I clicked on an Iry LeJeune video tonight on YouTube and was treated to a commercial from T-Mobile with the actress code-switching between English and Spanish, much like the Target commercial above. I’ve gotten used to advertisements in various languages popping up in my browser as I change the language on my computer fairly often but I’ve only recently started noticing US commercials that utilize English and Spanish at the same time. Here’s another from Tide:

As far as this Latino focused blog is concerned, the Tide ad does justice to bilingual families in the US. I’m sure it does, and I have no problem watching these myself, but I imagine many Americans being upset by it, which is attested to in the aforementioned blog as well.

This is not the first instance of bilingualism I’ve noticed in the popular media, either. The Simpsons ran a joke maybe a year or two ago that relied on the audience having at least some knowledge of Spanish:

What is the big deal? The big deal is I’m gonna sue you! Got me one of them “abogados” from the bus ads. He said he’ll only take “veinte por ciento,” whatever that is.

Maybe I’m assuming too much, but this probably isn’t even capable of being funny to an English monolingual speaker.

The usual refrain that I come across from the English-only crowd is that their great great grandparents came to the US from Italy or Germany or wherever and had to learn English and so should everyone else and, ya know, they’re probably right. Not about how we should be treating language use in the US now, but about the situation their ancestors faced when arriving in the US. Sure, they could speak their native languages with other immigrants but I’d be willing to bet that newspapers and such were not catering to their languages during the late 19th/early 20th century when we experienced some of our largest immigration waves. (I’d love to be proven wrong about this by someone who has the time to find out, by the way.) It’s as if the multicultural aspect of our national mythos has overpowered our actual historical treatment of other cultures within our borders, which is refreshing really.