Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

270 Language Diversity in the Classroomone-third (Castro, 1992). And second, while Spanish was often heard inLos Angeles, Houston and elsewhere, it fell differently on Floridian ears:elsewhere it wasthe language spoken by the people who worked in the car wash andcame to trim the trees and cleared the tables in restaurants. In Miami,Spanish was spoken by the people who ate in the restaurants, thepeople who owned the cars and the trees, which made, on the socioauditoryscale, a considerable difference... what was so unusualabout Spanish in Miami was not that it was so often spoken, but thatit was so often heard. (Didion, 1987: 63)This is an important and perspicacious comment by the famousAmerican writer, one that sounds an ominous note for all immigrantsas they begin to ascend the socioeconomic ladder. They are not supposedto violate ‘the norm of immigrant subordination’ and, when they do,reactionary consequences can be expected to follow (Castro, 1992: 181). Infact, the pattern is a remarkably robust one and involves more than alittle conflict between the old-guard mainstream and the socially mobilenewcomers. Those immigrants who were once on the receiving end ofsocial prejudice themselves are just as likely to pass it on to newer wavesof arrivals. Those escaping from the mid-19th-century famine were likelyto read ‘No Irish Need Apply’ signs in Boston windows; but, ageneration or two later, the politically savvy Irish were just as unpleasantto Slavs and Jews. It goes without saying that the Irish are not to besingled out here; almost all groups reveal similar unpleasant dynamics,and no one’s hands are particularly clean when it comes to discriminationof this sort; see Morrison and Zabusky (1980) for a few indirectadmissions of prejudicial attitudes and actions in this regard.One of the most popular arguments of those opposed to bilingualeducation is that its implementation has created a substantial number ofeducators, administrators, researchers, consultants, evaluators andothers. Their activities have reinforced those of teachers of foreignlanguages in the United States, a constituency that has generally been ina bad way for a long time. There is, then, a large group of educatedpeople with strong vested interests in the continuation of well-fundedbilingual education (and other language) programs, and the voices ofsuch articulate defenders, it is claimed, are often ‘privileged’ over thoseof more ordinary citizens. Thus, Unz noted correctly, so far as it goes that his Proposition-227 initiative was one of the most popular inCalifornia history; he also wrote that: