Cass 1 Houston Cass Multicultural Language November 26, 2012 Star Spangled Spanglish America is widely known for

its multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual society. While English remains the most widely used language in the United States, many Americans: immigrants, natives, children of immigrants and grandchildren of immigrants, find a safe haven when engaging in the discourse of their own ethnic expressions, different dialects, and jingoistic jargons. Consequentially emphasizing the importance many of Latin descent place on the value of family, culture, and heritage. Language, in many ways, hypothesizes the boundaries for the person we are, we were, and we will become simply because without language we become culturally inept, socially incapable, and psychologically inadequate; language has a strong correlation with not only culture, but also personal perception, social status, and intelligence. Right away, signaled from the words orchestrated by the trio of tongue, vocal cords, and shear stream of consciousness, categorizing people based on ethnicity, social class, regional residence, gender, and sometimes even sexual orientation, becomes scripturally systematic, sadistically stereotypic, shamefully and socially simple. Ilan Stavans's chapter detailing his first hand encounter with Spanglish, explores the critique of not only Spanglish, but observes various other forms of multicultural, multifunctional, and multinational language. Stavans, with the scholarly professorial insight of his own eyes, Mexican American eyes, and with

Cass 2 threatening tenacity, and the cavillous curiosity of a cat, examines the importance, commands the attention, and dauntlessly defines the popular fusion and synergy of English and Spanish. Stavans always assumed the best course of action to choreograph the minds of his pupils was to either speak in fluent, flawless, flavorless, standardized Spanish, or the alternative monolithic, monotonic, monarchic, mandated English. Stavans was unaware the younger Latino generations were challenging cultural norms, subsequentially distorting the way they view their heritage, their language, and their culture. Looking in the Americanized mirror, at the Americanized reflection, of an Americanized Latin, Hispanic, Chilean, Venezuelan, or Cuban American, images of language and culture overlap. Latin skin, Latin eyes, Latin hair, juxtaposed with American clothes, American hopes, American dreams. Spanglish would be their margarita Americana, a mixture of language for their mixture of culture. The history of the Spanish language is grotesque, greedy, and galvanizing. The colonization of North America, South America, and a majority of the other continents spread as rapidly as the bubonic plague, with just as many casualties. The Spanish crusades attempted to force many natives, fluent in their own tongue, and set in their own religious and cultural ways, into Catholicism. Subsequently causing the natives to reject their own various spiritual practices, and tying their tongue with a new dominating language. Spanish, despite the debilitating attempts from the mother county of Spain to standardize their national language, was evolving, growing, and regenerating into its own regional forms, with different phrases, words, and tenses that would confuse and abuse the minds of affluent Spaniards

Cass 3 from the mother country. Likewise, the standard English used in America today, greatly antonyms that of Great Britain; similarly, Great Britains English during the Shakespearian error, would be nearly impossible for a British student to decode in 2012. Language of any nationality is an ever-evolving means of communication between people, which morphs, blends, and mediates to fit functionality and ease of use. Stavans's conversation with his pupil Lisa highlights the importance, variety, functionality, and identity multicultural language brings to society. Lisa, an intelligent student, who was awarded a scholarship to attend the small liberal arts college, inevitably resented the affirmative action of her Caucasian oppressors. She began to talk to Stavans in her comfortable, functional Spanglish language; Stavans, deciding to break every academic code assumed by professors, became a generative actor, and began to retaliate in his first attempts at the Spanglish language. He surprisingly understood why so many Spanish-speaking people resulted to using the mixture of languages. The new dialogue brought rhythm to the mixture of both Spanish and English, bridging barriers of language gaps, and bringing functionality and ease of use full circle. Diversity is the shield of normalcy; America is a cultural cocktail. Generative actors use multicultural languages, regional dialects, and slang as their battle cannon to conflagrate societal prophesies, and create a cultural circus of independence, identity, and agency. With all of our different languages, dialects, and slang combined, we are able to understand the unifying culture of America; one group influences another, that group influences another group, recursively creating

Cass 4 a roulette of possibilities, that endows Americans with the ability to choose who and what they want to become. Spanglish is the brush that paints the battered and burned, yet stunningly hopeful portrait of many Latin Americans who are stained with Spanish colonial lineage, while also enlightening an exhilarating path that concedes within many a desire to overcome the oppression they endure. This new verisimilar language expressed cultural identity, manifested membership, and awakened societal change.