State tries to close a Spanish gap

Monday, Feb. 24, 2003 | 9:43 a.m.

A 68-year-old county employee learns how to say "speak slower, please" in Spanish.

A local bank staffs more than half of a North Las Vegas branch with bilingual employees.

Las Vegas' city website posts a link to a translation of the municipality's information into Spanish.

Nevada now ranks sixth in the nation in the percentage of its population that speaks Spanish at home, and the number is up from the 2000 Census was taken, according to a Census Bureau report released Friday. The trend is seen in the state's public and private sectors daily, as Nevada becomes more and more bilingual.

The report, based on a 2001 survey of 3,108 homes statewide, shows that 16 percent of residents spoke Spanish at home, compared with 15 percent in 2000. In Clark County, the numbers were even higher, at 17.6 percent in 2001 compared with 16.5 percent in 2000.

But the meaning of the federal agency's numbers go beyond the state's governments and businesses scrambling to get up to speed in the language spoken by 19 Latin American countries and Spain, observers said.

"It's indicative of the magnitude of immigration in Nevada," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national group that favors reducing the number of immigrants entering the United States.

Nevada saw its Hispanic population go from 11 percent to nearly 20 percent from 1990 to 2000, placing it in the company of states such as Texas, New Mexico, California, Arizona and Florida, all of which have been home to large Hispanic populations for decades.

Similarly, the percentage of Spanish-speakers has more than doubled since 1990, when it was at 7.7 percent.

"Now states like Nevada are going to have to encounter issues like California and these other states have," Mehlman said.

The issues, he said, stem from immigration's impact on a society's education, health care, economy, and environment.

Edwin Canizalez, coordinator for a new statewide program that makes sure Nevada's courtroom interpreters are up to national standards, said the growth in the state's Spanish-speaking population raises the question of access.

"The bottom line for our program is equal access to justice," he said. "And it only makes sense that people are going to need access to other services in Spanish as well -- whether it's as consumers, voters, or patients."

But Manuel Lemus, an organizer for the Culinary Union and president of the Las Vegas Cuban Association, said that providing services in Spanish is a two-edged sword.

"The part that worries me is that if nearly 18 percent of the people in Clark County speak Spanish at home, it means they're not becoming integrated into the system or assimilated into society," he said.

Lemus came to the United States eight years ago and rose from hotel kitchens to a union office. About 40 percent of the Culinary Union's nearly 50,000 members are Hispanic, according to Glen Arnodo, its political director. Its force of 9,000 housekeepers is nearly 70 percent Hispanic.

Even so, Lemus said he has made the effort to speak English at work -- "even if I butcher it," he said.

The union organizer's answering machine is in both languages, the contrast notable between a faltering English followed by Cuba's staccato Spanish.

But at home with his 74-year-old mother, Lemus, like many other Nevadans, speaks the language of his homeland.

Still, he insists there has to be a balance between services in Spanish and attempts to learn English.

"On the one hand, basic services have to be provided in Spanish so that they're accessible," he said.

"But on the other hand, we have to make sure we're becoming a part of society."

This, in part, falls on the shoulders of the leaders in the Hispanic community, who should promote the benefits of learning English to recent immigrants, he said.

Canizalez, of the interpreter program out of Reno, said the children of immigrants could be a boon for our state and nation, if properly educated.

"We live in a global economy and kids that grow up bilingual can actually be an asset in the future," he said.

But the risks to society of delaying learning English are high, Mehlman said.

"One hundred years ago, you had immigrants from a number of different language groups and they had no choice but to learn English," he said.

Having a common language has given the United States unity, Mehlman added.

"(But) this unity ... is now endangered, if you have people showing geographical proximity, but living linguistically apart," he said.