Embedded in the history of language in the Americas are centuries of settler colonialism, racial freedom, geographic dispossession, and political empowerment. Depending on what space, time, or place historians explore, a set of contradictory narratives emerges. Zevi Gutfreund's book Speaking American shows the paradoxical nature of language instruction evident in the ongoing political debates about national belonging. As Gutfreund contends, the fight over literacy and language rights was never a neutral act. Instead, it was at the precise center of Los Angeles's racial and political conflicts.
Speaking American covers a century of Los Angeles's social and political history (1900–1998). It takes a unique approach by jointly examining the history of Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles as they negotiated urban immigrant life. Rather than fragmenting their experiences in alternating chapters or relegating them to distinct themes, Gutfreund integrates their experiences throughout the book to reveal their common yet divergent educational paths. He shows how they lived through similar political conditions but were almost never affected in the same way. This methodological and structural approach provides an original take on Los Angeles's history, an exemplary relational study of race, and an excellent case of what histories of urban education reveal about liberalism and democracy. Despite the book's seemingly broad swath, its thematic organization, chronology, and narrative style make it appealing for historians seeking to understand how language, race, citizenship, and education were embodied in civic society.
Gutfreund argues that language instruction was not solely about what languages were included in educational curriculum or how pedagogical approaches were embraced, but also about how it influenced social inclusion or racial segregation. One of the Gutfreund's key arguments is that immigrant groups in Los Angeles “learned to ‘speak American’ in many different ways” (p. 4). Specifically, and as demonstrated throughout the book, Japanese and Mexican Angelinos were sensible to the political nature of language instruction. They learned that language was entangled in larger political debates about citizenship, nationalism, and structural inequality. Being perceptive of this social reality, Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans waged language instruction as a political tool against racial oppression.
One of the major contributions this book makes is that it reveals how Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans continually redefined language instruction and its relationship to racial justice. Despite linguistic aspirations of maintaining their home languages, they almost uniformly strove to learn English. Japanese Americans, for example, developed their own language schools and were active in sending their children to Japan to learn Japanese culture. Mexicans partook in similar projects. With support from the Mexican government, Mexican Angelinos founded schools where their children would learn Spanish, have access to books published in Mexico, and be taught by Mexican teachers. Even in these projects, Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans realized that English was necessary for their social inclusion.
When Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, the instruction of Japanese was banned in Manzanar War Relocation Center. Social reformers and educational policymakers perceived the instruction of Japanese in Manzanar as a national threat. Japanese language instruction became, paradoxically, a critical part of the US Military Intelligence Service (MIS) Language School's curriculum where Japanese Americans served national defense and postwar peace projects. The MIS program was so successful in the eyes of the US government that President Harry Truman praised its Japanese American students as “our human secret weapons” during World War II (p. 123). Learning to “speak American” was not only about what languages immigrants spoke, Gutfreund persuasively contends, but also about how the instruction of Spanish and Japanese was rationalized. Distinct debates ensued if Angelinos were learning Japanese or Spanish. Were they learning their own languages to help prevent juvenile delinquency, reinforce gender roles, learn vocational skills, or improve international affairs? Language instruction became a standard of measurement to determine who was worthy of national belonging.
The public role of Spanish and Japanese shifted over time. The use of primary sources such as publications written by social activists and educators, language policies crafted by social reformers, statistical data collected by educational administrators, community and school newspapers, oral histories, and teachers’ exams serve as a windows into larger educational processes. One example is the legal discourse regarding language instruction after World War II, as Gutfreund points out, when various stakeholders “used language learning to make the legal case for integration” (p. 101). In Westminster v. Mendez (1947), a school desegregation case originating in neighboring Orange County, the acquisition of English became an important reason to promote the inclusion of Spanish-speaking students into predominantly White schools where English was the norm. This causal argument suggested that Mexican children could not learn English properly in Mexican schools and, as a result, would fail to reach their intellectual capacity. Although scholars can contest the fundamental reasons for Mendez's victory, Gutfreund's inquiry into Los Angeles's desegregation movement raises questions about how the primacy of English language instruction was a broader euphemism justifying racial exclusion that sustained White supremacy.
After the internment camps closed in the mid-1940s and the subsequent US military occupation of Japan, the reintegration of Japanese American children into public schools coincided with a new civil rights movement. By the early 1950s and mid-1960s, integrationists characterized language instruction as one of the pivotal issues that could dismantle White-only schools. For the first time, bilingual education and English as a second language (ESL) programs were framed as innovative linguistic experiments that benefited all racial groups. Two months after the Bilingual Education Act passed in 1968, thousands of Chicano students in East Los Angeles walked out of schools in a weeklong set of protests. Better known as the “Blowouts,” the actions of these Chicano student activists helped redefine the role of language instruction in schools by challenging school districts’ refusal to incorporate Chicano history and culture. In their list of demands, students demanded the development of bilingual and bicultural education programs, the hiring of Spanish-speaking staff, and more educational access for Spanish-speaking parents. Political struggles over what languages should be taught in Los Angeles public schools extended into the 1980s. Gutfreund shows how debates now circled around the efficacy of instruction in languages other than English. Additional debates emerged questioning data that demonstrated the success of bilingual education programs. And, by the 1990s, Los Angeles was a “hotbed for original language projects” (p. 168) when language immersion programs became an alternative to bilingual education, and English-only campaigns gained traction at the state level.
Overall, Speaking American radically shifts the focus of language instruction as a peripheral issue to one that sits at the center of immigrant urban life. Despite the book's many strengths, one clear shortfall is that the book by and large is based on English language sources. Incorporating Japanese or Spanish language sources—newspapers, reports, or oral histories—would have added a perspective that English language sources failed to capture. This book, however, remains an important study that adds to the growing body of research on California, and the Mexican and Japanese American experiences in the twentieth century. It helps revise old immigrant models based on the European immigrant experiences that failed to consider how race, language, and education were critical factors in the struggle for citizenship.
