By Ralph Rewes

The So-Called “Multicultural Approach” Is Nothing But Anti-Hispanic Bullshit. It all began with the misadventures of a resented Russian woman, whose name I do not wish to remember. Years ago, when Dade County was officially bilingual, she got hysterical when she saw that the signs at Miami Airport were in English and Spanish and with the help of some other linguistically altered souls formed a pro English-only movement to vote the existing bilingual law out in the mostly-Hispanic Miami-Dade county. This is the same group who objected the term “Anglo” (short for Anglophones) because they put English speaking whites and blacks under the same classification. They all hid their crooked thoughts behind. The phony banner was to say that they were defending the rights of people who spoke neither English nor Spanish. Her deranged gimmick was ever since picked up at all levels in the State of Pascua Florida, discovered by Ponce de León. Today they still do, and we still suffer the consequences of an embittered woman who behaved like the watermelon photo-ripping nut.

What was wrong with this anti-Spanish campaign that wiped out thousands of bilingual signs in what is now Miami-Dade? There were many things wrong. First, it endangered the lives of the thousands of elders in the region who did not speak English. Then, it imposed the English-language normal supremacy in a racist way (nobody had never denied the importance and the need to learn English in South Florida) by underestimating the language that was the first European language ever spoken in America. Furthermore, it created a lot of confusion in the bureaucratic paperwork of that county among the people unable to understand laws and regulations that were previously translated. In the end, the Russian bigot project backfired because even young Cubans, who voted against bilingualism because they were facing double studies, got more attached to their roots after feeling culturally attacked. Even those that did not utter a word in Spanish learned it and began to use it more frequently.

The phony boloney justification. In America, the continent, there are two, only two main languages, English and Spanish and two important languages, Portuguese and French. In Florida, together with English, the language of the majority, there is ONLY ONE another important language — Spanish — spoken by a large segment of the population, which is also mostly concentrated in South Florida, and spreading rapidly to other counties, official acceptance or not, causing panic in some English-only people, who feel culturally threatened, instead of being culturally enriched.

Losing ground before reality, the enemies of the Spanish language have concentrated all their efforts at the capitol, to prevent government agencies from becoming fully bilingual. Which was their most effective weapon? The “multicultural” bullshit that makes the State waste thousands of tax dollars, or donations from grants to keep divisions busy, designing and writing brochures in every language they can imagine (even Tagalog and Chinese dialect that no educated Chinese every heard of), even those nobody reads, while depriving the large Spanish population of essential information — and this is the ultimate goal of people that abhor Spanish.

A case in point: The Haitian Creole is one of those concoctions. Creole is a language for the illiterate, designed by people who apparently had a good intention in their mind (for that of the “road to hell is paved with good intentions”), to help the illiterate population of Haiti learn how to read and write.

The actual result is caging that Haitian population in a small, barred linguistic circle forever. Instead of teaching them French, a familiar and an international, rich, important means of communication, French is a language with a fantastic literary wealth and the latest scientific knowledge. Teaching French, instead of wasting their time in Creole, would improve the horrendous condition they are living in that county, caused mostly by ignorance of what is going on in technological advances in the world. No, Creole promoters decided that Haitian knowledge should be limited to poorly translated jargon, while they pocketed the profits of artificially creating and translating common documents.

Yet, the state of Florida spends thousands of dollars printing materials in an artificial language that few can read, and those who can read it seldom understand the gobbledygook resulting from the good intention (a good intention of getting tax money from ignorant officials).

On the other hand, MyFlorida.com, the famous portal to everything official, has always rejected the idea of having at least its portal in Spanish because such a step “may be offensive” to extreme minorities. Yet the only one page in Spanish THREE STRIKES AND YOU ARE OUT! (TRES STRIKES Y ESTÁS FUERA)*, poorly written in second person as it was addressed to Hispanics as if they were potential criminals — page totally offensive, poorly written or translated, and discriminatory since it was not written in Haitian or any other multi-culturally approved language.

However, comes election time when the Hispanic votes are mostly needed, and no expense is spared to print political propaganda, and empty words and promises. In those cases, even English-only members of the Russian woman’s clique utter a couple of words in Spanish with the Cuban accent they paradoxically can’t stand.

Hispanics don’t have anything against political propaganda in Spanish. But every piece of propaganda in this language should remind Hispanics of these facts and make them ask, “why then, those who politick in Spanish don’t expand the use of that language to provide the Hispanic population with the important information they need to receive benefits or simply get along well through the intricacies of State government?”