How The 19th Century's 'English Only' Movement Sidelined Spanish In California, And The Legacy It Left

The United States is living a golden age of Spanish speaking. Millions of people count it as their first language while many others learned it in school or by growing up with a Spanish-speaking relative or traveling to a Spanish speaking country.

But this age also has a tarnish.

“There's a way in which Spanish is still seen by some people as threatening and seen as something that should be contained when it occurs naturally,” says Norma Mendoza-Denton, a professor of anthropology at UCLA.

The details are in her 2020 book Language in the Trump Era.

“Spanish is part of a big metaphorical ideology of things that threaten America. And that includes the Spanish language, the Mexican people, and border relations,” she said.

To understand the blemish and the luster of Spanish’s current golden age, Mendoza-Denton says, it’s important to look at a critical moment for Spanish-language rights in California about 150 years ago, when an “English Only” movement led to a decision that reverberates to this day.

And its repercussions are motivating some education leaders to create new policies to restore language rights to Spanish speakers and other speakers of non-English languages.

Late 1800s: English Only, but not unanimous

During the fall of 1878, more than a hundred people rode from all corners of the state on horses and horse-drawn buggies to California’s state capitol in Sacramento. These men — they were all men — were delegates elected to a convention tasked to rewrite the state’s 1849 constitution.

A lot had happened in the three decades since the U.S.–Mexican War, when California went from Mexican territory to U.S. state.

“I wish to offer an amendment,” said Edward O. Smith during the convention. Smith was a 61-year-old farmer who lived in San Jose, representing Santa Clara County:

Smith’s amendment was a clear rejection of what had been common practice after the U.S. and Mexico signed the treaty to end the war: The civil rights of Mexican residents would be respected under the new government.

It was understood by California’s postwar leaders that Spanish language rights were part of these protected civil rights, even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo didn’t say so.

That’s what some convention delegates said when they spoke out about the potential harm Smith’s amendment would cause.

English-speaking allies of Spanish speakers

Some of the convention delegates were unapologetically xenophobic, members of the recently formed Workingmen’s Party — a sort of Libertarian grouping that blamed Chinese, Indian, and other immigrants for the economic downturn of the time. But anti-immigrant sentiment wasn’t unanimous among delegates.

“The 19th century was actually much more … reasonable and understanding about language use than the early 20th century,” says Rosina Lozano, a history professor at Princeton University and the author of An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States.

The profession of convention delegates included business owners and civil servants, like Horace Rolfe, a 33-year-old judge and delegate from San Bernardino in response to Smith’s proposal:

Rolfe was saying the Spanish speakers he worked with (in all likelihood people who’d arrived from Mexico or descendants of Mexicans living in the state before the U.S.-Mexican War), were needed, essential, and good public servants.

Rolfe said there were communities in his county made up entirely of Spanish speakers and Smith’s amendment “would work a very great injury.”

A close vote

Rolfe was not a member of the Workingmen’s Party, but even some delegates who were actually agreed with Rolfe’s concerns.

“I do believe that these people have some rights that we ought to respect,” said Eli Blackmer, a music teacher from National City, who was elected to represent San Diego County on the Workingmen’s Party ticket:

Other allies of Spanish speakers said states they’d lived in such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania printed public documents in German, French, and “Norwegian languages” and California should do the same.

Smith’s amendment passed on a 46-39 vote.

A subsequent amendment by Rolfe to allow the legislature to give local entities the choice to carry out court or other official proceedings in English or Spanish failed by a larger margin.

The final California constitution, with that English Only provision, was ratified in 1879.

The English Only die was cast.

“[The vote] does change the way that Spanish is considered,” Lozano says.

Powerful and cyclical forces influenced that constitutional convention, which spanned 1878-1879: An economic crisis led to higher unemployment. About 30 years of immigration sparked by the California Gold Rush brought many Europeans as well as people from China, and Latin American countries including Chile. The non-European immigrants were accused of taking jobs.

It gets worse for Spanish

The Workingmen’s Party came out of this 1870s turmoil. It blamed public institutions and large corporations for opening the door to Chinese, Indian, and other “foreigners.”

“The people that had been elected to come into that [1878] constitutional convention, were largely from the Workingmen's party, which was a very nativist, very anti-immigrant … group of people,” Lozano says.

The patriotism stirred up by supporters of the World War I effort also stirred up nativism. People destroyed German-language records to display their support of the war while Nebraska policymakers passed a law that banned classes taught in German.

“It's in that same time period that you begin to see more of the Mexican schools created in Southern California as well,” to segregate Spanish speakers, Lozano says, “so World War I is a real shift in the ways that people are considering language and what it means to be an American.”

Restoring language rights through higher education

Some language rights have been gradually restored in the near century and a half since those California convention delegates sought to stamp out multilingualism. They include the voting rights of language minorities.

Courts and municipal governments have also made strides on this front. Interpretation is provided in court proceedings while municipalities with significant Spanish-speaking populations make sure residents can understand what’s going on.

“We have a translator in all our meetings and even when we have other functions, we do it in English and Spanish,” says Gil Hurtado, the vice mayor of South Gate, a predominantly Latino city in L.A. County.

“We want to make sure that our community is as well informed as possible and if their language is Spanish, dammit we're going to give it to them in Spanish,” he says.

But education has moved slower on the language rights front. English remains a barrier that keeps non-English speakers from accessing education.

“It's really tragic when somebody who has had education in their home country comes here and there's no way for them to get ahead,” Mendoza-Denton said.

That happens a lot.

Higher education administrators see an opportunity to counter dropping enrollment by appealing to people who completed some college but never finished. There’s even a name for this population: stop outs.

In L.A., a board member of the nine-campus L.A. Community College District is targeting non-English speakers by creating more classes for them. He was motivated by his parents’ hardships when they came to this country.

“[My mother] had an accounting [degree] in Mexico,” says LACCD Board Member Gabriel Buelna. “She worked as a receptionist at the orthopedic hospital. Her inability to master English is the reason she didn't take other classes.”

That’s part 2 of this story. Read it here.