Speak English

Does it bug you that every time you want to get $20, you have to tell the ATM machine you don’t speak Spanish? Or every time you call your bank or credit card for a statement, you have to select “1” for English or “2” for Spanish? Or that all the signs in Home Depot and Lowe’s are now in English and Spanish?

I thought the United States was a cultural melting pot. You get in the pot and melt into a fairly homogenized stew, and somewhere along the line it was decided the stew would speak English. But now you don’t have to.

One way to jumpstart everyone into learning English as quickly as possible is not to have all this coddling with options! At least, that’s what my grandmother would say. Nothing infuriated her more than the proliferation of Spanish. She was living in Kissimmee, Florida, and Southern Florida might as well be a part of South America, so much Spanish is heard. I’ve been to supermarkets there where every magazine at the check-out was in Spanish, driven through shopping districts where all the signs were in Spanish. You could get along very well without ever learning English.

Things weren’t so accommodating when my grandmother came to this country from Italy in 1916 at age 12. Because she didn’t speak English, she was put in a first grade class, despite being a preteen, and expected to figure things out from there.

 “Padrones”—self-appointed negotiators and problem-solvers for Italian immigrants—would visit the neighborhoods and conduct their English business for them for a fee. My grandmother’s family hired one to register the births, and he’d take his commission and make a stop at the corner bar first. By the time he got to city hall, he had forgotten the name of the baby he was supposed to register, so he’d make up a name, much to the surprise of my relatives when they had to get their birth certificates years later for military service or marriage.

My grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage at 14, got divorced when she was 22 and had four children. She supported herself for the rest of her life as a hairdresser. That required she learn English to talk to her customers, and by necessity, she did.

My grandfather did not. He came to America as a teenager and died in his eighties, and all that time he lived in Flushing, New York, he learned very little English. How could that be? How could you live in New York for 70 years, listening to the radio, watching television, and not learn English?

How? Because he lived in an Italian neighborhood, all the tenants in his apartment building were Italian, his first and second wives were Italian, every one he worked with at the wire factory was Italian. All his friends were Italian. He completely insulated himself from life in an English-speaking country. He never learned to read or write Italian or English.

I can’t tell you a thing about him, even though I lived with him for a year when my son was a baby and had breakfast, lunch and dinner with him every day. Our conversation in all that time consisted of a daily commentary on my non-supporting husband back in Virginia—“eessa bum,” and a daily weather report, “eessa louse day.”

My grandmother remarried him platonically 45 years after she divorced him just to torture him to death, and yelled at him in Italian all day. Sometimes he would mumble something back.

 “What he’d say, Nana?”

 “He says he’s going to chop up my car with an ax.”

It would have been nice to find out why—or maybe when—but he wasn’t talking, not in English anyway.

One day I visited Ellis Island—by way of the internet—to find out something about him. I had to guess at what his name was since I knew him only as Sam. I tried Saverio Matera, and there he was. He left St. Marco via the port of Naples on a ship named the Ancona and arrived at Ellis Island, April 6, 1914. He was 16 years old.

Eighty-six years of family history, 70 of it spent in America, and he couldn’t tell me anything and I can’t tell anyone anything about him now. Somewhere along the line he should have learned some more English. The ATM machines in Flushing now probably ask if you want your transaction in English, Spanish or Italian? Maybe even Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Klingon. I noticed the other day my ATM was now offering Russian. There is no large Russian community where I live. Why is this? Where does this end?

No need to melt in the melting pot now. We’ll keep you handicapped in America by accommodating your language requirements for some things, thus limiting your opportunities and keeping you segregated from the rest of us and even your own American-born family members.