Spanish in America

Hola, amigos! That’s Spanish for “Hello, friends!” And that was just part of the presentation at the Sept. 25 session of the library’s Talk Lab English Club. The topic was National Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated in the United States from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.The mid-September to mid-October time period was chosen because it coincides with the independence anniversaries of eight Hispanic countries – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile and Belize. President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed Hispanic Heritage Week in the 1960s, and President Ronald Reagan expanded the commemoration to a full month in 1988. The word “Hispanic” refers to anyone of Spanish or Latin American descent.

At Sunday’s Talk Lab, the 19 participants took on their choices of Spanish names for the meeting. Some selected names close to their real ones, such as Alex becoming Alejandro and Vincent becoming Vincente. Others adopted new personnas, such as Jose, Anabel, Isabella, Catalina, Fidel and Juanita.
In addition to choosing Spanish names, members also read and talked about some of the current immigration controversy in the United States and learned about some of the contributions of Hispanic Americans in a wide array of professions and activities, from physics and outer-space exploration to music and entertainment, from labor unions to sports.
Currently, there are 50.5 million people of Hispanic descent living in the United States. The only other country with more Hispanics is Mexico, with 111 million.The list of important Hispanic Americans is long and includes the likes of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Nobel Prize winner in physics Luis Walter Alvarez, astronauts Franklin Chang-Diaz and Elena Ochoa, musicians Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana and Joan Baez, labor union leader Cesar Chavez and Pulitzer Prize fiction writer Oscar Hijuelos. Also, there are some famous Americans of Hispanic descent who do not have Spanish-sounding names, such as supermodel Christy Turlington and Civil War admiral David Farragut, who was known for the famous words “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”

Many words in popular English are rooted in Spanish, such as barbecue, cafeteria, canoe, cigar, daiquiri, fiesta, guerilla, hurricane, jade, macho, mosquito, ranch, rodeo, stampede, tobacco and tomato.
Hispanic foods made for a lively and mouth-watering discussion. Words such as salsa, tacos, burritos and tortillas made everyone hungry!
So…Photo.