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The Sinatra-'Lucy'-Cronkite Method

Pop culture takes center stage in Latinos' remembrances of learning English.

By Michelle Campagna
LALA reporter

How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life
Edited by Tom Miller, foreword by Ray Suarez
National Geographic Society, 268 pp., $16.95 paper

All the while, English is waiting for me in the wings—a madman, a conqueror, a liberator with an axe. English will be my first fall. I first hear it…on television, of course. It is a big wooden Zenith in the living room, and it is on every evening. Through it comes Walter Cronkite's voice. It is a friendly tongue, and it is pinched. It is democratic, and it is nervous. It is young, and the rest of the world is old.
—"The Learning Curve," Rubén Martínez

Like most kids anywhere in the world, American music and television were also my English teachers. But it was the desire to be cool—more than the desire to learn English—that fed the infatuation with these exotic American exports.
—"My Tongue is Divided into Two," Quique Aviles

For contributors like Aviles, the process of learning English begins with American pop-culture and consumer culture. He claims to have "worshipped the English language before I understood it," because he associated it with the television shows on his 19-inch black-and-white TV. He would sit back with neighbors—his grandmother charged them a nickel a sitting for TV-viewing privileges—and watch "The Three Stooges," "Tarzan," and "Starsky and Hutch." He tells us that seeing these iconic American shows was the first phase of his language-learning process—the phase he calls "Curiosity and Wonder." Stories like Aviles' provide us with a fascinating account of a multifaceted process, one that is often motivated initially by at least one aspect of American pop-culture.

These stories are recollections, so Pink Floyd and Cyndi Lauper are some of the more recent pop acts in How I Learned English. Gigi Anders, a Cuban refugee, tells of feeling "blessed" with a television set because it enabled her to watch "Captain Kangaroo" and "The Lucy Show." Anders would spend hours listening to Ella Fitzgerald records, in particular "A Tisket, a Tasket," to learn English.

In stories set in multicultural Los Angeles, English is again a tool that the contributors use to access American pop-culture. "To further practice English while learning it," writes Franc J. Camara ("Trilingual Ease,"), "I made it a point to watch only English-language television. In particular, I enjoyed comedies, which taught me a lot about the American culture. 'Three's Company' was one of my favorites." Camara makes us feel the powerful motivation to understand jokes and humorous allusions. "[A]s time went by," he caught himself "laughing at their innuendos." It is evident why contributors like Camara preferred to learn English from American music and TV sitcoms: a Frank Sinatra song entertains while instructing. From that language mentor from Hoboken, José Serrano ("Learning English by the Sinatra Method") learned "to say 'Tewsday,' like [Sinatra] did, not 'Toosday.'" Sitcoms and music repeatedly surface in this three-part book as the means and motivation through which people learn English.

Squaring the Ring

Those of us who grew up with English as our first language can still find humor in the book because it delves into the difficulty of prepositions, the confusion of accents and pronunciations, and exceptions that seem to undo the rules. Virgil Suarez ("My Cuban Parents Learn English in Night School") notes in a tribute poem to English some of the language's bizarre homophones: "to, two, too / there, their, they're." Richard Lederer and Josh White Jr. ("English is Cuh-ray-zee") write, "There's no egg in eggplant, no pine or apple in pineapple. Quicksand works slowly; boxing rings are square. Writers write, but do fingers fing?"

The stories in this book successfully summarize and analyze the complicated experiences of linguistic assimilation. Although many contributors submit themselves to English as part of "the American way," there is also lamentation and a recognition of the loss involved with learning a new language and joining a new culture. All those who have not completely abandoned their original language will at least feel rooted in two different places, and more often than not are oriented within two frames of cultural reference.

Date Posted: 12/8/2007