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An American Language: The history of Spanish in the United States by Rosina Lozano

by
November 2018, no. 406

An American Language: The history of Spanish in the United States by Rosina Lozano

University of California Press (Footprint), $53.99 pb, 376 pp, 9780520297074

An American Language: The history of Spanish in the United States by Rosina Lozano

by
November 2018, no. 406

Many recent American politicians have believed that they could speak Spanish. Presidential candidate George W. Bush stumbled through a Spanish-language interview and was rewarded with thirty-five per cent of the Latino vote in the 2000 election. His brother Jeb, whose wife is Mexican-born, is a fluent speaker, but when he appealed to Spanish-speakers during the 2016 Republican Party primary, he received a typically brutal slap-down from Donald Trump. ‘This is a country,’ Trump chided his rival ‘where we speak English, not Spanish.’

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