Poetry

...They hired an advertising agent with little expertise and an incomplete knowledge of the Hispanic linguistic idiosyncrasies...

...Although all of these four groups share a common cultural heritage and utilize the same grammar and syntax, the various idioms---or I should say, quasi-dialects--they use daily often make for hilarious misunderstandings...

...Of course that may never happen, but like the two-thousand-year-old stubbornness of the diaspora Jews who pray for a better life in "Jerusalem next year," it is an expression of the Cuban sense of the transitory present...

...Among the Hispanics, Cubans are the most educated and affluent group...

...Their Spanish is a hybrid of AngloSaxon and Castilian words and expressions, and structurally their sentences are organized neither according to the language of Shakespeare, nor to that of Cervantes...

...The only way to distinguish between one linguistic Spanish-speaking group mad another is through its unique national past...

...The ad went on the air and of course almost a third of the audience roared with laughter every time they saw or listened to it...

...In the early eighties, for instance, when the Hispanic consumer began to be taken seriously by major marketing corporations, an insecticide company decided to launch a product on Spanishspeaking television and radio...

...There is no way they will adapt to the American way of life one hundred percent: Since they are in constant contact with newly arrived Central-American refugees, memory and daily endeavors will not allow them to abandon their identity...

...The comparison can be simplistic but it's also illuminating: Spanish is in the process of revamping its own roots in the United States, and if Hispanics refuse to give it up, as they have in the past, the result may be a perplexing mixture that belongs nowhere and is the product of an almost Darwinist evolutionary selection...

...Just as a British commercial would have to be reshaped in order to be used in the United States, words within the Hispanic community in this country depend on the various contexts...

...They can speak English with Anglos, but among themselves they use Spanglish--a middle ground, half a part of the past, half a part of their present and future...

...In an effort to preserve their historical identity and to battle co-optation and assimilation, Mexican-Americans have remained attached to their tradition...

...The word, you should know, means bug or insect in Mexico City, but in San Juan it is used to refer to the penis...

...Only after a forceful and long struggle was the dialect finally elevated to the level of language, and before the Holocaust it was spoken by more than 11 million people...

...Only last spring, after a heated political debate, Puerto Rico's governor proclaimed Spanish the commonwealth's language--hence defying total annexation to the 11 October 1991:565...

...And tradition means language...

...The sophisticated Cubans are proud of their baroque literature (written by authors like Jose Lezama Lima, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Alejo Carpentier), and although the younger generation is fluent in English, they keep their Spanish because many swear they will return to Havana when the Communist regime falls apart...

...For almost two hundred years, educated Jews in Eastern Europe, often referred to as Masklim, refused to grant Yiddish the status of a "legitimate" communicative language, although during the eighteenth century thousands of poor shtetl inhabitants used it in their everyday life...

...The result was a commercial that stated that the product was infallible in killing bichos...

...Yiddish was part Hebrew, part German, and part a sum of Slovak, Czech, Russian, Polish, and other Indo-European idioms...

...Of course a common understanding can be found, yet communication is not just the an of imparting, conveying, and exchanging ideas and information, but also of knowing how to do so...

...A substantial number escaped Fidel Castro's revolution in the sixties, and a second wave, this one made up of members of lower-income and less cosmopolitan social strata, fled to Florida in 1980...

...Those who walk in the streets of Miami, Los Angeles, or New York and have a sense of things Hispanic, know that there is no one Spanish in North America but many--at least four: that used by Puerto Ricans, by Chicanos, by Cubans, and by that other group commonly known as "other," made up of Central Americans (mainly Nicaraguans and Salvadorans), South Americans, Spaniards, and people from other corners of the Hispanic map...

...Obviously, Spanish is going to survive as a language in this country, although not in its Castilian, orthodox form...

...since 1898...

...Their home island has been a commonwealth of the U.S...

...I often think of Yiddish as a parallel example...

...Americans, descendents of the oldest Hispanic families in the U.S., look back to 1848, when in a diplomatic compromise, two-fifths of Mexico was sold by Generalissimo Santa Anna to the White House for $15 million...

...Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, have come to New York and other cities on the East Coast in search of better economic well-being...