You’ve got a few hours left to make it! I just got back from the event at the Morris hockey rink.
Dancing, music, fancy headdresses, tacos, kids running around with balloon animals and facepaint, drums, drums, drums. It ends at 10, so get here fast.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Interesante. Pero no sé por qué está en español.
“Connections?” Sounds like SOCIALISM to me… /s
Tacos? No tripletas, congri, or batidos? Grrrrr!
If you want a cause for celebration, two polls after The Debate show Trump did not get any benefit from it. One of them show Biden increasing his lead. Apparently the undecided voters were not charmed by Trump’s litany of BS.
And, less than a week from now the Asshole party will lose power in the rainy country back east.
Excuse me for asking, but where are their skates?
@Hemidactylus
Remember, this is small-town Minnesota. You can expect the White folks’ palates to only stretch so far. My sister lives in a small town in Arizona. She absolutely refuses to even try sushi, and when I brought some cheddar jalapeno bread to a picnic, she liked it, but she had never even heard of it before, and she was 50 years old at the time.
Stereo MC’s – “Connected”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=aatK_l9Yuyk
“You can expect the white folks’ palates to only stretch so far”
Homer Simpson: “mmm…food (drools)”
“Chico Chavez Orchuestra”…this invites Sean Hannity on Fox News to rant about Venezuelan infiltration.
“Banda comunitaria” -Band’o communists! And the background to the headline is blue. Imagine what qAnon would make of this.
moarscienceplz @6
Investigating further the tacos may have been part of an eating contest, which makes sense as tacos seem suited for competitive eating, except when the shell cracks and causes an emergency laundry disaster. The event had some sponsorship and/or catering by a Mexican restaurant and/or food market so the likelihood of Latin Caribbean fare seems quite low. I’m not huge on Mexican food. I did have flautas last week but not my thing.
Quite a few Puerto Rican cafes have popping up here lately which may wean me off Cuban food for a while. I do like congri, though when you look it up online the wikipedia calls it Moros y Cristianos which seems a little racist, conjuring up images of the reconquest. Yipes! I’ll call it congri.
The Chico Chavez Orchestra who were at the event in the OP does cumbia which is a Colombian style of music. I’m not familiar with it but wikipedia says there is tecnocumbia which sounds more my speed. It appears Selena was an associated act so maybe I’ve heard it before. John @1 will be happy to hear there is cumbia rap as he’s quite the hiphop fan. Oh Selena y Los Dinos did some of that too?
Hemidactylus, the language is Spanish, but none of the rest of it.
Different culture from a different continent, why would I care? They can crap on all they want.
I was just slightly bemused that a promotional poster for some event is entirely in a foreign language to that spoken in the locale where the event is taking place.
John Morales @11
I’m not familiar with the demographics of Morris, MN but to be fair I would assume there various sorts of Latin Americans there.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/morriscityminnesota/RHI725223
…has Hispanics/Latinos at 9.1% in Morris.
PZ chose the Spanish language version but it was promoted in English (as bastardized by us Americans) too:
https://morrismnchamber.org/community-event/conexiones-day-3/
Ah well, perhaps someone should have told them about the Rosetta Stone.
BTW, just took a look at your link; seems like ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ is used to categorise ethnicity, not language.
<clickety-click>
Yup.
“Hispanic origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before arriving in the United States. People who identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be any race.”
(https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin.html)
John Morales @14
My goodness man. I would assume some of the Latinos/Hispanics in Morris still know Spanish and maybe speak it. The Spanish language promotional material seems to be accommodating of that. Plus it apparently was celebrating some aspects of Latin American (and also Indigenous) heritage, no?
From my lived experience I’ve been to Miami and Orlando and especially in the former bilingual signs are quite common. Government forms for taxes and for assistance are available in Spanish. The latter are available in Haitian creole because reasons. If some cultural heritage event deep in Viking land wants to promote itself in Spanish and PZ chose to reflect that in his OP that’s cool IMO.
BUT a Mexican heritage coworker of mine originally from San Antonio, TX told me her son knew very little Spanish. That’s not uncommon here. So your hairsplitting is not too far off. Yet you live in Oz and still know Spanish fluently? Ok. Do you think the same thing happens in the US?
Also maybe there’s some migrant labor folks around Morris who know very little English. Would it be so bad if they could hear of this event and understand the promotional material? Just sayin’.
Hemidactylus, I can’t but help think you’re missing the entire point of my #1, even after the subsequent interaction.
Sure. Me too.
Thing is, I would also assume most of the Latinos/Hispanics in Morris know English and speak it.
A bilingual poster would achieve that too. It would actually accommodate everyone who uses either language or both.
Connect them, one could say. :)
Exactly! Thus my #1.
Fluently? Nope, not at all. Desuetude has befallen my skills, I can understand it well enough (idiomatic drift and neologisms aside), but I often struggle to come up with words. Adequately, these days.
But that’s not the point, is it?
This is what happens in the US census:
“Hispanic origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before arriving in the United States. People who identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be any race.”
—
And, it pains me to say, but “People who identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” indicates those are also not just ethnic but also cultural categories.
(Linguistic, I very very very much doubt)
—
This one I find insulting to your possible migrant workers:
Ah yes, those isolated migrant individuals who can’t read English.
Hey! If the promotional material were bilingual, that would present no problem, eh?
(Again? Why not, points need to be reiterated sometimes)
Connect them, one could say. :)
John Morales @16
It might be helpful to look at:
https://www.conexionesmn.org/
On the main landing point is said bilingually:
“CONECTANDO INMIGRANTES CON LA COMUNIDAD” and “CONNECTING
IMMIGRANTS WITH THE COMMUNITY” so…
It may have helped if PZ provided a little more background to the event but he probably didn’t anticipate us bickering.
More: https://www.conexionesmn.org/about/
So… the poster remains stubbornly monolingual regardless of other material elsewhere.
(Mind you, if those posters are posted next to the English version of the poster, I suppose that qualifies as Rosetta)
Ah, wait! I just peered, and the featured indeed is bilingual. Oops.
(It’s in the small print)
Also in Florida, from my own experience, there are people from various Latin American countries who know very little English. That’s not an insult but a fact. I am assuming that’s the case in Minnesota to some extent. PZ or others could elaborate. You might not experience this in Oz. Are there various South East or South Asians in Oz with limited English skills?
You may have heard we’ve had quite a few folks from Central America coming into the US and bussed or flown to other states due to the fact we messed with those countries during the Cold War? Trump is making a political career of demonizing such migrants. So…
Conexiones is geared up to help people in those situations that are happening as we speak in the United States.
Are you kidding?
My wife is currently (and has for the last two years) volunteering as an English tutor for exactly people like that. Remember, Oz is closer to SEA than is the USA.
One of my sisters also works at ESL (for money) back in Adelaide.
Here: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/overseas-migration/latest-release
Ah, right. Of course you remember, you pointed it out. Sorry.
—
Not the most apposite analogy, though.
USA has only the one language with which to deal, unlike Oz.
(Or is Portuguese a thing there? Brazil is big)
And we have no land borders. Ahem.
“The top countries of birth contributing to changes in population vary for different states and territories. In 2022-23, the top country of birth contributing the largest net gain to each population was:
India for NSW, Vic., Qld, SA and Tas.,
Bhutan for WA,
The Philippines for NT,
China for ACT."
John Morales @22 and @23
I think that PZ posted the Spanish language promotion was a good thing in that even though I took two semesters of Spanish in college this material was still kinda disorienting to me but not you. It helps me realize a little how disoriented people in the US not fluent in English might be. That your wife and sister are helping SE and S Asians in Oz is great and very important work!
Not justSE and S Asians; ESL is for anyone at all who does not speak English as a first language.
Point was more that, proportional to our population, there’s a pretty big migrant intake.
So, yes, very much so there are people who only have a rudimentary grasp of English.
Here: Australia’s overseas-born population increased by 494,000 people in 2023. The proportion of Australia’s population born overseas increased to 30.7% in 2023 (up from 29.5% in 2022).
(https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/australias-population-country-birth/latest-release)
So, these types of activity are not uncommon here.
cf. https://amrc.org.au/events/
John Morales @24
Here in the US we have a buncha different backgrounds. After the Vietnam war we had quite a few people from Vietnam. I graduated high school with a few. Spanish speakers and creole speakers from Haiti are in Florida. I had a Brazilian GF who was fluent in English and ironically resented Spanish language accommodations here. She wore that resentment on her sleeve. We have French speaking snowbirds from Canada. We have Cajuns from Louisiana. I think they speak English? Most Indians I encounter speak variously accented Brit-like English. In university I’ve met all kinds from Trinidadians to Indians. A coworker was English fluent Russian. Another GF was Antiguan. They often speak a very different English. I had a coworker with Czechoslovakia heritage born in Argentina and Spanish fluent. That’s really specific.
Mostly in Florida we have Spanish speakers. I can usually pick Cubans out by their throaty accented English as well as I can pick a New England accent. I adore the use of “pero” and other connector words. I had a Dominican GF who did that a lot. I almost read it in though I think it’s often mild “spanglish”.