Hable el idioma del imperio

Notes on language and the through-lines between Catalonian and New Mexican history.

Source: shbarcelona.com

The Catalonian culture and language have endured against the odds throughout centuries of oppression. The Catalan language, just 120 years ago, was unmodernized, undocumented, disorganized, and at risk of being lost to history like many Iberian languages before it, and the rise of Franco in 1939 should have been the end of the language, yet it endured.

Unlike what’s happened to Traditional New Mexican Spanish - the Spanish dialect spoken only in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado - or the Native languages around before that. New Mexican Spanish is the dialect many of my ancestors on my father’s side must have spoken over the last several hundred years.

Like other Hispanos who grew up in the mid-1900s, my grandpa was beaten by the white teachers at school if he spoke in his native tongue. He eventually learned English, and when he had kids, he and my grandmother did not teach my father Spanish. Most younger and middle-aged New Mexicans with roots in New Mexico share the same story today.

To combat this cultural loss, I’ve argued before that the State of New Mexico should adopt more bilingual schools. This would give New Mexico some of its cultural heritage back, and likely increase the effectiveness of our education system, boost our economy, and more. For more on that, you can read one of my first blog posts about it here:

New Mexican Spanish: A Case for Bilingual Public Education

Similar types of cultural oppression, and then revival, happened in Catalonia. Let’s go back 140 years to Catalonia before Franco - when the Catalan language was disorderly, and the people who spoke it couldn’t garner it well enough to use it practically in all cases.

Pompeu Fabra (1868-1948), the Catalonian engineer for whom Universitat de Pompeu Fabra is named (and the school I am currently attending through the associated Barcelona School of Economics), took a keen interest in fixing the problems within his native tongue. He spoke Catalan, as one does when they grow up in Catalonia, but he realized that his language was disorderly and in a state of misuse. According to the Universitat de Pompeu Fabra website:

He was a diligent student who excelled in mathematics and, following this path, over the years he studied industrial engineering. His vocation, however, was another: the study of Catalan and its normalisation. He said that he discovered this one day when he was preparing to write a letter to his nephews and realised that he barely mastered the language he spoke. From then on, the meticulous engineer passionately dedicated himself to the study of Catalan in order to rescue it from its disuse and bring it up to date.

I’m not a linguist, so I cannot adequately explain how Fabra managed to reorganize Catalan in a way that made it more practical and modernized, but the Spanish Royal Academy of History notes:

[Fabra] directed a "linguistic campaign" (1890-1892) that was the beginning of the renewal and modernization of standard Catalan… he published Ensayo de gramática de catalán moderno (1891), a… work… whose methodology and objectives are revolutionary: he does not write, like others, a theoretical treatise (full of notions and classifications) and in line with the habits of such works (based on some tradition of written language or on routines that are transmitted from one author to another), but rather aims to describe the real language spoken in Barcelona.

And Irene Boada, a Catalonian lecturer, noted in an article for The Conversation:

After the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, the repression was not only political but cultural too. Catalan institutions were suppressed and Catalan was banned in the school system. Indicative of the new political order were statements from the authorities, the police in particular, such as “Hable el idioma del imperio”: use the language of the empire.

Fabra was a Catalonian nationalist. He believed that Catalonia ought to be sovereign as it once was. So when Spanish nationalist Francisco Franco assumed dictatorial power after his nationalist army won the Spanish Civil War in 1939, he made it impossible for cultural threats like Fabra to live in Spain safely. Fabra fled to France, in exile, where he lived the rest of his days.

Boada notes:

Attempts to suppress the Catalan language and culture have deep historical roots but were intensified during the era of Francisco Franco. The dictator banned the Catalan language from public spaces and made Spanish the sole language of public life.

For 40 years under the dictatorship, Spain tried to present itself as an ethnically and politically homogeneous state. The execution of Franco’s opponents continued after the end of the Spanish Civil War. One prominent victim was the former Catalan president, Lluís Companys who was deported from Nazi-occupied France in 1940 and then executed in Barcelona…

With the death of Franco in 1975, and once democratic freedoms had been recovered, the 1978 constitution recognised linguistic plurality and established that Spanish languages other than Castilian could be official languages of the state. Catalan is now compulsory in Catalonian schools.

Now, there are likely thousands of historical examples of cultural devastation that are similar to what happened in Catalonia. But not all of them have the sort of happy ending of cultural rebirth that Catalonia has experienced since the death of Franco. New Mexico’s loss of language is not a perfect equivalent to Catalonia, but there are some similarities.

Mary Beth King of the University of New Mexico Newsroom notes:

In 1907, President Teddy Roosevelt expressed his conviction that “We have room for but one flag, the American flag ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people,” an ideology that intensified feelings that non-English languages were unpatriotic.

New Mexico becoming a state in 1912 was a bittersweet victory for New Mexico. Suddenly, New Mexicans were faced with English as a central language in education and were paying taxes to fund schools that stigmatized the only language they could speak.

Wilson notes:

Many educators and speakers of the prestige varieties viewed New Mexico Spanish as archaic, rural, full of errors, and in need of remediation, and attempted to eradicate elements of the dialect in an attempt to teach us how to speak correctly.

New Mexican Spanish evolved through years of isolation. It was confined to the practical situations its speakers found themselves in - mostly spoken around the house, the farm, and with other speakers locally. Most speakers of the dialect were not writers, intellectuals, or scientists who could help cement the dialect in any form of organized way. There was no New Mexican Pompeu Fabra. So now, even if we wanted to resurrect the dialect, we likely wouldn’t succeed at getting it down perfectly. Too many of its users have died without passing the dialect on to their children, and there are few historical examples of the dialect in written or spoken form on record for us to replicate.

I’ve managed to learn a little Spanish from my grandparents, and I hope to learn a little Catalan while I’m in Spain over the next year. Maybe it’s not as important to you, but I’ll leave you with some New Mexican Spanish that, perhaps, you could remember - to help restore a small part of New Mexican culture, which will likely not have the same comeback as Catalan but should be remembered nonetheless.

From the UNM Newsroom:

No je instead of No sé (“I don’t know.”).

Lonche, an Anglicism for “lunch.”

Ratón volador (flying mouse) for “bat” instead of murciélago.

Gallina de la sierra (mountain chicken) for “turkey” instead of pavo or guajalote.

Troca or troque for “truck.”

Muncho instead of mucho (“lots” or “much”).

Dende instead of desde (since”).