Trip of the Tongue (32 page)

Chapter Nine

New Mexico: Spanish

And so it was, finally, that I came to Spanish: not as an afterthought but as a culmination. I had traveled through the deserts of Nevada and the bayous of Louisiana, through the rain forests of Washington state and the tranquil prairies of North Dakota. And in many of these places I'd heard more Spanish than the language I had actually set out to find. It was in Elko, creeping into Basque American vernacular, and it was in South Carolina, tripping from the lips of southern belles. Always it was in Queens as I went about my daily life. Even were it not my favorite and most fluent acquired language, Spanish was hardly something I could ignore.

The majority of America's Latino population lives in the southwestern states of New Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado, in cities such as L.A., Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso. This is not a new development. The Spanish were the first European settlers to come to the area, moving into New Mexico by 1598 and Texas by 1659. The first explorers ventured into Arizona in the 1530s; the first Spanish mission in California was founded in 1769. By the time Mexico ceded the bulk of its territories north of the Rio Grande to the United States, Spanish had for several generations been established as the local prestige language. Though the demographics of the region changed with the advent of statehood and other economic developments, New Mexico, home to the earliest Spanish settlements in the country, remains the most heavily Latino state in the nation. According to the most recent estimates, more than 45 percent of its population is Latino.

The terms
Latino
and
Hispanic
do little to reveal the differences, both subtle and conspicuous, between various Spanish-speaking immigrant groups. (This is particularly true with regard to Census data, which leaves it up to the respondent to decide how to self-identify.) For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is geographical proximity, the largest of these groups is of Mexican origin. Next are Spanish-speakers from Puerto Rico, who are largely concentrated in the Northeast. Today there are approximately 750,000 Puerto Ricans in New York City, 33 percent of the city's total Latino population, and the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade is one of city's largest public celebrations—something I would invariably forget each year until I found myself once again stuck in unrelenting pedestrian traffic on the Upper East Side.

Then there are groups from the Caribbean and Central America, including Cubans, nearly half of whom live in and around Miami, and Dominicans, nearly half of whom live in New York. As I have mentioned, Miami also has the country's largest Nicaraguan population, and there are major Salvadorean communities in Houston, Chicago, and L.A. These numbers are rounded out by arrivals from South American countries (particularly Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru). And then, with a couple of thousand new arrivals each year, there are the immigrants from Spain. A sign of how much things have changed in the United States since the days of the Spanish Empire is that Spaniards don't even get their own subcategory in most Census tables, being relegated instead to “All other Hispanic.”

As you might expect, this diversity also extends to the Spanish language. Most high-school students who study Spanish are well aware of the differences between European and Latin American Spanish, but there are, of course, also substantial differences among Latin American dialects. These differences are so strong that, at times, mutual intelligibility is not at all a given. When I went to Miami, for instance, I had relatively recently spent three weeks in Mexico, and I was feeling fairly confident about my Spanish-language skills. In Little Havana, however, I was confronted with a Spanish that was spoken so rapidly and so differently that I had to struggle to keep up with simple conversations.

So though the last leg of my journey was, on the whole, devoted to the Spanish language, it would be misleading to say that it was devoted to a single kind of Spanish language. I started with the Spanish of the past, traveling to the oldest community of European-language-speakers in the United States. And I finished with the Spanish of the future, traveling to a border town to try to understand how Spanish and English might begin to interact as their relative status changes—if, indeed, their relative status is allowed to change.

If Santa Fe is your kind of thing, it's probably your favorite place in the world. For a woman of a certain age and a certain artistic inclination, no city in the country—not New York, not San Francisco, and certainly not Las Vegas—can hold a candle to Santa Fe. It is a city of art and music and the kinds of cultural events you hear advertised on NPR, a riot of turquoise jewelry, Georgia O'Keefe, and moderately priced white wine. Whenever I've visited—and, strangely, I've been there a lot—I've felt like I've just walked in on someone else's slumber party. I was out of place and in the wrong clothes, and I couldn't help but worry that at any minute someone might try to come by and braid my hair or discuss the sexual symbolism of the pineapple bud.

What I'm trying to say is that I used to be a bit of a jerk about Santa Fe. On this trip, however, I found to my surprise that if you ignore the lackluster art and the overpriced jewelry and the ostentatious rich-lady self-actualization, Santa Fe is actually pretty nice. Take it from me: stick to the history and you'll be just fine.

The first official expedition into New Mexico was led by Juan de Oñate, the son of a silver baron who had received a contract from the Spanish crown to settle the area. Oñate left Zacatecas in 1598 with 600 to 700 settlers, 7,000 animals, 10 Franciscan missionaries, and 129 soldiers, and by April of that same year he had crossed the Rio Grande and claimed all land north of it for Spain. His first capital city was San Juan de los Caballeros, located at the junction of the Rio Grande and the Rio Chama, about halfway between Santa Fe and Taos. But by the mid-seventeenth century the capital had been relocated to a city called La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís—The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi. Now known simply as Santa Fe, it has served as the administrative center of New Mexico ever since.

Though you can spend hours poking through the historical buildings of Santa Fe or driving through the sparsely populated mountain towns to the north, the best way to get a sense of what life was like in eighteenth-century New Mexico is to head to a place called El Rancho de las Golondrinas, or “Ranch of the Swallows.” Situated on 200 acres about fifteen minutes south of Santa Fe, the ranch was originally built in the early 1700s as a stop along the Camino Real. Today it is more or less the Colonial Williamsburg of New Spain.

Though the ranch in many ways attempts to replicate as closely as possible conditions in historic New Mexico, it is so picturesque and well kept that it can only be called a museum. Or, possibly, the setting for a photo shoot. The adobe buildings are perfectly set off by the blue summer sky, and everywhere you look you find artfully arranged period detail, from religious artifacts to kitchen utensils to skeins of richly colored yarn. Two of my favorite classmates from college had gotten married here at a time when I couldn't afford the plane ticket to Santa Fe, and my first thought when I walked in was how pissed I was I'd missed that party.

The ranch is a living history museum, which means that scattered about the grounds are museum employees dressed in costume and ready to explain the mechanics of the ovens or the water-powered mill. I spent a happy few hours exploring the ranch, discovering how, among other things, Hispanic mills “without exception” turn counterclockwise while Anglo mills turn clockwise. (I am still unable to verify or explain this.) In the kitchens I came across Annyssa, a fourteen-year-old museum volunteer whose family had lived on the ranch for generations. Though she was a little skeptical of my reasons for wanting to know about any Spanish slang, she indulged me, teaching me a few phrases I later identified not as New Mexican Spanish but as Teenager Spanish.

At the schoolhouse, meanwhile, I met a woman named Judy Reed. She had learned Castilian Spanish in school, and she spent some time telling me about the difficulties she had understanding the local Spanish. She had a friend who was born in Spain, she said, and even he had trouble communicating. I was surprised. Although I had expected New Mexican Spanish to be different, I certainly hadn't expected it to be incomprehensible. I wondered if Ms. Reed wasn't telling me more about Castilian Spanish than about New Mexican Spanish.

As usual, I figured I'd better do some reading.

The first settlers to come to New Mexico, I found, spoke more than one kind of Spanish. There were Castilian-speakers, to be sure, but there were also Andalusians, Asturians, Galicians, and even a few Basques. And as soon as they settled in New Mexico, their language began to diverge from the forms spoken in Europe. Rubén Cobos, a native of Coahuila, Mexico, and a linguist who studied New Mexican and Colorado Spanish for more than seventy-five years, identified a few key grammatical differences between the new and old varieties. First of all, he writes, in New Mexico the second-person plural form fell out of use. But this is nothing new for anyone who has studied Latin American Spanish—usage of
vosotros
is these days limited to Spain.
^bd
The other morphological changes identified by Cobos are relatively minor, nothing that should confuse a native Spanish-speaker. There are, for instance, some slight changes in the formation of the preterit (i.e., the past perfective), a substitution in present-tense first-person-plural conjugations of -
emos
for -
imos
, and an occasional shift in accent and inflection that results in the change from
hablemos
to
háblenos
.

There are a number of phonetic divergences as well, but for non-linguists the most obvious differences between the dialects are lexical. Some New Mexican Spanish words are radically different from the Spanish words you'd find in Spain or even in Mexico.

These new words came from a variety of sources. Just as English adopted the names of local plants and animals from indigenous languages, so too did Spanish turn to the languages of the Americas when it needed to describe the novelties of the New World. The primary sources for these loanwords were the Nahuatl languages of Mexico and Central America. Though Mexican Spanish, too, has a large number of Nahuatl loans, the isolation of New Mexican Spanish resulted in some drastically different pronunciations. Cobos, in fact, suggests that these words are still pronounced as they would have been in the early seventeenth century. One of these words is
nesha
, which in New Mexican Spanish means “yellowish.” It comes from the Nahuatl
nexectic
, a word used to describe corn tortillas that had turned grayish due to an excess of lime.

New Mexican Spanish was, of course, also subject to influence from English—more, certainly, than it would have been south of the border—and so a number of Americanizations have also crept into the lexicon. Some, such as
bequenpaura
(“baking powder”), were simple Hispanizations of English words. Others had more roundabout histories. From the word
honey
came the Spanish
jane
. This then became the verb
janear
, “to look for girls.” Similarly, “how much” snuck into Spanish as
jamache
. This eventually evolved into the verb
jamachar
, “to talk business”—or, as Cobos puts it, “to talk turkey.”

The existence of New Mexican Spanish owes much to the isolation of the area's first settlements. Although the Camino Real was used to supply the missions and scattered settlements, the supply trains were only scheduled to come through once every three years—six months out, six months there, six months back. But in practice they came through even less frequently. Moreover, ongoing hostilities between settlers and local Indian tribes discouraged new arrivals. Travel was also highly regulated by Spanish authorities, and until 1821 a law prohibited the Spanish from engaging in commerce with American or French traders.

In the early days of Spanish colonization, then, there was little traffic in or out of the area. Furthermore, as linguist John M. Lipski has pointed out, the area was underserviced by the institutions—schools, churches, government—that establish standard prestige dialects. It was, in other words, a linguistic power vacuum. There was no social or economic pressure on New Mexican settlers, then, to shift away from their regional dialect, either toward English or toward a more standard or elite form of Spanish. It's almost as if someone planned New Mexico as a way to establish and preserve a distinctive Spanish dialect.

In the years after the United States acquired the territory, this unusual linguistic environment was at first largely preserved. Because even though the territory came under U.S. control after the end of the Mexican-American War back in 1848, New Mexico was actually one of the last territories in the continental United States to be admitted to the Union. It wasn't granted statehood until 1912, nearly sixty-four years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As such, the state was slow in acquiring an English-language bureaucracy. Spanish was, quite accidentally, protected so well in New Mexico that until the 1940s Spanish was still a viable school language.