Spanish language's legacy
Language rights advocates have begun to create community college classes in Spanish and other languages to increase access to education.Delegates to a California constitutional convention in 1878 voted to ban foreign languages in public proceedings and printing of state laws and that vote echoes to our modern day.Spanish and the people who speak it continue to be perceived as “threatening” in California and the United States, experts says.
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.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.
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: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.
“I can assure this Convention ... [T]here are Justices of the Peace in my county [San Bernardino], and their proceedings are judicial proceedings, who are intelligent men, and very able Justices of the Peace, who have no knowledge of the English language.”
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