when the national soul is indeed being tested, at a time when the democratic ideals at the heart of American identity are truly in danger of being sacrificed on the altar of false security, the better angels of that America should welcome the wonders of Spanish, the first European language ever spoken on America's shores, to that struggle and that debate.

To those who are afraid and claim it can't be done and believe the United States can only endure as monolingual for ever, there's a simple answer. The words have been heard on the multiple streets of America in recent days, sung and imagined by destitute men and women who crossed deserts and risked everything to live the American Dream. In words that the Founders of the Republic and the pioneers who crossed the continent would have embraced and have now become part of the national vocabulary: Sí se puede - yes, it can be done.

[Guardian´s G2]