Promising Young Women

There was a recent twitter spat between fans of two rising actresses, the obviously white but Spanish speaking Anya Taylor Joy - a fluent native speaker of rioplatense, the dialect of the Buenos Aires region - and Jenna Ortega, a brown but monolingual American.  Which of the two was a better Latina or were they even Latin?

None of this was helped by American hangups about race and colour.  The US authorities for example considered Spanish speaking migrants (even from Spain) to be non-white, while North Africans were classed as white.  No wonder the showbiz magazine Variety celebrated Taylor-Joy's win at the Golden Globes as the first by a "woman of color in twelve years."  

The spat throws up some interesting points, what exactly is a Latina/Latino/Latinx?  Is it someone who speaks Spanish or Portuguese like Ms Taylor-Joy - I'm not sure if French speakers get included here  - or is it someone with native American ancestry like Ms Ortega?  Choose one and you exclude many Latina icons from the United States, choose the second and you exclude many Cubans and Agentinians or even Puerto Ricans, whose distant Taino ancestry was largely invisible before dna testing.

Anyway let's leave such questions to the pigment obsessed Americans, what is of interest is the monolingualism of many Latin Americans in the United States and its parallels with Wales.  

While many US towns, especially on the border with Mexico are overwhelming Spanish-speaking this is not the case elsewhere, here families must decide whether to pass on the language to their children.  Many do not and their reasons for doing so are similar to language shift in the South Wales valleys in the first half of the twentieth century.  Parents feel that their children need to learn English and that a knowledge of their native language will hold them back or be of little use.  The end result is the obviously Latina Jenna Ortega struggling to pronounce even simple Spanish and being ridiculed by her more fortunate compatriots.

Ortega actually comes from a county close to the border with around 50% of the population identifying as Hispanic with less than half speaking Spanish as a first language.  For those in cities such as Chicago and New York the experience is more like regular immigrants, expected to assimilate fully in the second and third generations.  This is similar to the situation of another promising young actress, Carey Mulligan, who has a Welsh speaking mother. Never having lived in Wales and with an English speaking father any fluency in Welsh would be unusual. 

Around half of Hispanics with no Spanish or Portuguese skills report being humiliated, especially by their fellow Latinos - the no sabe kids they call them.  Again there are similarities to Wales where the English-speaking Welsh are often described as Saeson.  Here in Radnorshire for example our history is routinely ignored or misrepresented by those for whom it might as well  be located in Central Asia for all they know.  It's not good enough.