(DOWNLOAD) "Eating Your (Spanish) Words: The English Only Restaurant by Silvio Martinez Palau." by Bilingual Review # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Eating Your (Spanish) Words: The English Only Restaurant by Silvio Martinez Palau.
- Author : Bilingual Review
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 211 KB
Description
The English Only Restaurant was published in New York in 1990, during the resurgence of nativist sentiment in the United States, a national phenomenon that some sociologists consider to be "a backlash against legislative and judicial tolerance toward linguistic minorities in the areas of civil rights, voting rights and educational opportunities" (Marshall 22). At the time the play appeared, New York's Suffolk County was considering a restrictive official English measure that "would prohibit social workers, child-abuse investigators, consumer-protection advocates and doctors in county clinics from speaking to clients in Spanish or any other foreign language" (Schmitt qtd. in Zentella 173). In 1987 and 1988, similar restrictions had been unsuccessfully proposed in the state legislature, but it is significant that 84 percent of those polled in 1989 supported Suffolk County's repressive bill (Schmitt B3). In The English Only Restaurant Martinez Palau's play takes these propositions to their logical extreme: the banning of foreign languages from the nation's public spaces. The play presents a number of Latino characters who, seduced by the economic promises of assimilation, attempt to suppress their linguistic and cultural identities in order to run a business the "American way." Since the owner has an "English-only" license from the state, the presence in the restaurant of Spanish-speaking members of the local community threatens his enterprise; he contacts the ominous language police, who arrive in full military regalia and are ready to enforce the law there in Queens, New York City. The play ends in mayhem, and the circumstances of the event suggest that the tragic outcome is due as much to economic, political, and cultural factors associated with the American promise of prosperity for all assimilated "Americans" as to the violation of the fictional English-only statutes.