English, Argentina and Lehe

This is part two of my experience as an immigrant in Argentina, recounting the trials and… This is part two of my experience as an immigrant in Argentina, recounting the trials and tribulations of my life as an immigrant. Today’s theme: English.

Spanish has just five vowel sounds, all of which exist in English, while English has 12 vowel sounds. After childhood, it’s hard for Spanish speakers to learn our vowels correctly. Whenever I hear Argentines trying hard to speak English, I feel proud for no reason, like I invented the extra seven vowels. As if it was hard for me to learn them, too, but as a toddler I for one had the initiative to buckle down and say “That over there is an oar.”

For $5 per hour, I teach English to business people. They try hard, but fall so short.

For my students, the hard “j” is a Sisyphean labor, partly because they can’t perfect it, and partly because I make them roll boulders uphill while they practice. Meanwhile, I draw a picture of a mouth making a hard “j” sound.

“Your teeth should vibrate,” I explain, “but no, it’s not like when you’re cold.” It’s hard, though, since Argentines mush y’s and j’s and sh’s into the same weird “ygsh.” We practice repeating “Sean John.”

Argentines stand for this tedium because they take English seriously. Kids go to bilingual schools. Adults take English courses in their free time. One day, a student came to class very upset, because she’d rented an English-language movie and couldn’t understand the dialogue. The movie in question: “A Clockwork Oranygshe.” I explained that I couldn’t teach her to speak the Cockney of a dystopian future. Instead we learned, “Yinz won go donton n drenk Arn Cety?”

While I like teaching, we immigrants hate becoming some stranger’s language punching bag. At first, when people answered my Spanish questions with broken English answers, I just kept speaking Spanish. But now I am bitter, and I act like their accent is too bad to understand. To be clear, I do that to make them feel bad about themselves. Still they try.

In the United States, we complain that everything is made in China. But abroad, it seems like everything is made in America – everything culturally accessible. Although great books and movies and music come from everywhere, almost everything really easy to get into and still pretty good comes from the U.S.-Canada-England culture machine. Think “The Sopranos,” The Arcade Fire and Nicholas Hornby, respectively.

That’s why you can hear, “Karma police, arrest this man…” whistled at Estacion Tribunales. It’s why I can’t remember what the real Sawyer talks like after watching two seasons of “Lost” dubbed in Spanish.

I found more proof at a show for Outbreak, a hard core rock band from Maine. For the encore, the singer asked, “Who’s heard of Bad Brains?” referencing the greatest hard core band ever. Nobody raised his hand, and the band launched disappointedly into a Bad Brains cover. In a flash, the crowd exploded and 40 kids grappled to scream the stream of syllables that to them is “Sailin’ On” into one humble microphone. It was awesome – and telling: It’s not just our mainstream refuse that washes up on foreign shores, it’s subcultures, too.

For this reason, among others, English is fetishized here in Argentina. Somehow, English gives anything an extra touch of legitimacy. Ads for nice things sometimes are completely in English, as if to say, “Our customers are the kind of decent Argentines who speak English.”

One sign for a fashion boutique says, “Live as if you’ll die tomorrow!” Now, our advertising also promotes hedonism and impulsive decisions, but we say, “Live each day like it’s your last.” We don’t bring up the fact that if this is your last day then you logically will have to expire no later than tomorrow.

An advertisement for a telemarketing outsourcer expounds the benefits of working at TeleCom. Then an actress turns to the camera and says in English, “I work for TeleCom, don’t you?” She says this as if she believes more than 50 percent of the population works at TeleCom: “You don’t work for TeleCom? That’s so uncommon,” she implies. You might ask, “I use Pantene. Don’t you?” It’s possible we could all use Pantene. But her comment paints a dreary future for Argentina, where TeleCom employs everyone of age, teaching, entertaining and providing medical support through catacomb hallways of a single corporate palace and in cavernous warehouses, the endless acres of telemarketers nourished by TeleCom’s colossal farms.

In a way, the use of English makes me proud of my country and culture, but mainly I’m just sad for the implicit self-contempt. It makes me want to mount the balcony of the Casa Rosada, like Madonna did in Evita, and shout, “Argentines, be yourselves!” I don’t want that everyone consciously be Argentine for tradition’s sake, like an anti-globalist would, but only that they not be American for novelty’s sake. I would shout, “Speak your cool accent. Drink tiny coffees. Dance your tango. Don’t be the weird, worse America.”

But instead, they are printing ads in bad English, drinking Starbucks coffee that is worse than the regular coffee and scorning tango as a dance for old people when tango is clearly, demonstrably awesome. As the trend continues, the country will change. And Argentina will face a dystopian future – one marked by a rootless youth speaking an unintelligible English dialect: a true Clockwork Oranygshe.

E-mail Lewis at ljl10@pitt.edu