Don’t Tread on Me! I Can Speak English!

If the British had defeated the Spanish Armada, say, 60 years earlier, it would have been a different story in the deli section of the supermarket near my home. Things would have turned out much better, I think.

I had turned my shopping cart into a particularly narrow aisle in front of the deli cooler when I ran up against a group of shoppers and caused a four-cart pileup. There was no real harm done, but it was a dumb thing to do and obviously my fault.

Before I could apologize, however, the woman facing me turned against a fellow victim--a slight, brown man to her right. “Why don’t you move !” she hissed through clenched teeth. Then she looked at me, the real troublemaker, and rolled her eyes in disgust--an invitation to join in her disdain for this imbecile from Mexico. “A fool,” she said to me.

The man was, in fact, acting like a fool: He said nothing and did not move. He had the stare of someone who did not understand what was going on, although he certainly sensed that the hostility was aimed at him. With one last huff, the woman jerked her cart free and stalked off. We other three went on our ways, too, without saying a word.

I found this minor fracas preying on my mind for an unusually long time. Why hadn’t the woman rebuked me instead? It couldn’t be pure bigotry, could it? In Orange County, where almost everyone considers himself sophisticated to some degree, it’s gauche to be blatant about it. In a Costa Mesa supermarket aisle, I would have expected icy condescension before outright hostility.

Something gave her the confidence to attack. Could it have been that his Mexican looks implied he was without the main self-defense weapon of ordinary life: the spoken word? Had she turned on him because he was the least likely to talk back?

Not understanding is so intimidating, and you don’t have to leave the country to experience it. They speak foreign languages all over Orange County: in TV repair shops, in lawyers’ offices, in school district offices--in every school corridor, for that matter. If you are on their turf and outnumbered and don’t understand the jargon, you are an outsider and vulnerable. It is so easy for them to make you appear--and feel--foolish.

And helpless. When the auto mechanic says it will take a $475 tappet-repair job to prevent your anti-sway bar from rupturing and causing the master cylinder to catch fire and explode, a person who doesn’t speak automobile has no defense. He or she is likely to stare as stupidly as the man in the market and feel just as anxious. Both know they are about to be treated very badly.

Knowing the language offers a leg up, and the leg needn’t be up very far to give a person a feeling of superiority. In line at the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Costa Mesa, I was behind a man who, unable to read English, was being guided through the Spanish-language test. It was taking longer than usual, of course. “If you can’t speak English, you shouldn’t be allowed to drive,” muttered the man behind me. A unique solution to traffic congestion in Paris and Tokyo.

At a department store counter where you pay gas bills, I saw another brown man who was having trouble understanding the clerk’s English. “I guess you have to speak a little Spanish to work this counter,” I remarked to the clerk. “I will never speak Spanish,” the clerk said with surprising intensity. You have to draw the line somewhere, her tone implied.

There is a lot of tension underlying all this, I suppose. According to some estimates, people with Spanish surnames will be the majority in California in the 1990s. Then, or soon afterwards, Spanish could become the majority language of California. On the used car lots along Harbor Boulevard, they will hang out signs that say, “English Is Spoken Here.”

This will be a difficult time for a state that couldn’t even cope with the metric system. It may be difficult as well for the woman in the market when a slight, brown man turns to her for no apparent reason and snarls, “Porque no pierdes peso! Tienes una llanta!” (Loose translation: “Why don’t you lose some weight! You’re fat!”)

This push and countershove between cultures could have been reduced by plenty, I think, had the Spanish launched their Armada a few decades earlier. The Spanish fleet would have been destroyed before the Spaniards colonized Mexico, and the British would most certainly have taken Mexico instead.

Then all those farm workers and busboys, all those men traveling in car trunks and living 20 to an apartment in Santa Ana, would speak like David Niven. They could say to their bosses in that suave, round-edged accent, “Fifty percent seems rather a lot to withhold for income tax, what? If you insist on paying me in cash, perhaps you would be good enough to document where these funds are going.”

And the slight, brown man in the deli aisle would not be silent when, for no good reason, a woman rebuked him with, “Why don’t you move! “

He would look at her with forebearance and say: “My good woman, your anger is misdirected. It should be obvious that I cannot move until this chap in front of me gives ground. You, however, have a clear path behind you, so if your mind is capable of such a simple maneuver, perhaps you could back up a bit.”