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Your thread offered no premise, it merely referred us to a link, and anything that relates to anything in that link is on-topic.
Offered no premise? You're correct, but that doesn't mean the thread doesn't have a topic. You haven't read any Kerouac, eh? Tell me about the price of eggs in Victoria, TX then... I'm on the edge of my seat waiting.
Do chickens there say "****-a-doodle-doo" or "kikiriki" ? I would assume the chickens know which one is more economically beneficial. They really ought to learn "****-a-doodle-doo".
Jack Kerouac fan here and a fan of traveling to Mexico. Have not read JK in years though. Always liked the Mexico City Blues poem.
But the last part of On The Road when he goes to Mexico City is pretty epic. Totally different time and place. He wrote the first transcript in the late 1940's (though the book was not published until 1957 or so). Of course, he gets stranded at the end of the novel in Mexico City by his buddy.
Love the part when he describes being on a lonely mountain road and seeing some Mexican villagers reaction to seeing him. That world is gone....the internet, cell phones, etc. has made the whole world a lot smaller.
He means, Why are there so few people in Mexico who can speak the language that is spoken in their huge, influential neighbor. This is a question that has always mystified me, too. In Mexico, and most other Latin American countries, it can be very hard to find a person who can speak English. Even Mexicans who lived for several years in the USA have a very poor command of English. They place a very low priority on learning English. It's easier to find an English-speaking person in Taiwan or Egypt or Poland, than in Mexico. I think Panama and Venezuela are the only countries in Latin America where a fairly large number of people know some English, but even then, a very small minority.
A case in point: There are at least a thousand professional baseball players in the USA from Spanish-speaking countries. They have known since childhood that they have the skills to play professional baseball and may be signed to a contract to play in the USA. Yet, nearly all of them arrive in the USA with no knowledge of English whatsoever.
A case in point: There are at least a thousand professional baseball players in the USA from Spanish-speaking countries. They have known since childhood that they have the skills to play professional baseball and may be signed to a contract to play in the USA. Yet, nearly all of them arrive in the USA with no knowledge of English whatsoever.
They also arrive with a second-grade education. In fact, most Mexican immigrants come to the US with a second-grade education.
As a teacher, I think that poor education generally is the key to the lack of English among Mexicans and other Latin Americans. The level of public school education is not comparable to the standards in Europe or East Asia or the U.S. and Canada. Many children just don't go to school.
I ask my adult business students in Mexico whether they had English classes in high school, and almost without exception they did, but they go on to say that the classes were poorly taught (never by native speakers) and most students simply didn't pay attention (which they now uniformly regret).
The U.S. is not very good at teaching languages either, of course, although the overall level of public education is much higher than in Mexico. Better teaching of languages can be found in the same place in both countries, in private schools (and in the well-funded American public suburban schools which would put most international private schools to shame). Native speakers are much more likely to be employed to teach languages in those schools. The private school that I worked at in Culiacan had English, French, and Chinese native speakers teaching.
Korean public schools, to their credit, employ scads of native English speakers, because English is a national educational priority. In Mexico, alas, educating ALL children is not even a national educational priority.
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