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Cosmic City

What if "multilingual" isn't just an adjective that describes Los Angeles? What if multilingual is who we are and want to be?

By Rey M. Rodríguez

In January The Los Angeles Times recently printed an obituary of Andrés Henestrosa Morales, a prolific Mexican writer who had a profound impact on defining what it means to be Mexican. His life and deeds serve as important metaphors for Los Angeles, because they remind us of what can happen when we decide to recognize fully what it means to be an Angeleno.

Henestrosa was born Nov. 30, 1906, in a village near the city of Juchitán, in Oaxaca, Mexico, known for centuries of matriarchal culture. In an interview cited in the Times article, he described himself as Spanish, black, Zapotec, Huave and “even a little Jewish.” And until his early teens when he left for Mexico City he only spoke in indigenous languages. He later became fluent in Spanish and translated the indigenous stories into a language that all of Mexico could understand and embrace.

The diversity of his heritage harkens to the intense complexity of Los Angeles, where people come from 140 countries and speak well over 100 languages. That diversity is consistent with its founding in 1781 when 44 settlers named this new settlement, “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula” (“The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels on the River Porciuncula”). These settlers represented many nationalities, including Filipino, Native American, African and Spanish ancestry, with two-thirds being mestizo or mulatto.

Henestrosa's most influential book is Los hombres que dispersó la danza (The Men Scattered by Dance), a collection of Zapotec legends and fables that Henestrosa learned as a boy growing up in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The book gave voice to the stories of indigenous people who otherwise had been ignored and disparaged by the larger society. Henestrosa and other great intellectuals, artists and writers, such as Jose Vasconcelos, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, reminded Mexico that Mexicans were a raza cósmica or “cosmic race,” with European and indigenous blood.

The Mexican government later extended Henestrosa's lesson by incorporating the story of Afro-Mexicans, a history beautifully explored in the current exhibition at the California African American Museum on "The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present." In 1992, Mexico officially recognized Africa as the "third root" of its culture. This aligned perfectly with Henestrosa's concept that Mexicans had to understand and come to terms with their full heritage if they were to forge a national identity.

And so it is with Los Angeles. Just like the Mexicans who Henestrosa challenged to recognize the richness of their heritage, we will be enriched if we consider ourselves constituents of a multilingual society, regardless of how many or few languages each one of us speaks.
 
We need to view these languages as an asset that will inform who we are as a city, especially by signaling to our children that knowing more than one language is a positive quality and not a negative one. We can do this by ensuring that our children receive adequate preschool in an environment where all languages are celebrated in song, word and print. We can continue to embrace it by promoting heritage language schools that extol the language and cultures of other societies. Finally, we can continue to develop dual immersion and heritage programs in our schools so that children are able to communicate in more than one language. 

Henestrosa was famous for saying that, “Language is culture.” If we think of our city as monolingual, then we are saying that many of its citizens do not matter. But they do, like the indigenous fables and stories in Henestrosa's works. We need to listen to, respect and honor the voices who tell their stories instead of ridiculing them and passing legislation that prohibits bilingual education. A city where these stories can be heard will be greater and more important than we could ever imagine.

Rey M. Rodríguez, vice president of Business & Legal Affairs for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Distribution International, is a grateful son who hopes that he can pass on the gift of speaking at least two languages to his sons, just as his parents were able to do. All opinions expressed are solely his own.

Date Posted: 3/20/2008