In 2018, Ana Suda and Martha Hernandez were detained in Havre, Montana, by a Customs and Border Protection agent for speaking Spanish while buying groceries at a gas station convenience store. Both are US citizens, fluent in English and Spanish. Both lived in Havre at the time and worked at a local nursing home. And both had valid Montana drivers licenses. Yet CBP agent Paul O’Neill singled them out because, “you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here.”
How rare is Spanish “up here”? Havre is a small town 30 miles from the border—the vast, unwalled, snowy Canadian border. According to the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey, in 2018, 390 of Havre’s 9,762 residents were Hispanic, and only 58 of them spoke Spanish. 58 is an approximate figure, with a margin of error of +/- 48, which means anywhere from 10 to 106 of Havre’s self-identified Hispanics speak Spanish. And that’s not counting the town’s Spanish teachers and their students, since Spanish is also taught in the Havre schools and at Montana State University-Northern, where even federal agents can attend the free Spanish conversation group in the college Multicultural Center.
Speaking Spanish may be rare in Havre, but it’s not unheard of. More important, it’s not a crime, even though Agent O’Neill seemed to treat it as one. But O’Neill and his supervisor held and interrogated Suda and Hernandez for 40 minutes in the store’s parking lot before releasing them. Backed by the ACLU, the women sued Customs and Border Protection, asserting they’d been profiled for speaking Spanish.
CBP settled the lawsuit last week for an undisclosed amount. Although the suit “revealed text messages from O’Neill’s cellphone that contained racist and derogatory language,” the agency did not admit fault, insisting that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Nevertheless, speaking Spanish in public has become a shibboleth that signals to at least some CBP agents, and to too many others, that the speaker does not belong.
A shibboleth is a word that’s used to test whether a speaker is friend or foe. The biblical story of the first shibboleth shows that what’s important is not the meaning of shibboleth, which remains uncertain, but how you say it. According to Judges 12:6, after the Gileadites defeated the Ephraimites, the vanquished army tried to retreat back over the Jordan. Gileadite sentries asked anyone trying to cross the river to say the word shibboleth, knowing that enemy soldiers could not pronounce the /sh/ sound and would say sibboleth instead. Some 42,000 failed the password test and were killed.
Fortunately, Havre is not Gilead, and although both Suda and Hernandez were forced to leave town after their story made national headlines, at least they weren’t executed for using the wrong language.
Unfortunately, not everyone using the “wrong” language is that lucky. Only a year earlier, in 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an engineer from India working in the US, was shot dead in a bar in Olathe, Kansas, by an American nativist shouting “Get out of my country.” In response, the Telangana American Telugu Association warned its members to speak English in public, not Telugu.
As we see from the first shibboleth, language-related prejudice has a long history of targeting not the language, but those who speak it. The US also has a long history of violent response to anyone speaking the “wrong” language. In the Midwest during World War I, speakers of German, or any language mistaken for German, were threatened, beaten, or worse. In one case, five rural women were fined for speaking German over a party-line telephone. In another, a German-speaking pastor was strung up by an angry mob, only to be cut down at the last minute by police who decided he had probably learned his lesson.
Today the shibboleths that trigger anything from a jeer to an arrest to a shooting, are Spanish, now the second most commonly-spoken language in the US, and the Asian languages that came to America along with the 1965 immigration reform. But telling immigrants, or those like Suda and Hernandez, who were born in the USA and are simply bilingual, “Go back where you came from,” rejects birthright citizenship, glosses over the inconvenient fact that Spanish predates English in the Western Hemisphere, and ignores the history of English as an immigrant language, not just in North America, where it arrived uninvited with 17th-century colonists, but even in England, where it waded ashore with invading Europeans twelve centuries before that.
Today’s English-only crowd insists that English is the glue that holds our diverse society together. But that’s wrong, too. A common language did not prevent the colonies from splitting with England in 1776, and it didn’t hold the union together in 1861. National unity comes, not from all English, all the time, or from attacking anyone not speaking it, but from the willingness of Americans to bind themselves together under a common government. And the politics of the past four years suggests we ought to focus more on preserving that common government than on some superficial differences in the languages we use.
