How Sociopolitics Affects Your Language
A historical look at the circumstances which led Miami to paradoxically be the birthplace of two-way immersion bilingual schools and of the English-Only movement.
The other day, my mom and I were talking to a Colombian couple. They were telling my mom that they couldn’t believe she grew up in the U.S. because her Spanish is perfect down to her Colombian accent. Then, they turned to me and asked about my Spanish. After we talked for a bit, the wife said my Spanish was good but then started mocking my pronunciation saying I don’t sound Colombian at all.
Ah, just another day listening to people’s false assumptions about bilingualism, I thought to myself.
They continued to talk and my mom was saying that she grew up speaking only Spanish with her parents and that that’s why her Spanish was so good. The couple nodded in accordance.
It was a type of story I’d heard many times—a story about my mom’s Spanish being so good because she grew up in a monolingual Spanish household.
While that is partly—or even largely—true, I always suspected there was more to the story. My mom is close to being a mythical balanced bilingual. But I have countless cousins and friends who also grew up speaking Spanish at home, and their Spanish is not at the same level as their English1. (And people judge them saying things like, “What a shame! They must be bad at languages.”)
Something didn't make sense. But it wasn’t until recently when I was doing research on two-way immersion (TWI) bilingual schools that I came across the missing piece of the puzzle. The first ever U.S. TWI school—Coral Way Elementary—was created in Miami in the 1960s.
Interesting. The same time period my mom was in school. And she lived in a neighborhood near Coral Way. “Wait, mom, what’s the name of the school you went to again?”
You guessed it. Coral Way Elementary. My mom went through seven years of fully bilingual education, having all of her classes in Spanish and English. She was part of a historical experiment of creating the first TWI school in the U.S…and neither she nor my family ever mentioned this. It never came up when talking about my mom’s Spanish. (From their perspective, they just enrolled my mom in the neighborhood school, and it happened to be Coral Way Elementary. It happened to be a bilingual school.)
Today’s story is about what we often don’t take into account when it comes to our language—the sociopolitics of our community, country, and world. And how it can have a major effect on the languages we speak (or don’t speak).
I’m focusing on two generations of my family in Miami, but I invite you to think about how the sociopolitics around you affects your language.
The 1950s
My grandparents moved to Miami from Colombia in the 1950s. They lived in a small apartment downtown and would visit the neighborhood where they’d eventually start a family every Sunday for mass. They fell in love with the area around the church and when a house went on the market, they put in an offer. As the story goes, the neighbors didn’t want my grandparents to move in because—long story short—they weren’t White. Today that neighborhood is almost completely Hispanic, but at the time, it wasn’t. And it was only when one of the neighbors vouched for my grandfather—because he spoke English—that their offer was accepted.
In those days, it must have been lonely to be Hispanic in Miami. And if nothing had happened in Cuba in 1959, then my family might have been socially pressured to learn English as soon as possible and try to assimilate to the local culture. But something did happen in Cuba only a few short years after my grandparents started their lives in Miami—in 1959 Fulgencio Batista’s government was overthrown by Fidel Castro. And Miami was changed forever.
1959
Miami was not changed immediately, though. When Castro first took over, the net migration to Miami was actually negative: the few Cubans who did live in Miami were moving back to the island because Batista’s dictatorship was characterized by violence and corruption, and Castro promised to be different. That promise was soon reneged as his communist intentions came to light.
When he started to outlaw religion and reform the education system, the first wave of Cubans made their way to Miami. They became known as The Golden Exiles; they were the wealthy elite who boarded international flights when they thought their money was in jeopardy.
Castro’s regime would be temporary, they thought. And they’d soon return home to Cuba, they thought.
Over the next three years, another group boarded planes to Miami: children. The U.S. backed a secret operation to help 14,000 children leave Cuba and come to the U.S. As their parents were scared of what was being taught in the schools, they sent their children over, thinking that they’d see them soon, when Castro’s regime would be over.
Those children were part of an operation known as Pedro Pan.
Pedro Pan
Pedro Pan was a secret operation. Pilots would smuggle in visas and passports for the children in their uniforms. Children would leave in the middle of the night. The next day at school their seats would be empty. As time went on, more and more seats were empty.
When these unaccompanied children arrived in Miami, they were taken care of by the Church which organized the operation. About half of the children were able to go stay with relatives or friends who were already in the U.S. The other half were assigned foster homes—some in Miami, some on the other side of the country.
The children would write home to their families, and most were reunited when their own family came to the U.S. on the Freedom Flights about a year later. Others weren’t as lucky and had to wait years to be reunited with their family.
1962: Coral Way Elementary
By 1962, there were thousands of Cuban refugees in Miami and thousands of Spanish-speaking students. Those students entered the only classrooms which existed in the U.S: English-only classes. But those classes weren’t working for anyone: the English-speaking students were falling behind, and the Cuban students were not being supported in Spanish. Both sets of parents were getting upset. The Cuban parents were upset because they expected their children to return home to Cuba when Castro’s regime would be overthrown, and so they needed their children to be educated in Spanish as well as English.
The solution for everyone came in the form of an experiment: taking an elementary school and making the student population 50% English speaking and 50% Spanish speaking. And then having the students learn each other’s language by having material in both languages. This solution was approved by an exclusively Non-Hispanic, White school board who viewed a bilingual school as the best solution.
The layout was designed by a bilingual linguist, Dr. Pauline Rojas. And the school-type was made possible because there were Spanish-speaking teachers who were highly trained in Cuba who now needed to work in Miami. After becoming re-certified, these teachers spent hours making materials and lesson plans in order to make a Spanish curriculum possible.
Another group of highly-qualified teachers wasn’t able to get re-certified in the initial program. Because they couldn’t teach, they became the bilingual aides of the school. These aides translated for parents, worked at the front desk, and looked after the kids at recess so that the teachers would have time to create the curriculum. During this time, those aides were called the “angels” of the school by administrators because they worked all day—for $18 a day—to make the program possible. Some even taught community Spanish classes to the English-speaking parents after class. And after the second round of funding came, the aides would go together at night to the university to become re-certified to teach. Those university classes were held from 6PM to 11PM each night.
Because of the teachers and aides’ hard work and sacrifices, the school was a success: the children performed similarly—and often better—than their monolingual counterparts. They also reported having had positive experiences in the school, which allowed them to grow up maintaining a Cuban identity.
1979
By 1976, Miami-Dade County was declared bilingual and government papers were being written in both English and Spanish. But these times of coming together and forming a bilingual community were unfortunately short lived.
The first group of Cubans were upper-to-middle class and phenotypically White. This changed in 1979 when Castro opened the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave the island. This next wave of Cuban immigrants was less wealthy and educated than the first. And during this time, Castro emptied his jails and mental institutions by sending those people to Miami on boats.
Tensions were growing in Miami. Local non-Hispanics with “little tolerance of Cubans2” began moving north. And by the 1980s, it became more and more apparent that Castro’s regime would continue for much longer than anticipated.
The rise of fear and xenophobia during this time created the situation in which the city which started the country’s first TWI program 17 years prior became the birthplace of the English-only movement. Politicians made it so that government papers and advertisements went back to only being in English.
And the school systems were also affected. While Coral Way Elementary continued to be a bilingual school (and continues to be to this day), less funding was allocated to creating more bilingual schools. These policies contributed to the fact that when I entered school a generation later I entered a monolingual English school.
My Family
When it comes to raising children bilingually, the pressure is often placed on the parents. But parents are individuals in a society and what’s going on in that society affects how well the children acquire their home languages.
In 1960, around when my grandparents first moved to Miami, Hispanics made up only 5 percent of Miami’s population. One generation later, Hispanics now make up 72 percent of the population.
What was going on during this time of significant demographic changes affected not only the languages spoken but the languages taught in schools.
While it’s so important to encourage parents to speak their languages to their children, I hope this newsletter has also shown that language is political, and we need to advocate for bilingual policies and education structures in order for home languages to be maintained—and to hopefully even thrive.
Works Cited
If you’d like to learn more about Coral Way Elementary, the book The Coral Way Bilingual Program by Maria Coady is really informative.
If you’d like to learn more about Miami’s history, I really love the book Miami: Mistress of the Americas by Jan Nijman.
I’m not saying that we should all try to be balanced bilinguals. I’m more curious about why we’re expected to be balanced and why my mom was able to acquire Spanish “more fully” than my cousins.
(Nijman, p. 51).
After posting this I realized that the Cuban diaspora affected me in a huge way which I forgot to mention: I grew up surrounded by Spanish in my community (and I probably wouldn't have otherwise). A huge reason why I can communicate with my friends and family in Spanish is because of the bilingual community around me. Thought I'd add that here :)