Well, to be completely truthful, I take statement back. Spanish is actually the language used by a whole bunch of people in our country! If I went into a random house in the United States (much less Southern Arizona!), Spanish would be the second most likely language being spoken, only behind English! The US Census Bureau released statistics in 2009 showing that there were 229 million native English-speakers. Next on the list was Spanish with 35 million native speakers. All of the Chinese languages combined came in a distant third with 2.6 million native speakers. The United States currently has the fifth largest Spanish-speaking population behind Mexico, Spain, Columbia, and Argentina. And Spanish has been growing at a rate which eclipses most other languages as well. There were 11 million Spanish-speakers living in the United States in 1980, about 5 percent of the population. By 2010, thirty years later, that number had exploded to a whopping 37 million people or 13 percent of the population. As political and economic events unfold constantly in Latin America, more Spanish-speaking immigrants will likely continue to arrive daily to the United States. From the Cuban Revolution sending refugees north in the 1960s to El Salvador's Civil War in the 1980s to the current economic and social problems facing young adults in the northern Central American countries, the United States has and will probably continue to be a refuge for Spanish-speaking Latin Americans seeking better opportunities.
Accordingly, I can't converse with a huge portion of the population of our country! I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, about 60 miles from the Mexican border. I went to Borton Primary, Carrillo Elementary, and Tucson High Schools, schools with a high bilingual population. You would assume I would have picked up a little Spanish. Well, I didn't. So many people living in the United States - specifically Southern Arizona - immigrated from places not so far away, places that primarily speak Spanish. Many came across the border from Mexico. Some came from as far as Central or South America. Some even had the border cross them. In 1853, the Gadsen Purchase transferred the huge swath of land - Southern Arizona, which includes my hometown of Tucson, and a small southwestern corner of New Mexico - from Mexico to the United States. Spanish will continue to be spoken by a large number of people in the United States, especially in places like Tucson.
I often feel like people speaking Spanish know a secret language. What are they saying? Does it concern me? Is it about me? So many people with Latin backgrounds live in Tucson. (I am not one of them, however. I'm full-blooded European. Both of my parents speak strictly English.) Many of them are sufficiently bilingual, being born into Spanish-speaking households. Bilingual folks from Tucson usually have parents originally from Latin America, often Sonora. Spanish was their first language; it was spoken by their parents. English was their second, which they learned in school and from friends. They spoke and continue to speak Spanish with their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends.
However, I know many bilingual people who even speak Spanish to their fellow American-raised siblings and cousins! There's not as much of a stigma attached to the language as there was 50 years ago. Teachers don't physically punish students in the United States anymore for speaking Spanish like they used to. Some teachers actually promote Spanish. My niece, Gloria, who's in first grade, actually attends a Spanish-immersion school, Davis Elementary, just north of downtown Tucson!
Bilingual folks generally learned both languages at a young enough age. Their brains were able to grasp and absorb them both. My sister, Elena, learned Spanish when she was just 17. She had just taken a few years of Spanish classes in the Tucson when she went to Bolivia for 6 months. She came back a fluent Spanish-speaker with just the tiniest of a Spanish accent. I know that I'm a little bit older than she was and that my brain isn't as plastic as it once was. But hopefully I can learn enough to make it easier to communicate with the people in Spanish-speaking countries, including the United States!
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