Talk like Us or Else-

Linguistic Assimilation in former Yugoslvaia

by Rey Irizarry

                The Croats and Serbs of former Yugoslavia have been at odds for a long time due to historical events that put them at odds. Starting with the Byzantine Empire, the Turkish rule, the Balkan Wars, WWI, and WWII, the region has always seemed to be caught in the middle of nation state-building, nationalistic control, and religious conflict. The central conflicting groups have been the Croats and Serbs, which would lead to the Yugoslavian War in the 1990s. Both groups had been oppressing the other, but the minority has little power against the majority. The Croats were the majority and they intended to assimilate the Serbs into their "more superior" nationalism. One method that they used was linguistic assimilation.

                Linguistic assimilation is a tactic used in ethnic cleansing, which many times leads to genocide. In "Fires of Hatred, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe," author Norman M. Naimark points out that "the intention of ethnic cleansing is to remove a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory" (Naimark 2001, p3). During the 19th century, nationalism was on the rise and Croats and Serbs differed in their opinion of languages. According to Birgitta Busch and Helen Kelly-Holmes, authors of "Language, Discourse, and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States," "On the Serbian side, Vuk Karadzic... under the influence of the prevailing Romantic identification of languages with people, and dimly aware of the three major dialect groups, had broadly assigned Cakavian to Croats, Kajkavian to Slovenes, and Stokavian to Serbs. This symmetrical distribution... made all Stokavian speakers (Orthodox, Catholic, and Mohammedan) appear as Serbs" (2004, pg 25). On the Croatian side, during the Illyrian movement, philologists and other inflential men created the Vienna Agreement essentially stating that they were all the same and should speak a common language (Busch and Kelly-Holmes 2004, pg 25). This marked the beginning of a Serbo-Croatian language. As time went on more forceful measures were taken to assimilate the Sebs, who realized the new language was not inherently equal and appealing to the Serbs national identity. During WWII, it was the policy of the Croats to force a third of the Serbs to convert to Catholicism, to deport a third, and abolish the remaining Serbs. The Cyrillic alphabet was outlawed and many were forced to use the Latin alphabet system that the Croats used.

                It has been the mission of many minorities to establish linguistic human rights in their homeland. Often, many of the minority groups are faced with two major framing challenges, utilitarian view of linguistic worth and the political legacy of linguistic assimilation (Heidemann 2012). Many Croats used the utilitarian view of linguistic worth to frame the linguistic human rights movements in former Yugoslavia as pointless and backwards. "The utilitarian view of linguistic worth posits that the value of a language rests largely if not solely on the capacity of that language to promote socio-economic mobility and opportunity.  The greater the capacity a language has for promoting material advancement the more likely it is to be valorized and adopted by growing numbers of individuals" (Heidemann 2012). With this definition in mind, minority languages are deemed less useful because the languages are not represented in the power structures. With former Yugoslavia in mind, the Serbs wanted their language, alphabet, and in essence their identity to be recognized, while the Croats tried to unify the language. The intent of unifying the language meant that Croats saw the Serbian language as a step backward and as an intentional depriving of their opportunity to acquire, as Heidemann puts it, a "more useful language."

                "Serbian and Croatian language varieties have (re)emerged in the 1990s to replace Serbo-Croat, itself the artificial 50 year language product of the Yugoslav Communist Federation under Tito" (May 2004). In December 1991, the Croatian constitution named Croatia over all the states and its minorities, but claimed to give everyone the right to express their language (Karadjis, Link). The Serbs continue to fight for linguistic human rights and fight against the utilitarian view that put minority languages in opposition with the ideals of the majority. Though, the Yugoslavian War has been over for about 3 decades, animosity still looms near and history is not forgotten.

·         Busch, Birgitta and Kelly-Holmes, Helen. 2004.  Language, Discourse, and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States. Multilingual Matters.

·         Chronology for Serbs in Croatia. http://www.refworld.org/docid/469f387dc.html

·         Heidemann, Kai. 2012. Notes on the Ideological Challenges of Minority Language Activism. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/notes-on-the-ideological-challenges-of-minority-language-activism/#more-3011

·         Karadjis, Michael. National oppression and the collapse of Yugoslavia. http://links.org.au/node/166

·         May, Stephen. 2004. Language Rights and the Construction of the Minority Language.http://www.norrag.org/en/publications/norrag-news/online-version/language-politics-and-the-politics-of-language-in-education/detail/language-rights-and-the-construction-of-the-minority-language.html

The State of Chicano Nationalism

What does nationalism mean for Latinos and Latinas in the United States? Latin American nationalism often focussed on the culture of the people of whatever country the people were in, eschewing European and American influences where they were seen as unneeded or intrusive. There is a strong sense of the peoples of many of the Latin American countries that had strong nationalist movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s trying to stand on their own as a culture. The focus on mestizo heritage seems to help make the people of these places feel united in their relative newness as a people; not European, but also not Indigenous anymore either.

But again I ask the question what does nationalism mean for Latinos and Latinas in the United States? If we look at Chicano culture, we see the lingering effects of Mexican nationalism’s artistic and cultural movements; murals on the sides of buildings that reference the style of Diego Rivera, for instance. We see a sense of nationalistic pride among Chicanos and Chicanas, even though many have never been to Mexico. It would appear that their sense of identity is connected to a sense of nationalism of where their people originated. This has lead to good relations between Chicanos and Mexicans politically, strengthening US-Mexican relations. This interview with Jorge Bustamante and Jose Lopez Portillo, experts on the subject of US-Mexican relations, sheds light on the pattern of strengthening Chicano-Mexican relations. 

Yet not all Chicanos and Chicanas feel such a strong attachment back to Mexico and its culture. In some areas, Mexican-descended people are identifying less and less as Chicano or Chicana. Declining interest in Chicano Studies at San Diego State University demonstrates this change in attitude rather well. At a time when Latino enrollment is up campus wide, the department concerned specifically with Chicano studies is seeing fewer and fewer students, yet at the community college in the same city enrollment in the Chicano Studies department is nearly over capacity. This seems to point to a socio-economic component to Latino-American nationalism. As Latinos and Latinas become more affluent, perhaps the need for the unifying force of nationalistic pride is less necessary? It does track with how many nationalistic movements in Latin America were in response to neoliberal oppression in those countries, creating a social pressure for mutual support that was relieved through the outlet of nationalism. 

So where does this leave nationalism for Latinos and Latinas in the United States? Does Chicano or Dominican or Cuban ethnic nationalism mean what it used to? It seems to represent a resistance to assimilation, either on the part of those trying to assimilate, or the larger receiving US culture. Are the dual reactions of increasing national pride for some and decreasing national pride for others indicative of a shift in Latino Culture, or of an increasing polarization of the political culture of the United States? Time will tell.

Making It Happen

                It’s a good feeling knowing that Latinos/Hispanics now hold the largest number for 18-24(year old) college enrollments. In 2011 the number of 18-24 year old Latinos was at about 2 million. Latinos also were counted for 16.5 percent of all enrollments. Not only have Latinos held the highest number of enrollments but they have been creating record numbers with them actually finishing college with about 112,000

Latinos finishing and earning their associates degrees and close to 140,000 receiving their bachelor’s degree. Even though these numbers are pretty staggering they are still behind whites and blacks when it comes to receiving these degrees. Regardless when comparing numbers from now to back then Latinos have been touched by the movement and tagged along. Though we are behind at the moment it is progress and it’s happening quickly. With dramatic increases, for example there was a 15 percent increase from 2010 to 2011 alone. We are also now the largest minority group on campuses across the nation. Though many Latino students aren’t necessarily going to universities they are being attracted by HIS’s, they are basically small college credited establishment. I would really like to see more Latinos then there already are on big university campuses, as well as a bigger Latino population on schools like Harvard University, Columbia University and even colleges like Dartmouth. It is for certain that Latinos are in numbers, not only that but besides being one of the biggest populated groups I want to see Latinos attend these top schools to show that we also have the smarts. In a couple of years I would also like to see that many more Latinos are completing college not only attending. I say this because Latinos also hold a big number when it comes to school failure. The number of school failures or Latino college dropout could be dropped but it needs to start with parents adding incentives and pushing their young ones to pursue college and higher education. I say that because of the cultural argument that explains one of the main reasons why Latinos are failing out of school. The cultural argument claims that children are stuck in “culture of poverty” which means that a lot of Latinos are use to a cycle of failure where they know that regardless there going to fail, therefore lacking in school and failing out. Another big thing would be changing some of the class learning experience and education level at certain schools. Many schools lack in teaching students in general what they need to know in order to be prepared for college. Not being prepared for college obviously means that the form education at the moment is doing nothing but setting up students to fail. Though Latinos/Hispanic college statistics have greatly improved there are things that can be done to make even greater changes. Seeing it I believe it all will have to start with Latino households and parents encouraging these bright teens. Latinos are making it to colleges and more and more will be completing it. These are topics and things that I love to learn about because you know that your ethnicity though not wanted is making moves.

The Caucasian/Latino Disparity in Plainfield, IL

For decades, Latino students have been disadvantaged in the public school system. The etiology of the problem is multi-faceted, ranging from rapidly expanding Latino populations to ineffective teachers to a language barrier in the daily curriculum as well as on standardized tests. Regarding the language barrier, there are four million Latinos in U.S. public schools that do not speak English as their primary language. According to the Department of Education in 2002, 1 in 3 teachers working with these ESL students were not sufficiently trained or lacking certification.

Poor standardized test scores are often linked to low socioeconomic status which is made up of disproportionately minority students. However, the disparity between Latino and white students goes beyond rich versus poor. In my hometown of Plainfield, Illinois, a middle class suburb with a median income of $81,000, Latino students struggle disproportionately to whites. It is evident that, disregarding socioeconomic status, there is a major discrepancy occurring between Latinos and whites.

There are four high schools in Plainfield: Central, South, North and East. Among these schools, the South and East campuses have the highest number of Latino students with 27.7 and 29 percent respectively. Not coincidentally, these two campuses have the lowest percentage of students meeting and exceeding standards on the Prairie State Achievement Exams (PSAE). Over the last three years, the discrepancy between the South and East campuses and the North and Central campuses has been on average between 10 and 15 percent lower.

It should come as no surprise that throughout the Plainfield high schools, 93 percent of teachers are white while Latinos only make up 3.8 percent. There is a clear gap in the scores of schools with higher percentages of Latinos versus the schools with lower percentages. Plainfield South High School has the lowest percent of students exceeding standards and the highest percent of students in the warning level. Plainfield South High School ranks 460^th out of 669 high schools in the state of Illinois based on PSAE scores.

I believe that in order to alleviate this problem, Plainfield School District should attempt to hire more Latino teachers. The percent of Latino students versus the percent of Latino teachers is nearly ten times higher. I believe that Latino teachers would have a better understanding of the issues faced by Latino students and be able to better assist them by helping to eliminate the language barrier in the curriculum.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2070930,00.html

https://iirc.niu.edu/school.aspx?schoolID=560992020220002

http://www.schooldigger.com/go/IL/schoolrank.aspx?level=3&findschool=3174004524

A Milestone in the Discussion of Immigration: The Associated Press to Stop Using "Illegal Immigrant"

A peaceful demonstration in support of immigration reform.

One of the articles we read for class, Dropping the Hyphen? Becoming Latin(a)-American through Racialized Assimilation by Tanya Golash-Boza talks in some depth about how Latino and Latina immigrants label themselves and the reasons for these labels. In essence, the article talks about how using a hyphenated identity such as “Mexican-American” or “Colombian-American” tends to psychologically separate those using hyphenated names from people who identify simply as “American,” and more to the point, continued use of a hyphenated identity in subsequent generations is often a side-effect of racial discrimination encountered in a particular community. 

Recently the Associated Press and several other major news organizations, though notably not the New York Times, have removed the terms “illegal immigrant” and pejorative “illegal” from their style guides when referring to people who have immigrated to the United States illegally. As this article on Colorlines, a news website focussing on racial issues discusses, this move signals an important change in the mass media’s rhetoric regarding the immigration of people from Latin-American countries. With luck, the move away from the divisive term “illegal” will alleviate some of the widespread racist attitudes towards immigrants in this country and lead more of them to drop the hyphen, so to speak.

While perhaps not always intentional, though in some cases it certainly is, the use of the term “illegal immigrant” instead of “person” subtly dehumanizes the person being discussed. This ties rather directly back into the themes of “Dropping the Hyphen?” By making “illegal immigrant” the name by which we refer to people, it makes “illegal” the most important attribute about them, with “immigrant” closely following it to reinforce the idea that they are not from here; that they are not us. This serves to enable discrimination against a group that is unfortunately easily identified as non-white where those making policies and decisions regarding immigration in this country are still by-and-large white. It is through this path that the words we use to describe people affects public opinion on those people. 

The Associated Press’ decision to finally stop using these terms is something of a milestone in the discussion of immigration in the United States not because it will necessarily change the discussion overnight, but because it follows a long term trend among other news agencies that reprint Associated Press articles to edit those articles to not call people illegal immigrants. News agencies are notoriously slow to change their outlooks and policies, partially to maintain consistency in their reporting, which likely means that public pressure to make this change has been growing quite strong. As pressure wells up to make policy changes like this and policies change, the prevalence of terms like “illegal” will begin to drop, giving less fuel to the xenophobic sentiment that pervades the discussion of immigration in this country.

There is still a long way to go, however. Noted rich old white guy, John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona, has stated publicly in the wake of the Associated Press’ announcement that he will not stop using the term “illegal” to refer to those who have entered the United States illegally. McCain’s opinions in this regard do not seem terribly uncommon, as evinced by the New York Times’ continued use of “illegal immigrant” despite increasingly vocal popular pressure to change its policy. The all-too-common view that immigrants in this country illegally are criminals is slowly dissipating, but old habits die hard. Changing how we talk about those habits should help them die faster, which I can only hope to help into its shallow, hastily dug grave.

What Cuba's prevalence of doctors says about its educational system and ours

A Cuban Doctor tending cholera patients in Haiti

Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other nation in the world, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Even though many countries don’t appear to have data on that chart, Cuba still comes in well above every major industrialized nation according to their data. Cuba has double the doctors per capita of the United Kingdom and France, and roughly triple the doctors per capita of the United States and Japan. These are nations that see themselves, and are commonly seen by others as well, as world leaders in many areas, including science and medicine. Yet Cuba, with its ailing economy and resultantly poor access to the high technology fruits of industrialization, has managed to educate more people to be doctors than any of them. Why is this? What could cause this disparity in the actuality of Cuba’s healthcare system with the common perception that richer countries have better access to doctors?

Cuba has long had a history of strong support of public education, even though in the 1950s Batista pushed back against educational institutions to try to suppress the opposition from academic areas of Cuban society. As discussed in this article about Cuba’s education system, the rise of Castro’s Revolution saw a major upswing in governmental funding and support for education, including expanding Cuba’s medical training system from a single school in Havana to at least one medical school in every province in Cuba. The results of this are clear from the statistics I discussed earlier; Cuba has produced more doctors than almost anywhere else in the world when considered in as a percentage of its total population.

The prevalence of doctors in Cuba is undoubtedly a good thing for the country as a whole, yet it has not only been a boon to the people of Cuba. As we discussed in class, Cuba has so many doctors that there simply aren’t enough jobs for them to go around, resulting in many Cuban doctors emigrating to other Spanish-speaking countries and causing a subsequent increase in the per-capita prevalence of doctors in those countries. In this way, the value of education in Cuba benefits all of Latin America.
But what does all this have to do with the Latino-American experience? The prevalence of doctors in Cuba is merely a symptom of Revolutionary Cuba’s dedication to education, a dedication that isn’t shared by the United States. Latinos and Latinas in the United States are less likely to attain a college education than other groups. Coming from a country where education is available for any who want it, the American education system must come as something of a shock to Cuban immigrants. Not only is education not subsidized to the same degree in the United States as in Cuba, but frequently racist bias within educational institutional structures in the United States reduces the opportunities for Latinos and Latinas to even reach the point where financial barriers come into play.

Reading From The Left

Why is it so dynamic and evolutionary? This is the question that always pop in my mind every time I think about south America's politics. Since I graduated from journalism and start shaping my view about the world I was taking immediately by Russian writers such as Pushkin,Dostoyevsky,and absolutely by Yuri Bondarve “The Hot Snow Novel.” However, the heroes of the human cause lived on the other site of the world, they dreamed and song on Latin American's soil. Simon Bolivar, Che Guevara, and even the most rebellion musician Bob Marley, they all fought for humanity,freedom,and equality.

My fascination by the Latin America’s history inflamed in 2000 when I went on a trip to Nicaragua and Cuba , I witnessed the love of music, I tasted the rebellious blood in each drink,and I observed the contradiction of the Marxism philosophy. The south America’s politics is similar to a volcano in its resting stage ready to erupt at any time. By taking the historical back ground into consideration,this article will analyze the influential elements that shaped Latin America politics. One of the great aspect in South America formation is “ self-identity” for Latin American's people as a whole. Since the present of the Spanish ship on the shore of the Paria peninsula to the moment that last Spanish soldier left the continent , one question faced the people's of Latin America and needed to be answered “Who are we” The present of the White -European and the enslavement of the Black-African

changed the homozygous society of the indigenous people to a heterozygous society with lost identity. The rise of Nationalism movement throughout the continent was the normal outcome for long search for an identity to be claimed. The nationalism movement in South America fulfilled most of the need of Latin's societies on the psychological aspect such as self-identity and national pride as well as the economic needs such as jobs and production. Within Nationalism came the idea of self-acceptance and foreign rejection, the Latin American's people rejected the White- European identity and embraced the Native identity. The rise of communism in Latin America was also the outcome of the rejection to the USA intervention and manipulation of the political and the economical situation of the continent. The communism version of Latin America stand as example of its uniqueness;in other word, while communist regime around the world started to collapse after the fallen of the Berlin's wall ,the communist parties in Latin America are making an astonishing comeback.

By putting all the previous discussion and points into a concept of understanding the complex mosaic of the Latin American's politics, the role of self-determination and identity seem to be clear. No doubt other forces such as did influence the political scene,but the rejection of the intruder usually highlighted the day . This motion of identity-searching and rejection of other was no created from a vacuum,but was the out come of along history of colonization and revolution.

http://youtu.be/ZCFHYyErkA0