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What’s the language of the map showing ignorant, lefty Latinos?

Last week I watch the results of the elections with several acquaintances. During the conversation, I mentioned “Nueva York.” Immediately, one of the presents corrected me: “It’s ‘New York.’ ‘Nueva York’ doesn’t exist on any map.”
I unsuccessfully tried to reason with that person. I pointed out “Nueva York” is included in many maps, that is, in all those maps produced in Spanish. Those are the same maps that read “Estados Unidos” (but not “United States”) and “España” (but not “Spain”).

I also said that maps printed in France will be in French, maps printed in Germany will be in German, and maps printed in other countries will be in other languages. However, neither my solid arguments nor more persuasive skills had any effect.

According to this person, there are no places named “Nueva York,” “Nuevo México,” or “Nueva Jersey.” This means this persons will also agree there are no such places as “Brasil” (it should be written with “z”) or “México” (it should not have the accent over the “e”).

I kept thinking about the arrogant attitude of believing that just because one learned some manes in some language those are the only real names to be used, as if other groups, cultures, or languages have no rights to use whatever names they wanted for whatever they wanted.

I was still thinking about that issue the day after the elections when I heard in the radio a commentary by an ultra-conservative talk-show host, whose influence keeps growing. He said that the Latino vote helped democrats to maintain the control of the Senate, adding that Hispanics voted for democrats because Latinos are “ignorant” and “lefties.”

In my mind, I imagined myself reasoning with this talk-show host and explaining that not all Latinos lack formal education and that not all Latinos are lefties.  However, I immediately realized there was no point in continuing with my mental experiment, because it will be as useless as trying to explain to my acquaintance that maps are printed in many languages.

That’s why I ask the question I asked in the title: What’s language of the map showing ignorant, lefty Latinos? Obviously, such a question is meaningless. The real question is: What’s the context where the idea that there is only one kind of maps and only one kind of Latinos can happen?

In other words, how is it possible that in our globalized, always-connected, and cosmopolitan world monolinguism and monoculturalism are still seen as a virtue?

Part of the answer lies in the concept of “social imaginary,” developed, among others, by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Social imaginary is a series of ideas that appear to be so obvious and self-evident to a group of people that the group can’t accept the existence of alternative ideas.

There is nothing imaginary in social imaginary. It’s something very real. So real, that inspires the creation of monolingual maps and the perpetuation of stereotypes. But let us be careful: we too are slaves of our own self-evident ideas.

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