Speaking Spanish in Phoenix, Arizona


Most people are very surprised to find that I speak a little Spanish. Maybe it's my ojos azules, or maybe they've just become accustomed to the fact that many people in Arizona speak only one language, English.

Of course, I really don't speak Spanish, as anyone who actually speaks Spanish would realize in an instant. I can read and write a little bit of it, and I went to the trouble of learning to pronounce some words and phrases. But it gives me an insight into a world that is usually invisible to people who only speak one language.

When it is polite for me to do so, I sometimes ask people how many languages they speak. So far the most anyone has admitted to me was five, and that was with apologies at not really being all that fluent in the fifth language. That meant four fluent languages. Four.

Of course, you don't have to ask if someone is fluent in two languages, all you have to do is to listen for an accent. If someone is speaking to you in English, and you can tell by their pronunciation that they have a foreign accent, well guess what, they speak a minimum of two languages. Maybe more.

Getting back to practicing my Spanish is something that I find myself saying year after year. And I will, because not only is a beautiful language, it shows respect for the two places that are the most important to me, California and Arizona.

Image above: Caballeros in Gold Alley in 1915, Phoenix, Arizona. From Mexicans in Phoenix, by Frank Barrios.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more