For Star subscribers: The new congressman from Tucson gave a Spanish-language response to the State of the Union, but in an interview he said it's hard even for his family to keep strong Spanish skills.
Tim Steller For Rep. Juan Ciscomani, the Tucson area's new congressman, his big opportunity last month contained a lesson.
"It takes effort to maintain your Spanish," he said in a recent interview conducted in that language. Longtime U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva is bilingual and has delivered comments in Spanish on behalf of the Democrats in response to Republican presidents' State of the Union speeches. Tucson Mayor Regina Romero also grew up speaking Spanish, as have other local office holders over the years. Ciscomani is just the latest, but relatively rare as a Spanish-speaking Republican office-holder in southern Arizona.
Spanish lacks prestigeHis parents were smart, though, to be worried about losing the language. I spoke to a University of Arizona sociolinguist, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Ana Maria Carvalho, who told me that even this close to Mexico, the same immigrant language patterns seen elsewhere in the country often hold true.
"There’s a lot of pressure to speak English only," she said."Spanish does not have a lot of social prestige. English is the dominant prestigious language in Arizona." He and his wife Laura both grew up in Spanish-speaking homes and now are trying to raise six kids to be bilingual. They do it the way their parents did, by speaking Spanish in the home and letting the kids learn English outside. But that can be hard.
"The little ones speak English with the littler ones," he said."At home they start speaking more and more English among them. They start losing Spanish — the younger they are, the less Spanish they speak."
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