"Corruption of My Mexican Identity," by Dan Acosta, Ph.D.

There is a lot to appreciate from this story by a former member of the University of Texas at Austin faculty, Dr. Dan Acosta, who also previously served as Dean Emeritus of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati. He offers a powerful narrative that resonates deeply with struggles faced by Mexican Americans. In my own research, I describe the systemic erasure of our identities as "subtractive schooling," a deliberate process that undermines our cultural heritage, as well as individual and community power.

Dan Acosta, Ph.D.

In Dr. Acosta’s story, I sense profound pain and frustration rooted in a long history of prejudice and discrimination. The inability to speak Spanish, or not speaking it “correctly,” reflects the success of assimilationist policies designed to strip away cultural ties. The stakes are high for those in power—especially as manifest throughout ongoing battles within the State Board of Education over culturally relevant curriculum and Ethnic Studies programs.

The irony here is striking. Current anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies seek to suppress initiatives that promote these very principles. Albeit with a few exceptions, the tragedy here is that DEI efforts have rarely been abundant in any meaningful way, as Dr. Acosta’s experiences illustrate. On the contrary, his story reveals a history of exclusion to which I can relate as one who has fought for her own place in higher education despite my Stanford Ph.D. and credentials.

Anti-affirmative action and DEI opposition appear to be preemptive strikes in an environment where people of color might otherwise gain access to higher education and subsequently assume their rightful places at the table in culture and society. These policies send a clear message: These opportunities are reserved primarily for white people. So wrong-headed. So sad.

So much talent has been wasted. It is truly a shame. Thanks, Dr. Acosta, for your story. We need more of these so folks out there don't believe the lies about the academy getting overtaken by "woke" students and faculty of color. Rather a more sinister agenda is at play.

—Angela Valenzuela

Corruption of My Mexican Identity

By Dan Acosta | Summer/Autumn 2024 | Rise Up Review, Resistance is Fertile

Now that I am retired one of my weekly tasks is to read what is happening at the Society of Toxicology, the largest professional group for toxicologists of all types--academic, government, and industrial- in the world. As the first elected Hispanic president of the organization, I like to keep up to date with issues facing the society. One current topic is to increase membership and to bring in more diverse scientists into the discipline, especially non-toxicologists who want to learn more about toxicology. Without getting too much into the weeds about the issue, I was struck by a comment made by a past president who strongly objected to the possibility that standards would be lowered to allow more people of diversity (i.e. people of color) become members of SOT. He did not want a "dumbing down of the society with unqualified individuals". He was alluding to affirmative action and "DEI" issues that have become hot political topics in America. It got me thinking about my life and qualifications as one of those people of diversity that SOT wants to have as some of its members.

As a first-generation Mexican American, my mother and grandparents emigrated to El Paso from Mexico; her parents wanted to create a new life for themselves by escaping the discord and troubled times in Mexico during its revolution in the early 1900s. Nana Cuca often told me stories of what it was like to live in Mexico and recounted her vivid memories of some of the revolutionaries like Pancho Villa. My paternal grandfather also came from Mexico; he later married his wife who was born in Presidio, Texas. My father was born in Valentine, Texas. He stopped going to school after the sixth grade so he could work with his father who was a hired hand on a ranch near Marfa. My parents never completed high school.   

When I was very young especially before I started grade school in 1951, my mother was often asked about my heritage. I later learned that they really wanted to know if I was white and not a Mexican. Nana Cuca used to brag that our family tree had strong Portuguese ties and that the lighter skin colors of her ancestors were passed on to her daughters--my mother and her sister, Babe. Although as a young boy I looked like a chubby white kid with fat cheeks, my Mexican heritage became more apparent as I grew older. My light brown hair started to become darker and by the time I began high school my hair had turned black, and my facial features were more Mexican-like.

I refused to speak Spanish at home and at school; my parents and family spoke to me in Spanish and did not force me to respond in Spanish. Many of my teachers wanted to help me because of my eagerness to learn and my desire to become the best student in their classes. I wanted to acquire at all costs those American traits or characteristics of my white classmates who were most successful in the classroom. Because of my skin tone and hair color when I started grade school, I did not experience the discrimination and hatred that my brown-colored friends and classmates often encountered. This Americanization process corrupted my Mexican identity at a very young age, and it has taken me a lifetime to confront my mistake. As I progressed through college, the army, graduate school, and my academic career, I was no longer that smart little Mexican boy. I now faced subtle discriminations and at times overt racist remarks from highly educated individuals.

I eventually graduated as one of the top students in my high school class, and later on I graduated top of my pharmacy class at the University of Texas in 1968. I received one of the few highly competitive national fellowships awarded to graduate students to attend a school of their own choosing. I earned a doctorate in toxicology at the University of Kansas and accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Texas in 1974.

However, I was rudely introduced to the role of DEI and affirmative action in hiring more people of color at Texas. Pointedly, I was told several times by my supervisors that the only reason I was hired was because the college needed to hire more Hispanics and Blacks. During my 22 years at Texas, I helped develop one of the first graduate programs in toxicology in the state and mentored over 50 undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral fellows in my research program. I later became dean of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, where I established one of the first councils on diversity at the university. In the final phase of my career, I accepted a position as Deputy Director for Research at FDA's major research center--The National Center for Toxicological Research. Although I had what many called "a successful career", I paid the price of never becoming fluent in Spanish and having to live with the shame and embarrassment of not being able to converse in Spanish with my family and many of my former classmates and friends.

I also experienced many times during my career what are now known as "microaggressions" or thinly veiled putdowns of my accomplishments and successes. For example, when I was elected president of the Society of Toxicology, some of my colleagues suggested that I won the election because I was a person of diversity. I grew up in Texas where this attitude was quite common; it did not really bother me. I just laughed it off.  

In the past, it was all right to ask where you were born or what was your family ancestry. It was out of curiosity because many Americans have relatives who were not born in the US. People were interested in knowing more about you, especially if you recently moved into the neighborhood, were a new employee, or a new customer in a local store. But in today's America asking that question is fraught with anxiety and possibly danger for a person of color who is asked that question. As a Mexican American who has lived in one of those states that border Mexico, I have observed the tension when one is accused of being an undocumented immigrant and not an American citizen. And as America has become more polarized, there are many reports of violence against people of color because it is thought that they are not truly American or to be more blunt-not white enough.   

Today, affirmative action and DEI policies that were supposedly lauded and supported by institutions of higher education, corporate America, and local, state, and federal agencies and departments have come under attack by many white Americans who believe that they are the ones who have suffered from discrimination. State legislators, especially in red states like Texas, Florida, and several others, have passed laws to abolish or limit the use of offices that help students and employees of diversity navigate organizational obstacles. White students and employees are not denied assistance as some of them like to suggest. 

Where are those colleges that thought that it was right to limit the admission of students of color to keep their classes filled with mostly white students? Where are those corporations and institutions that thought it was right to employ mostly white men and restrict the hiring of women and people of color in the workplace? The answer is that they never left and are ready to go back to the pre-affirmative action era. 

When I left the UT College of Pharmacy in 1996, there were two Mexican American Ph.D. professors on the faculty. When I returned to Austin for my retirement years, there was only one full-time professor; no progress has been made in the 50 years since I joined the faculty as one of those two Mexican American professors in 1974. There has been some improvement for people of color and women in the classroom and workplace, but the Supreme Court has now declared that it has seen enough of this intrusion into the lives of white men. American universities must turn a blind eye to matters of race and gender in student admissions. It will happen very soon in the workplace, but that does not mean that we should stop trying to admit more students of color and to hire more faculty of diversity. My biggest regret was that I did not speak up sooner about what I faced as a student and professor during my career in Texas and elsewhere. 

It took me a lifetime to realize that my generation has failed in maintaining America's faith in our inalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I write this story to reach out to the young people of the country with the hope that they will restore and secure those rights for all. If they don't, who will?

***

Dan Acosta is a first-generation Mexican American, whose mother and grandparents emigrated from Mexico. He is a former professor, research scientist, and administrator, who retired in 2019 at age 74. He writes about his experiences as a Mexican boy trying to succeed in white America. His stories have appeared in The Acentos Review, Sky Island Journal, Somos en Escrito, The Rush, Toasted Cheese, Latin@Literatures, Midway Journal, and The Manifest Station.

Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot: Understanding Far-Right Republican Mayra Flores' recent Congressional Victory

This thoughtful piece by Xochitl Gonzalez writing in this week's Atlantic, helps illustrate how race and ethnicity are social constructions. That is, these are historically produced in the context of, and in response to, social, political, economic, and cultural forces, resulting in a high level of complexity in relation to identity that Gonzalez identifies as problematic in the context of South Texas' conservative, far-right Republican Mayra Flores' recent election to Congress. 

Gonzalez raises the question of whether a "Latinx" or "Latino" electorate actually exists—even to the point of suggesting that there may be no "Latino vote," much less a "Latinx vote" in light of not only our diversity as a Latino community writ large, but also by a potentially false centering of it in places like South Texas where the electoral dynamics don't align.

My short answer to this question of whether a "Latino electorate" exists is that it does and it doesn't. 

It does to the extent that being "Latino," "Hispanic," "Latina," or "Latinx" correlates to such things as consumer and political behavior, as well as to language and cultural practices. A shared experience of subordination also promotes a sense of "we-ness."

It doesn't in the sense that ethnicity is also "situational," meaning that how one describes oneself varies by context. In spaces like a college campus or highly diverse urban contexts, it's easy to adopt pan-ethnic labels like "Latino," "Hispanic," "Latina," or "Latinx." It's further encouraged when one is in an ethnically mixed group of "Latinas" or "Latinos," consisting of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, Salvadoreans, and so on. However fraught (e.g., "Latinx"), pan-ethnic labels are inclusive terms that can easily straddle political party identification and views.

To be sure, pan-ethnic labels and identities can be different from how one regularly identifies or how one experiences or "feels" one's identity, including in instances like South Texas where race and ethnicity may be less salient than say, class, gender, sexual orientation, or generational status (immigrant or non-immigrant)—that can themselves also function intersectionally, or in tandem, while shifting in salience—at different times depending on context.

Many are quick to decry overarching labels and even question their validity, but for those situationally choosing such labels, this can facilitate navigating across diverse contexts and promote inter-ethnic solidarity. Without a doubt, these constructions are so powerful that they do have implications for how our multiple identities get formed and evolve over time.

But what about contexts like South Texas that are more homogeneous—in this case, "Mexican" or "Mexican American?" Clearly, ethnicity is experienced differently. The "other," isn't a white person, but rather an immigrant, foreigner, or outsider who may be viewed either in a competitive manner or with disdain, as Congresswoman Flores' winning rhetoric displays (e.g., read this New York Times piece titled, "The G.O.P.’s ‘Wildest Dream.")

Moreover, when everybody around you in South Texas is "Mexican," including all the candidates running for office, Gonzalez is correct to conclude that given the uniqueness of this context, a "blanket Latinx Outreach Strategy isn’t going to win over the Hispanic voter." Instead, an approach that is more situated in the lived experiences of the community holds much greater promise.

I don't think most South Texans are anti-immigrant, but many can be manipulated to be so with schools that don't teach that we didn't cross the border, but that the border crossed us instead. It's perhaps more probable that it's mostly not taught. Errors of omission in curriculum and pedagogy leave wide, gaping holes in knowledge and interpretation. And this is exactly what we're seeing—a filling in of that conceptual gap with a pernicious and harmful ideology.

For those with ill will, it's so convenient. The anti-immigrant, white supremacist trope of the "invading immigrant" who is "taking our jobs" maps onto fears about the economy, giving folks in South Texas and beyond a false sense of entitlement that translates into the scapegoating of so-called "immigrants" whose ancestors inhabited this continent before there ever was a border or a place called "Texas" or the "United States." 

This leaves the question of how to address Congresswoman Myra Flores' conservative views toward immigrants and immigration—especially considering that she herself is a Mexican immigrant? Clearly, she was either not educated or miseducated about the history of the border and her own people in San Benito High School that she attended upon migrating across the border to the U.S. What happened—or what didn't happen—when she thereafter went to South Texas College? Probably the exact same thing since our higher education institutions are also assimilationist and Eurocentric. 

It's amazing that any of us hold on to our languages and cultural integrity. And yet many of us do. In defense of our own humanity, we resist in the service of social justice.

This is not at all an insult but rather a statement of the status quo of our assimilationist education system that does not want us as Mexicans or Latinos to hold onto our identities. However, if we do manage to do so, the "next best thing" is for us to think negatively about them, where we unknowingly internalize and accept as truth the dominant views held toward minority (or minoritized) people, ourselves included.

All told, it's positive to have an expansive, open view of race and ethnicity precisely because this fosters an awareness of, and appreciation for, difference that welcomes curiosity, acceptance, and peaceful relationships. How can we be open to others if we are not first open to our own identities and selves?

Yes, Democrats absolutely do have a "Latinx Blind Spot." The first step in fixing this is to acknowledge how they, too, have been complicit in the creation of a system—especially an educational system—that engineered this from the get-go. This is exactly why we struggle for Ethnic Studies, including Mexican American Studies, alongside culturally relevant and sustaining curriculum and pedagogy in our schools. 

We have a human right to our ethnicity. All people do. 

Without such grounding, vacuums in identity exist that can and do get exploited—in this case, by the Republican party that's winning big on an ongoing political project of invisiblizing and eviscerating Latino culture and identity. Not that this project is ever fully realized, but rather that we are always positioned in vexed relation to the dominant culture that's pushing this. In short, this is actually not a "minority people's problem," but rather, a "white people's problem."

This project has definitely been a force in our history as Latina/o/x peoples, making many in our community vulnerable to rhetoric and ideologies that betray their origins and resonate with their fears—when there really is nothing to fear at all except fear itself, as John F. Kennedy once said.

Let's support the teaching of Ethnic Studies in our schools. Let's also continue challenging the attack on Critical Race Theory and our teaching of the truths of history. Let's widen the circle of citizenship so that all can benefit from the wealth and riches of our communities and country. 

Let's also vote this extremist Republican leadership out of power—and get reconciled to one another and the planet so that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren not only heal from the historic trauma of assimilation, but most importantly, love themselves. This will help them to also love the socially constructed "other," nurturing ways of knowing and being in the world where no one is scapegoated, "othered," or treated as "less than." 

Love is the answer. It always has been and will always be. It begins with us loving ourselves so that instead of hostility and division, we can engineer peace and prosperity.

Sí se puede! Yes we can! 

-Angela Valenzuela

#EthnicStudiesNow

Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot

The victory of the ultraconservative congresswoman Mayra Flores in South Texas shows what Democratic campaigns are doing wrong.

By Xochitl Gonzalez | July 12, 2022 | The Atlantic

Congresswoman Mayra Flores of Texas, with her family, after being sworn into Congress. (Brandon Bell / Getty)

Several years ago, shortly before the 2016 elections, I was having a drink with an acquaintance of mine, another Latino Brown alumni, who we’ll call Mando Gonzalez. Other than our last names and our Brown degrees, Mando and I don’t have much in common, but we hit it off at an alumni function and went on to get the occasional drink or coffee when we find ourselves in the same city. When the conversation turned to the election and how much Hillary Clinton needed the Latino vote, Mando said something that I found nearly blasphemous at the time, but that I’ve pondered since. I paraphrase, but he said: “There is no Latino vote; Latino identity is an invention of academia.”

His point, as he further explained, was that Latino-ness is something your kids “catch” when they go to college, like feminism. And not just any kind of college, but a predominantly white institution. Had Mando, the son of Mexican immigrants who was reared in a Spanish-speaking Los Angeles household, gone to, say, UCLA—a school with a 21 percent Hispanic population (about 6,600 students), and whose Chicano-studies program is nearly 20 years old—he would have likely emerged with a different worldview. Surrounded by so many other Hispanics of similar backgrounds, he argued, he likely would have just considered himself Mexican American. Mando felt that having the rarified experience of being part of a pan-ethnic Hispanic minority at a predominantly white institution is what gave the term Latino emotional and intellectual resonance. (To help paint a picture, Brown—by no means an outlier among the Ivies—boasts a 10 percent Latino enrollment rate, which is about 1,000 students. This number includes students from every Latino ethnic and geographic background that the U.S. has to offer.)

I found myself thinking of Mando this weekend while reading the recent New York Times coverage of Mayra Flores, the newly elected, ultraconservative congresswoman in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. I was wringing my hands the whole time, yet I was also utterly unsurprised. I wasn’t surprised that Flores and other conservative Latinas’ success in running for office has largely been fueled by the power of Latina political organizing—something the Hillary Clinton campaign tried to tap into as well. I also wasn’t surprised that Flores’s simple slogan, “God, Family, Country,” was persuasive; it clearly reflects the values of a certain slice of her predominantly Mexican American, pro-law-enforcement region of South Texas.

But here’s what had me wringing my hands: I could very easily see that slogan having appeal in pockets of Florida, Arizona, Central California, and even parts of New York. As we watch this Hispanic drift toward the GOP, I wonder: What, exactly, are Democrats offering “Latinx” voters? (Indeed, that very language is somewhat polarizing, as just 3 percent of the Hispanic population uses the term, but that’s a newsletter for another day.) What, beyond the blanket and possibly patronizing presumption that Latino voters all see themselves as people of color and therefore are voting against their own interests by voting Republican, is being offered up? Or, to return to Mando’s take, how do you make a compelling case for voting around Latinx identity politics when only a micro-segment of the population feels an emotional tether to that identity? In a community like Flores’s, which is overwhelmingly not just Hispanic, but Mexican American, what aspect of a pan-ethnic identity do voters there connect with? Do they connect with such an identity at all?

Personally, getting to college and finding a Latino community was a salve for me. I am of mixed Puerto Rican and Mexican American heritage; I spent my school years in Brooklyn and the summers in Northern California with my paternal grandmother. No single identity felt fully correct, and at that time it didn’t matter, because in the streets of Brooklyn, you were just “Spanish.” When I got to college, the term Latino, which spoke to my own pan-ethnic identity, felt like a comfortable identity to embrace. (I preferred it to Hispanic, which, in my opinion, put the colonizer in the center of our experience.) Away from my family and home and with such a small group of us on this largely white campus, the Latino community became my family. I learned how to cumbia from my Colombian friends, perfected my bachata with my Dominican ones, and developed a familiarity and affection for the cultures of many other ethnicities and experiences that comprise what we think of as Latinx in the United States. (While I tend to use the terms interchangeably, I personally prefer Latin, Latine, or Latinx, in a sign of respect for my gender-nonbinary brothers and sisters out there, although I also understand the resistance.)

My experience is rare. Going away to college is what gave me access to Latine diversity, yet only about 16 percent of Latinos have college degrees. (Again, a gap that merits its own post.) Within that group, students are overwhelmingly attending local community colleges, state schools, and regional private, often religious, institutions, with majority minority or Latinx populations. Couple that with the sheer fact that nearly 72 percent of Americans live near where they were born and raised; that number includes Hispanic Americans, who traditionally have gravitated to certain regions and areas based on ethnicity. What we can extrapolate is that most Hispanic Americans are living a highly specific, regional experience of their identity. Even among college-educated Hispanics, the pan-ethnic experience that made Latino identity into more than just a demographic term for me is not a universal one.

Maybe Mando was right. Yes, part of the Democrats’ problem with the Latino vote is their laziness in failing to look at the regional cultures and concerns of the Hispanic electorate and tailoring their messages to that (or their refusal to even use the terminology most Hispanics prefer). But I believe it’s also, as David Shor has pointed out, a blind spot that Democratic campaigns have developed, in which they over-index the worldview and experiences of the college graduate. As Shor’s theory was paraphrased in Politico:

Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.

In my experience volunteering in politics, this holds true for the young Latinx movers and shakers seeking to make a mark in politics as well. A quick search of “emerging leaders” celebrated by the Biden administration last Hispanic Heritage Month reveals a talented bunch of young staffers, all of whom, as expected, have four-year degrees, many from elite, predominantly white institutions, where I would imagine they, like me, found some comfort in their pan-ethnic Latino communities. But their reality is not reflective of the reality of Mayra Flores’s constituents, many of whose families have lived in the Rio Grande Valley since before it was Texas, and the majority of whom are Mexican American.

When every candidate on the ballot is Mexican American, what matters to voters is not an allegiance based on identity, but which candidates’ values (God, family, country) are aligned with their own. I don’t know what the midterms will hold, and I can’t even wrap my head around the 2024 presidential race, but what I can tell you is that any candidate who comes out with a blanket Latinx Outreach Strategy isn’t going to win over the Hispanic voter.

 

Embracing America also means embracing our multilingual diversity

Great summative quote in this on point article in The Hill written by University of Texas at Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film Professor Madhavi Mallapragada: 

A monolingual (English-only) multiculturalism is limited, not to mention paradoxical. One big step towards an inclusive vision of multiculturalism in the U.S. would be to fully embrace its multilingual diversity. To move beyond rhetoric and towards respect and recognition.

I like that she calls out Tom Brokaw who disrespects all Spanish-speaking Americans (hear his comments here) and Barbara Ehrenreich for disrespecting one of my Netflix sheros, Marie Kondo. Here's another place where Ethnic Studies could have prepared Tom Brokaw and Ehrenreich, providing them with a deeper understanding not only of diversity, but also how racial, cultural, and linguistic purity are myths—and as a consequence, harmful.

Read on.

-Angela Valenzuela

EmbracingAmerica also means embracing our multilingual diversity

BY MADHAVI MALLAPRAGADA, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 03/19/19 09:30 AM

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Another day, another “speak English” demand. This time it was in El Paso, Texas, a border city that finds itself at the center of the current debates over national security and the border wall. In the viral video made of the episode, we see a man admonish a woman for speaking Spanish and demand that she “speak English.” 

Unlike other viral “speak English” videos, where bystanders both record and speak up in support of the person speaking Spanish, in the El Paso instance, it is the woman herself who records the encounter and her refusal of the man’s demands to “speak English.” According to news reports, the woman is bilingual and the man is white.

What really underlies the demand to “speak English” however seems to have very little to do with whether bilingual immigrants of color can actually speak English. In fact in the El Paso video, the woman who is being berated for speaking Spanish eventually switches to English to address her harasser. Rather, the demand is really about the fact that a non-English language is being spoken in our public spaces.

Does the fact that our public spaces — streets, restaurants, universities and communities — bear testimony to a non-white, bilingual, immigrant culture trigger a racialized anxiety for many white Americans? The evidence suggests so.

More pointedly, the demand to “speak English” also demonstrates the limits of contemporary multiculturalism in the United States. While cultural diversity is often heralded as an American virtue, the reality often reveals, such as in these viral “speak English” videos, the discomfort with and even violence towards multilingualism in the nation. That reality begs the question: What does American diversity mean if linguistic diversity, the very facet of living in a multicultural society, can be so vociferously opposed?

In its short time so far, 2019 has unfortunately given us plenty of examples of the demand to “speak English,” occasionally coming from unlikely sources.

In early February, the noted liberal writer Barbara Ehrenreich stated in a now-deleted tweet,“I will be convinced that America is not in decline only when our decluttering guru Marie Kondo learns to speak English.” Enhrenreich  issued an apology of sorts after public outrage erupted over her comment but still maintained her discomfort that Kondo spoke in Japanese (with English subtitles) on her hit Netflix show, "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo."

 A couple of weeks before that, Tom Brokaw said in a televised interview that Hispanics should do a better job of ensuring that their kids all learn to “speak English.” Doing so, Brokaw suggested, would help the immigrant group assimilate better into the United States. Brokaw has since apologized.

Brokaw’s apology came hot on the heels of another “speak English” viral story. This time it was leaked emails from a Duke University professor to Chinese international students in the professor’s department who she told in her email to “speak English” “100% of the time” they were on campus. The professor has also since apologized.

At an obvious level, the demand to “speak English,” is linked to the expectation that all immigrants assimilate. In the historical representation of America as a melting pot, assimilation is often addressed in the context of cultural assimilation and refers to the process in which immigrants leave their unique and distinct cultures behind and gradually adopt the values and cultural frames of the dominant society as their own.

 In this frame, America is the “host” nation that is welcoming of new immigrants who, in turn, readily demonstrate their new identity as grateful immigrants by adapting to their new environment. In this context, speaking English is one key way in which immigrants might show they want to assimilate — and that they have.

Learning to speak English in an English-dominant country such as America is not in itself a bad idea. It is in fact a good idea and necessary to navigate life in school, at work, in the community. At the same time, in contemporary popular conversations, we see references to America as a salad bowl rather than a melting pot. The idea here being that instead of melting all our cultural differences, we celebrate our differences and our diversity.

Yet, despite the move to embrace diversity, we have to contend with the fact that in 2019, a woman in El Paso speaking Spanish in Cracker Barrel, Marie Kondo speaking Japanese on a Netflix show, Hispanics speaking Spanish in everyday spaces, international students speaking Chinese on a university campus, prompt demands to “speak English.”

The public engagement with a language that is not English is a reminder that the historically privileged location of English-centric white European culture in America is changing. For some, this shift is unsettling and triggers a number of responses. Some, as documented in the viral videos, are overtly anti-immigrant and xenophobic.

Others, such as seen in Ehrenreich’s tweet, are covert arguments about the primacy of a white, English language culture to the American nation. And others, like Brokaw’s remark, reveal how stereotypes about immigrants are reproduced in the guise of political commentary — that they don’t work hard enough, they don’t speak or want to speak English and that they are in fact unassimilable. That these demands to “speak English” are coming not just from conservative factions in the country but also from “liberal” quarters is a telling sign of the times we live in.

In an increasingly diverse America, culturally, racially and linguistically “different” immigrants are refashioning the American nation in new ways. That includes forging a diversity that is not just multicultural but also multilingual.

A monolingual (English-only) multiculturalism is limited, not to mention paradoxical. One big step towards an inclusive vision of multiculturalism in the U.S. would be to fully embrace its multilingual diversity. To move beyond rhetoric and towards respect and recognition.

Madhavi Mallapragada Ph.D., is associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Public Voices fellow at the Op-Ed Project.