How California helped Trump make English the official national language

It was the spring of 1985, and Californians were waging civic war on behalf of English.

Some Monterey Park residents were pushing their City Council to ban Chinese-language business signs. Voters who had passed Proposition 38 a year earlier were waiting for Gov. George Deukmejian to implement the initiative, which required that he ask the federal government to print election material only in English.

Former U.S. Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, one of Proposition 38’s co-authors, was preparing for Proposition 63, which would enshrine English as the state’s official language, after Whittier-area Assemblymember Frank Hill introduced a bill proposing just that. Tiny Fillmore in Ventura County had already become one of the first cities in the country to go English-official.

These shepherds of Shakespeare argued that their efforts were necessary to save the American way from ignorant immigrants who just wouldn’t let go of their native tongues. The official argument for Proposition 63, co-signed by Hayakawa, proclaimed that the state was moving toward “language rivalries and ethnic distrust” and that declaring English as the official language would help residents “respect other people, other cultures, with sympathy and understanding.”

While this was all happening, I was in kindergarten trying to learn English.

I started at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Anaheim knowing only Spanish, the tongue of my Mexican immigrant parents. We lived in a neighborhood where the only white people were the family who lived in front of our granny flat. Our social life was centered on my parents’ native ranchos, whose residents transplanted themselves from Zacatecas to Southern California along with their music, culture and español.

We were Hayakawa’s Babelish prediction personified. But by the time Propostion 63 passed with 73% of the vote in the fall of 1986, I was in second grade and speaking fluent English. So were my friends and cousins. Our parents were beginning to learn English too.

Our growing embrace of English — one part classroom instruction but mostly marathon Saturday morning cartoon sessions for the kids and Charles Bronson movies for my parents — wasn’t the only thing Hayakawa and his crew were wrong about. All the societal kumbaya they insisted would sprout if English was elevated in California unsurprisingly turned out to be a bunch of — excuse my Spanish — caca.

Copycat laws soon spread around the country — 32 states have since declared English as their official language. Californians passed propositions in the 1990s that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants, ended government-sponsored affirmative action and banned bilingual education. The embers from those political wildfires spread across the U.S. and helped blaze the trail for Donald Trump to win in 2016 and last year.

On Saturday, President Trump threw our country back to those ugly days of my youth when he signed an executive order declaring English the official language and promising that the move will “reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society.”

But as it did in California, the opposite is more likely to happen.

Coming in the wake of executive orders ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government, ending birthright citizenship and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” this is Trump’s latest gift to people who despise a multicultural society. These are the worst Americans of all, motivated not by love of country but rather fear of newcomers, whose ways they seek to extinguish under the cloak of patriotism and the cudgel of the law.

Anxiety about immigrants’ attachment to their mother tongues goes back to colonial days. In the 1750s, no less a national icon than Benjamin Franklin complained to a friend that Germans “will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language.” This type of skepticism continued even as wave after wave of immigrants — Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Mexicans — ended up assimilating.

Yet xenophobes continued to use the specter of other languages crowding out English to urge immigration clampdowns. No one knew this better than John Tanton, the intellectual architect of today’s “America first” movement.

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An ophthalmologist by trade, Tanton funded organizations that fought immigration and birthright citizenship and published white nationalist tracts. The son of a Canadian immigrant reserved a special enmity for Latinos, warning confidants of a “Latin onslaught” and wondering, “As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”

In 1983, Tanton and Hayakawa — born in Canada to Japanese immigrants — formed U.S. English, a nonprofit pushing a constitutional amendment to make English the nation’s official language and opposing bilingualism in general.

U.S. English helped fund all the English-is-great propositions of my childhood to whet the xenophobic appetite of some Americans. It even asked members to write angry letters to Pacific Bell about the decision to publish the Yellow Pages in Spanish.

“California,” Tanton told The Times in 1986, “can be a laboratory for the nation.”

Forty years later, all of his racist dreams seem to be coming true through Trump. And the California Constitution still declares that English is our official language, commanding the Legislature to “insure that the role of English as the common language of the State of California is preserved and enhanced.”

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Daniel HoSang is an American studies professor at Yale and author of the 2010 book “Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California,” which tracks the 1980s-era English-only battles in the Golden State. Tanton and Hayakawa’s consultants told them that their campaign had “the stink of rank nativism,” HoSang said, but if “you can come to California and figure out how to mask that,” they could go nationwide, which they eventually did.

The professor described Trump’s executive order as a “deep reminder that language has been a site of nativism” but dismissed it as a “desperate act of political symbolism” that will be ignored, just as it was in California.

“The lesson there is important because it failed,” HoSang said. “Most Californians either don’t know or don’t care that English is the state’s official language.”

He pointed out that even the Republican Party uses Spanish to reach out to Latino voters across the country.

“That’s why it’s hard to take [Trump’s English-language executive order] seriously as a policy, because they don’t,” HoSang said.

His book shows how all the 1980s-era “official English” measures were basically test balloons for the nastier legislation that followed, I noted.

He conceded the point, speculating that local governments could use Trump’s executive order as an excuse to end multilingual forms of communication, which would harm immigrant communities.

“So much of the anti-immigrant sentiment over public benefits is particularly sharp, because we’re a moment where all of them are slashed,” he said. People who speak only English “could think multilingual access is a luxury that’s responsible for the cuts in other people’s benefits.”

HoSang paused. “I could see that logic work insidiously down.”