How Spanish Can Help Us Survive Viral Times: A Journey Into the Heart of a Language We Need Now More Than Ever

By Ariel Dorfman, TomDispatch

16 February 21

Over these last few years, here’s a problem that’s sometimes bothered me: how to translate Donald Trump — whether, in his initial presidency-launching moments in 2015 when he was fulminating about those Mexican “rapists” or, in his final weeks in the Oval Office, as he tweeted furiously about that “fake election”? Sadly enough, it evidently wasn’t a problem for 74 million Americans, though the number of them still speaking Trumpese seems to be dwindling.

Perhaps my problem was that I’ve never been good at foreign languages. I used to say that, at the height of my ability to speak French (and that was when I was young and had a French girlfriend), I could get into any conversation and out of none. In Chinese, which I also studied once in my life, I’ve never forgotten trying to describe something to an old Chinese man — possibly almost as old as I am now! — and having him sweetly and politely suggest that, next time, I might try using tones. (Since Chinese is, of course, a tonal language, he was telling me all I needed to know about my linguistic skills.)

In the years before TomDispatch, when I was a book editor, those minimalist skills of mine always left me with the deepest admiration for translators. What a talent — to be able to usher someone like me into other vibrant worlds that I would never have had access to. In those years, for instance, I published the work of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano (translated from the Spanish by that wonderful old lefty Cedric Belfrage). If you don’t believe just how magical that world of wonder they welcomed me into was, then check out Galeano’s three volume series I published in English in those years on the history of the Americas from the first creation myth to what was then late last night: Memory of Fire: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Centuries of the Wind.

Or for that matter check out any of the works of another author I once had translated and published, Ariel Dorfman, who has, in these years, become a TomDispatch regular and a translator par excellence of this strange world we all now live in. Today, he offers us a little lesson in language skills when it comes to the Spanish that’s so much a part of our American world and yet, in Trumpese, was officially banished, along with the Muslims the president also hated with a passion. Tom

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

How Spanish Can Help Us Survive Viral Times
A Journey into the Heart of a Language We Need Now More Than Ever

“Una nación bajo Diós, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.”

hen Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival. It was a joy to hear my native language given a prominent place at a moment when the need to pursue the promise of “liberty and justice for all” couldn’t be more pressing.

A sense of arrival, I say, and yet Spanish arrived on these shores more than a century before English. In that language, the first Europeans explorers described what they called “el Nuevo Mundo,” the New World — new for them, even if not for the indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands for millennia, only to be despoiled by the invaders from abroad. The conquistadors lost no time in claiming their territories as possessions of the Spanish crown and, simultaneously, began naming them.

Much as we may now deplore those colonial depredations, we still regularly use the words they left behind without considering their origins. Florida, which derives from flor, flower in Spanish, because Ponce de León first alighted in Tampa Bay on an Easter Sunday (Pascua Florida) in 1513. And then there is Santa Fe (Holy Faith) and Los Angeles (the Angels), founded in 1610 and 1782 respectively, and so many other names that we now take for granted: Montana (from montañas), Nevada (from nieve, or snow), Agua Dulce, El Paso, and Colorado, to name just a few. And my favorite place name of all, California, which comes from a legendary island featured in one of the books of chivalry that drove Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes, mad and set him on the road to seek justice for all.

It was not justice, not justicia para todos, however, that the millions who kept Spanish alive over the centuries were to encounter in the United States. On the contrary, what started here as an imperial language ended up vilified and marginalized as vast swaths of the lands inhabited by Spanish speakers came under the sway of Washington. As Greg Grandin has documented in his seminal book, The End of a Myth, the expansion of the United States, mainly into a West and a Southwest once governed by Mexico, led to unremitting discrimination and atrocities.

It was in Spanish that the victims experienced those crimes: the girls and women who were raped, the men who were lynched by vigilantes, the families that were separated, the workers who were deported, the children who were forbidden to speak their native tongue, the millions discriminated against, mocked, and despised, all suffering such abuses in Spanish, while holding onto the language tenaciously, and passing it on to new generations, constantly renewed by migrants from Latin America.

Through it all, the language evolved with the people who used it to love and remember, fight and dream. In the process, they created a rich literature and a vibrant tradition of perseverance and struggle. As a result, from that suppressed dimension of American history and resistance, Spanish is today able to offer up words that can help us survive this time of pandemic.

That’s what I’ve discovered as I navigated the many pestilences ravaging our lives in the last year: the Spanish I’ve carried with me since my birth has lessons of hope and inspiration, even for my fellow citizens who are not among the 53 million who speak it.

Words of Aliento for Our Current Struggle

Aliento tops the list of Spanish words that have recently mattered most to me. It means breath, but also encouragement. Alentar is to give someone the chance to breathe, to hearten them. (Think, in English, of the word encourage, which comes from the same root as corazón, heart, in Spanish.)

It’s worth remembering this connection today, when so many are dying because they lack breath and not even a ventilator can save them. Because they don’t have aliento, their heart stops. Perhaps they can’t breathe because others didn’t have the courage, el coraje, to help them survive, didn’t rage against the conditions that allowed them to die unnecessarily. Recall as well that so many of us in this country felt suffocated in another sense, breathless with the fear that we wouldn’t survive as a republic, not as a democracy, however imperfect it might have been.

Maybe that’s why, last year, so many Americans felt represented by the next to last words of George Floyd, repeated more than 20 times before he died: “I can’t breathe.” If he had cried out those words in Spanish, he would not have gasped, “No tengo aliento,” though that would have been true. He would undoubtedly have said: “No puedo respirar.”

Respirar. English speakers use the verb “to breathe,” but can certainly appreciate the various echoes respirar has in English, since it’s derived from the same word in Latin, “spirare,” that has bequeathed us spirit, inspire, and aspire. When we inhale and exhale in Spanish, I like to think that we’re simultaneously in communion with the sort of spirit that keeps us alive when the going is rough.

In normal times, the sharing of air is a reminder that we’re all brothers and sisters, part of the same humanity, invariably inhaling and exhaling one another, letting so many others into our lungs and vice versa. But these times are far from normal and the air sent our way by strangers or even loved ones can be toxic, can lead to us expiring. So rather than respirar together in 2021, we need to inspirar each other, to aspirar together for something better. We need to band together in a conspiracy of hope so that every one of us on the planet will be granted the right to breathe, so that good things can transpire.

As so many of the initial measures of the Biden-Harris presidency suggest, to begin to undo the venomous divisiveness of the Trump era, we all need to tomar aliento or breathe in new ways to survive. We need to have more vida juntos or life with one another in order to go beyond the masked solitude of this moment, este momento de soledad.

Here Comes the Sun, But Let It Be for All

As soledad originates from that same word, solitude, it undoubtedly will sound familiar to English speakers. But the Spanish syllables of soledad radiate with the word sol, the sun, that antidote to loneliness and separation, which rises for all or will rise for none, which warms us all or fries us all or heals us all. And soledad also contains the suffix dad (from the verb dar, to give), telling us again that the way out of isolation is to be as generous as sunlight to one another, especially to those who have more edad; who, that is, are older and therefore at greater risk. To be that generoso is not easy. It may take a lot of work to care for those in need when one is also facing grief and hardship oneself — a labor that is frequently difficult and painful, as the Spanish word for work, trabajo, reminds us.

Trabajo is not just physical labor or exertion. It brings to mind something more distressing. The last novel that Cervantes wrote after finishing Don Quixote was called Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda and there trabajos refers to the torments and trials that two lovers go through before they can be unidos, united.

Think of trabajos as akin to travails in English and, indeed, many who toil among us right now during this pandemic are going through special travails and trouble to keep us fed and sheltered and safe. Called “essential workers,” trabajadores esenciales, many of them have journeyed here from foreign lands after terrible travails and travels of their own (two words that derive from the same tortuous linguistic roots). As in the era of Cervantes, so in our perilous times, to leave home, to wander in search of a secure haven in a merciless world is an ordeal beyond words in any language.

It gives me solace, though, that when so many of those migrants crossed the border into the United States where I now live, they brought their Spanish with them, their throats and lives full of aliento, inspiración, trabajo, sol, and solidaridad. Now may be the time to record them — or rather recordarlos — in the deepest meaning of that word, which is to restore them to our hearts, to open those hearts to them at a moment when we are all subject to such travails and plagues.

In concrete policy terms, this would mean creating a true path to citizenship, ciudadanía, for so many millions lacking documentos. It would mean reuniting (re-unir) the families that Donald Trump and his crew separated at our southern border and finding the missing children, los niños desaparecidos. It would mean building less disruptive walls and more roads, caminos, that connect us all.

There Is No Unidad Without Struggle

Not all words in Spanish, of course, need to be translated for us to understand them. Pandemia, corrupción, crueldad, violencia, discriminación, muerte are sadly recognizable, wretchedly similar in languages across the globe as are the more hopeful, justicia, paz, rebelión, compasión. The same is true of President Biden’s favorite word of the moment, unidad, to which we should add a verb whose indispensability he and the Democratic Party should never forget, at least if there is to be real progress: luchar or to struggle.

Equally indispensable is a more primeval word that we can all immediately identify and make ours: mamá. Who has not called out to his or her mother in an hour of need, as George Floyd did at the very end of his existence? But the Spanish version of that word contains, I believe, a special resonance, related as it is to mamar — to suckle, to drink milk from the maternal breast as all mammals do — and so to that first act of human beings after we take that initial breath and cry.

For those of us who are grown up, an additional kind of sustenance is required to face an ominous future: “esperanza,” or hope, a word that fittingly stems from the same origin as respirar.

Many decades ago, Spanish welcomed me into the world and I am grateful that it continues to give me aliento in a land I’ve now made my own. It reminds me and my fellow citizens, my fellow humans, that to breathe and help others draw breath is the foundation of esperanza. The native language that I first heard from my mamá — even though she is long dead — still whispers the certainty that there is no other way for the spirit to prevail in these times of rage and solidarity and struggle, full of light and luz and lucha, so we may indeed someday fulfill the promise of “libertad y justicia para todos,” of liberty and justice for all.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Ariel Dorfman, a TomDispatch regular, is the Chilean-American author of Death and the Maiden. His most recent books are Cautivos, a novel about Cervantes, the children’s story, The Rabbits Rebellion, and a forthcoming novel about the Apocalypse, The Compensation Bureau. He lives with his wife in Chile and in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a distinguished emeritus professor of literature at Duke University.

Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution

By Eugene Debs, Jacobin

16 February 21

In a 1911 article, legendary socialist Eugene Debs excoriated the US Constitution as an “autocratic and reactionary document” written by aristocrats and “in every sense a denial of democracy.” To mark Presidents’ Day, we reprint the fiery essay here in full.

he convention of 1787, held in Philadelphia, which framed the Constitution of the United States and adopted that instrument on September 17 of that year, consisted exclusively of what [Alexander] Hamilton, one of its dominating spirits, called “the wealthy, the well-born, and the great.” There was no workingman present to degrade its councils. Labor was held in contempt, unfit to have a seat among the aristocrats who composed that body and controlled its deliberations.

Neither was there a woman among the delegates to ruffle the dignity of the grave and revered “fathers of the Constitution.” It was a place for the wise and mighty, and for powdered wigs, velvet knee breeches, silk stockings, and silver shoe buckles.

The democratic spirit so defiantly expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and which had sustained the patriots during the dark days of the Revolutionary War, had largely subsided, and nothing was further from the purpose of the delegates than that the government they had met to establish should be controlled by the people. As professor J. Allan Smith remarks in his Spirit of American Government:

It is difficult to understand how anyone who has read the proceedings of the Federal convention can believe that it was the intention of that body to establish a democratic government. The evidence is overwhelming that the men who sat in that convention had no faith in the wisdom or political capacity of the people.

The Constitution itself furnishes sufficient evidence of that fact. It is not in any sense a democratic instrument, but in every sense a denial of democracy. The Declaration of Independence had been democratic and revolutionary; the Constitution, however, was autocratic and reactionary.

Only six of the fifty-six signers of the declaration had a hand in framing the Constitution. Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams were not in the convention. Jefferson bitterly opposed the Constitution as finally adopted, and Henry openly denounced it.

Woodrow Wilson was right in declaring that the government was established “upon the initiative and primarily in the interest of the mercantile and wealthy classes,” and that “it had been urged to adoption by a minority, under the concerted and aggressive leadership of able men representing the ruling class” — and he struck the keynote of the Constitution when he said that the convention that framed it was backed “by the conscious solidarity of material interest.”

There is not the slightest doubt that the Constitution established the rule of property; that it was imposed upon the people by the minority ruling class of a century and a quarter ago for the express purpose of keeping the propertyless majority in slavish subjection, while at the same time assuring them that under its benign provisions the people were to be free to govern themselves.

A democracy in name and form — a despotism in substance and fact!

And this stupendous delusion has not yet lost its magic power upon the people, a great majority of whom still believe, in their mental childhood, that the “Constitution of the fathers” established democratic rule, and that we are a free and self-governing people.

Admitting for the moment all that its most zealous devotees claim for the Constitution as an “inspired instrument,” that it embodies all the wisdom and statesmanship of the age in which it was written, the fact still remains that it is now antiquated and outgrown, and utterly unsuited to the conditions and inadequate to the requirements of the present day. So palpably is this fact in evidence that we see the Supreme Court, the specially constituted authority to construe the provisions of the Constitution and preserve inviolate its reputed integrity, ride roughshod over the “inspired instrument” and by judicial interpretation make it serve, as it has from the beginning, the class in power. And to accomplish this essential service under capitalist class government, the Supreme Court contemptuously ignores and defies the sacred “Constitution of the fathers” by boldly usurping the power not only to construe it absolutely to suit themselves and serve the ends of the ruling class, but by deliberately invading the domain of the legislative, virtually destroying a coordinate branch of the government created under the Constitution, and annulling, wiping out utterly, laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people.

Constitutions, like the times and conditions in which they originate, are subject to the everlasting laws of change. Evolution is no more a respecter of a Constitution than it is of those who make it.

In 1787, when the Constitution was adopted, the population was about 3 million, and agriculture and mercantile interests dominated the colonial life. Today the population is 100 million, and capitalized industry controls the government and shapes the national destiny.

There has been a complete revolution in the methods of producing, distributing, and exchanging wealth, the essential means of life, and a corresponding revolution in the industrial and social life of the people. The ruling class of the colonial era has vanished as a class as completely as have those who composed it. And the Constitution they adopted is just as completely out of date as would be its makers, if by some magic they could appear upon the present scene. In their day, the ruling class consisted of small landowners, petty merchants and traders, and professional persons who made up what was known as the “official class.”

The actual workers and producers were still in a state of semi-feudal servility, an inferior element, and practically without voice in the affairs of government. But there were no hard and fast lines between the classes of that day, nor any sharp antagonisms to bring them into violent collision and to array them against each other in hostile conflict.

In the century and a quarter since elapsed, there has been an overwhelming industrial and social transformation. The weak and primitive agricultural colonies of that time have become a vast and powerful industrial nation. There is now a sharply defined capitalist class and an equally sharply defined working class. The struggle between these modern industrial classes is growing steadily more intense and reshaping and remolding the entire governmental structure and social organism.

Political government has had to give way to industrial administration, and the old forms, including the Constitution, are now practically obsolete. Political government, its constitutions and its statutes, its courts, its legislatures, and its armies, scientifically considered, are institutions under class rule, expressly designed to establish the supremacy of one class and enforce the subjugation of another class. With the end of class rule, political government will cease to exist. Its functions, which are essentially coercive, will no longer be required.

With the overthrow of the capitalist class and the installation of the working class in power (which must be the inevitable outcome of the present struggle), the government of political states will be superseded by the administration of national industries.

In discussing the United States government and the Constitution, Professor J. Allen Smith, already quoted, correctly concludes that “this complex system of restrictions which is the outgrowth and expression of a class struggle for the control of the government must necessarily disappear when the supremacy of the people is finally established.” The present Constitution was not designed to establish but to prevent the supremacy of the people. It is outgrown, obsolete, dead. Industrial and social development are not halted by it, but these forces sweep past it with scant regard for its ancient and musty respectability.

Politicians and legislators are today the representatives, not of the people, but of the trustified capitalist class. The government is essentially capitalistic, as is also, of course, the Constitution to the extent that it is still vital and has any binding effect at all.

The working class is now the rising class and will soon be the triumphant class, and then the capitalist state will be superseded by the working class commonwealth, and industrial despotism by industrial democracy.

The old Constitution will have its place in history and will serve its purpose in the study of governmental evolution and class rule, and among the inspired relics of a past age. It is a class instrument, inspired by class interests, and will survive only to mark a historic epoch in class rule.

The new Constitution will not be framed by ruling-class lawyers and politicians, but by the bona fide representatives of the working class, who in the day of their triumph will be the people in the complete sense of that magnificent and much maligned term.

And the representatives of the working class will consist of women as well as men, sharing equally the rights and duties, the privileges and opportunities of the councils of state, and they will smile indeed as they look over with pitying toleration the “Constitution of the fathers” and recall the convention in secret session that framed, in blissful ignorance that toilers and producers were citizens, and that women are also included in the people.

The new Constitution will be framed by an emancipated working class with the sold object of establishing self-government, true democracy, conserving the freedom and security and promoting the happiness and well-being of every man, woman, and child.