Thinking about things Hispanic while far from the Hispanic world

I’m sitting here in a Helsinki airport lounge, quite tired, reflecting on various things.

One of the best things we did in raising our children — and, of course, as with most parents, there are things that we would do differently with hindsight — was to put our children in a Spanish immersion program, whereby they did their basic subjects not in English but in Spanish.

As it happens, we now have two Hispanic daughters in law, one Cuban-American and the other Peruvian.  In each case, none of the in-laws speak any English — but, while neither husband served a Spanish-speaking mission, both husbands can communicate quite well with their wives’ families.  (We also have three partially Hispanic grandchildren.)

Thus, it’s quite odd to have recently been accused of harboring some sort of bigotry against Hispanics.

Earlier in the month, as is my annual practice, I posted a birthday tribute to my father.  In passing, I mentioned that several of the Mexican-American men who worked for my Dad’s small construction company became something like extended family for me, especially when I was just a boy.  In some corners of the internet, though, I’m held to be incapable of ever saying anything that’s honest or doing anything that’s good, so it was suggested that my comment about the Mexican-Americans at Dad’s company was a lie.  It seems, if I understand correctly, that I’m a bit of an English-only white supremacist, or something of that sort.

I hate to contradict such carefully researched sentiments, but they’re . . . well, false.  I was around men like Celestino Beltran (my “Uncle Tino,” when I was really young) and his brother Frank, and Joe Esparza, from the time I was a little boy.  And I find it extremely difficult to dislike my grandchildren and my daughters in law.

I grew up among and around Mexican-Americans.  The old San Gabriel Mission stood directly across from my high school.  Hispanic influence was everywhere, and was far from limited to Mexican food — although I love Mexican food dearly and missed it painfully while I was on my mission in Switzerland.  (One day, I found a restaurant in Zürich that served enchiladas . . . accompanied by mashed potatos and gravy.  It seemed to me that they somehow that they hadn’t quite caught the vision.)

Anyhow, it seemed to me a complete no-brainer to give our kids the essentially painless gift of a second language when they were very young, and we did so.

Posted from Helsinki, Finland