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Do you see the percentage of Spanish speakers for each of those cities? I would say a good indicator of needing to know Spanish to get around successfully would be any city where the percentage of Spanish speakers is over 80%. Of course, I'm surmising based on objective stats. Just like in Mexico, or Europe, several citizens understand and speak basic English, so of course you will find English speakers in these cities I listed.
You linked to lists of the percentage of the population which is Latino, not the percentage which speaks Spanish (let alone only Spanish). In rural northern New Mexico, over 2/3rds of the population is of "Old Spanish" descent, but in most of these communities people stopped speaking Spanish as a native tongue almost a century ago. Obviously Southern California's Latino community came more recently, but a non-trivial amount of these people will be bilingual and prefer English, even if they aren't entirely monolingual English speakers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SouthCali4LifeSD
There are corridors in downtown LA with tens of thousands of Latinos who only speak Spanish, and if you don't speak it, they won't help or or even understand you for that matter. Places like the Fashion District (Santee shopping area), the area surrounding MacArthur Park, the Mexican village shops downtown, etc. It might come as a shock too many of you, but large sections of south east Los Angeles county is as Spanish speaking as this country gets, and where fluent English is known by a the minority. Yes, even the children.
I know that ESL programs retard the ability of children to pick up English, but they usually result in kids at least able to speak in broken English. The only communities which successfully keep home language going in the longer run are those which don't do public schooling, like the Amish and the Hasidim.
I was up at almost midnight looking at the LA county hispanic population stats and for some reason, framed it as spanish speaking. However, to slightly recover from my flub, many of those cities on the list are not integrated at all. Many of them are sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, most of whom aren't even accounted for in the demographics. The typical illegal immigrant stays with friends or family members who gained citizenship, and even these friends and family members, for the most part, feel most comfortable speaking only Spanish. I know it's slightly going off topic, but LA County has hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal immigrants and the vast majority only speak Spanish. So that must be taken into consideration.
Posters mentioning San Antonio have probably never been to San Antonio. Seriously, people here speak English. Of course there are Spanish speakers but the vast majority speak English as their first language. The times I ever hear somebody speaking Spanish is occasionally when I'm at the mall and it's usually a tourist visiting from Mexico.
Funny side note. When I told my parents I had a job offer and was possibly moving to San Antonio two years ago, my dad told me I shouldn't take it because I'm not Hispanic and don't speak Spanish like everybody down here. Granted, he had never been to San Antonio until recently when I dragged him down to visit me. His point of view has definitely changed.
Working for the census there were entire areas with people who answered the door and could not speak English. Some most probably were playing possum but generally, no. They nevere learned English.
My first experience as a resident was strickingly different from a tourist. The dozens of times i visited i barely heard spanish. Went to a mcdonalds the first day i moved there and no one there spoke English.
Posters mentioning San Antonio have probably never been to San Antonio. Seriously, people here speak English. Of course there are Spanish speakers but the vast majority speak English as their first language. The times I ever hear somebody speaking Spanish is occasionally when I'm at the mall and it's usually a tourist visiting from Mexico.
Funny side note. When I told my parents I had a job offer and was possibly moving to San Antonio two years ago, my dad told me I shouldn't take it because I'm not Hispanic and don't speak Spanish like everybody down here. Granted, he had never been to San Antonio until recently when I dragged him down to visit me. His point of view has definitely changed.
Last time I was in SA, I met some Mexican-American chick from Houston who was in SA for vacay, and her cousins were with her, and they were from and still lived in Mexico. The girl spoke fluent English, but her cousins spoke broken English. Her cousin sure was fine. She kinda looked like Carmen from the George Lopez Show. Ironically, the girl who played Carmen isn't even Mexican or Hispanic for that matter.
I was up at almost midnight looking at the LA county hispanic population stats and for some reason, framed it as spanish speaking. However, to slightly recover from my flub, many of those cities on the list are not integrated at all. Many of them are sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, most of whom aren't even accounted for in the demographics. The typical illegal immigrant stays with friends or family members who gained citizenship, and even these friends and family members, for the most part, feel most comfortable speaking only Spanish. I know it's slightly going off topic, but LA County has hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal immigrants and the vast majority only speak Spanish. So that must be taken into consideration.
For LA county,
48% hispanic
39% speaks spanish at home
19% speaks spanish at home and cannot speak english very well (it's a survey so the respondent gets to decide what very well is)
Lawrence, Massachusetts is 43% Dominican with an additional ~9% other hispanic minorities (not counting 22% Puerto Rican because most of them learn english in grade school)
Excluding a 2-mi. radius of the border, you are more apt. to find hispanics speaking spanish outside of the Southwest. Certainly, in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona many of the street names are in spanish, but I very rarely hear spanish being spoken. If you are in some random farming community in North Carolina, or a hispanic enclave in Milwaukee, WI you will almost always (9 x out of 10) hear them converse in Spanish. Many of the hispanics in the Southwest tend to be more assimilated into American mainstream culture than the ones living in per say Pennsylvania or Iowa.
Excluding a 2-mi. radius of the border, you are more apt. to find hispanics speaking spanish outside of the Southwest. Certainly, in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona many of the street names are in spanish, but I very rarely hear spanish being spoken. If you are in some random farming community in North Carolina, or a hispanic enclave in Milwaukee, WI you will almost always (9 x out of 10) hear them converse in Spanish. Many of the hispanics in the Southwest tend to be more assimilated into American mainstream culture than the ones living in per say Pennsylvania or Iowa.
Which is, of course, mainly a function of the non-Southwestern communities (except for Puerto Ricans around NYC) mostly being made up of first-generation immigrants.
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