Struggling with Spanish

This isn't my grandmother's Miami any more. It happens to me when I'm walking down the street, someone will ask me a question or make a comment, usually about the weather. The only catch, they speak Spanish to me. Days and nights can go by and the only language I hear when I'm out and about is Spanish. My long dark hair = Latina = speaks Spanish. I speak a little Spanish, enough to get by. Enough to talk about the weather or buy stuff at stores and cafes. It happens to Taylor, who is a mezcla, a mix of white and Latino ethnicities, but she speaks as little Spanish as I do, her parents thought it was more important for her to know English, only English, little did they know, 25 years later, they would have made a blunder as to which the predominant language would be in SoFlo.

I could get more session work in my deemed profession if I spoke better Espanol. I am going to get the Rosetta Stone CDs or just do more immersion, learn more things to say about the weather....

From a recent news article:

This situation, so pleasing to Latin American immigrants, makes some English speakers feel marginalized. In the 1950s, it's estimated that more than 80 percent of Miami-Dade County residents were non-Hispanic whites. But in 2006, the Census Bureau estimates that number was only 18.5 percent, and in 2015 it is forecast to be 14 percent. Hispanics now make up about 60 percent.

"The Anglo population is leaving," said Juan Clark, a sociology professor at Miami Dade College. "One of the reactions is to emigrate toward the north. They resent the fact that (an American) has to learn Spanish in order to have advantages to work. If one doesn't speak Spanish, it's a disadvantage."


According to the Census, 58.5 percent of the county's 2.4 million residents speak Spanish - and half of those say they don't speak English well. English-only speakers make up 27.2 percent of the county's residents.

In the mainly Cuban city of Hialeah and in the Miami neighborhood of Little Havana, 94 percent of residents identified themselves as Hispanic.

Andrew Lynch, an expert on linguistics and bilingualism at the University of Miami, said that the presence of Spanish-speakers first became an issue in Miami-Dade County in the 1960s and '70s with the arrival of Cuban immigrants and intensified in the '80s with immigrants from not just Cuba, but Argentina, Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America. The exodus of English speakers soon followed.