Spanish Political Ads' Multiple Translations

Outreach Can Send a Mixed Message

How fitting that the most Latinized presidential campaign season in history enters its final week with the Democratic candidate looking deep into our eyes and carefully pronouncing 65 words in Spanish.

"Compartimos un sueño. . . . Este es el sueño Americano."

Just two questions about Barack Obama's new television ad: What is he saying, and to whom is he saying it?

The translation is easy enough: We share a dream. . . . This is the American dream.

But what is he saying, and who gets it? Also, what was the point of buying 30 minutes on Univision last night to run a translated version of his "American Stories" infomercial that simultaneously aired on several English-language networks?

The same can be asked of Republican candidate John McCain, who has aired several commercials with his spoken English translated into Spanish.

Is this just a little bit of linguistic showing off? Most Latino registered voters don't need to be addressed in Spanish. Those born in the United States tend to speak English fluently, and those naturalized as citizens had to pass an English test. The Pew Hispanic Center reports that 84 percent of Latino voters speak English very well or pretty well.

Also: Nearly a quarter of Latino registered voters speak little or no Spanish at all. Won't Obama's and McCain's messages in Spanish be lost on them?

Maybe not. The politics of language and the language of politics are full of bank shots, meta-messages. Sometimes the language is more meaningful than the words. The language is the music, never mind the lyrics.

"It allows that one-on-one cultural touch between the Latino community and a presidential candidate who simply cannot go shake everybody's hand," says Lorena Chambers, a Latina Democratic political consultant with Chambers Lopez & Gaitán.

"When you do something in Spanish, you're trying to communicate a bigger message than the message you're ostensibly sending," says Antonio Tijerino, president of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. "It resonates. The bigger message is, 'We care about Latinos.' "

But a candidate has to be careful. Latinos, like anybody else, don't like being talked down to. Fluent Hispanic English speakers are proud of their language mastery. They're galled by the charge hurled by some in the immigration debate that Latinos can't or won't learn English.

"They don't like to have people assume they speak Spanish, not English," says Brent Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

But making that assumption is a social misstep between individuals -- like goofily breaking into Spanish every time you meet a Latino. That may not be a concern in mass advertising, Wilkes says. "The ad is addressed to everybody. . . . Why watch Univision if you don't want to see ads in Spanish?"

Complicating matters, in a single Latino family there may be, across generations, diversity in language, citizenship, even immigration status. Family members will put political information in English and Spanish to different uses. Tijerino says he gets most news and advertising from English-language sources, while still glancing at Spanish-language sources. His father and uncles speak English and are registered voters -- but their primary sources are in Spanish, secondary in English.

We've reached this point after a primary and general election cycle where Spanish has played a bigger role than ever, and the politics of language has seemed ready to explode at any moment.

You can date the new Latinized age -- with all its irony and paradox -- to the spring of 2007, when Newt Gingrich, not a candidate himself, apologized for saying that anything but English is "the language of living in a ghetto." To do penance, he went on YouTube -- and spoke for several minutes in grammatically flawless Spanish, which he studies assiduously.

There arose the first major Latino presidential primary contender and fluent Spanish speaker, Bill Richardson -- who never found a way to let Latino voters know he was Latino without coming off as too Latino. Another contender, Christopher Dodd, gave discourses in his decent Peace Corps Spanish, while Mitt Romney tried some phrases on the trail in Miami that backfired when he inadvertently quoted Fidel Castro's favorite battle cry.

Meanwhile, on the Hill, the Senate was debating whether English should be the "national" or "official" language.

Politicians have wanted to have it both ways ever since Jackie Kennedy delivered a campaign commercial in Spanish on behalf of her husband in 1960. They have wanted to reach Latinos by any means necessary -- but they have not wanted to show weakness in their allegiance to English and "American" culture.

Thus, when Obama does speak of his plan to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, he always makes clear it will include a requirement that they learn English.

But this week, he is speaking Spanish. Mano a mano, McCain hasn't matched Obama's linguistic feat. But his campaign reacted to the Spanish ad with a statement -- in English and Spanish -- from Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), who said in part: "This election is about more than beautiful words."

Obama's campaign overstated the case when it claimed Obama is "the first presidential candidate" to deliver an ad in Spanish. John Kerry did it in 2004 in an ad created by Chambers's firm.

Spanish affords one subtlety lacking in English to communicate a candidate's personal style: Kerry used the formal "su voto" in asking for "your vote," while Obama has adopted the informal "tu voto" to make the same appeal.

Speaking Spanish is good as far as it goes, say members of the target audience. But there's more to Latinos than the language of the old countries.

"Thinking you're going to reach the entire diverse Latino population by doing a Spanish-language advertisement is as naive as thinking that you're going to connect with all Latinos by saying 'Happy Cinco de Mayo' to Peruvians and Nicaraguans," Tijerino says. "But I do appreciate the effort by Senator Obama."

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer