On of my most vivid memories of mine collapse and people trapped underground is the babble of different languages that filled the house. My maternal grandmother, born in German South West, but educated as an orphan from about twelve in English, spoke with a heavy German accent and strange grammar: the verbs came too close to the end of the sentence.
My paternal grandmother spoke only Afrikaans, for memories of the concentration camp at Thaba Nchu filled her with loathing of English. Then there were the various African languages: primarily Fanakolo, but also loud wails in Zulu and Northern Sotho.
Thus it was with much sadness that I read this about events in Huntington, Utah:
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Maria Buenrostro, the sister of trapped miner Manuel Sanchez, said Murray got angry with relatives’ questions and walked out. She also said there was no interpreter for three Spanish-speaking families.
I confess I never learned French in Vancouver, Canada, and I am hopeless with California Spanish in spite of twelve years there. Because of seven years of Latin and a passion for Italian opera, I can more or less read Spanish, but have trouble following emotions in that language–except when Placido Domingo is singing a Zaruzela aria.
Much as we like to believe that English is the official language of the United States, the fact remains that those in the fields, in fast-foods, opera, and now it appears, mines, speak Spanish.
If there were no translators to speak Spanish to the families, you must wonder how they communicated in the mine. Or did they simply not communicate? Did they simply work? How did they hold meaningful safety meetings? Or did they simply attend and nod? I bet/hope there were no fines for not speaking English.
We can deny global warming. We can deny mine-induced seismicity. We can deny immigration. But we cannot deny that people speak different languages, and that to work safely we must communicate effectively. My father was fluent in Fanakalo and I recall him discussing accidents in the mine in that tongue with his assistant whose home language was quite different from Zulu.
Maybe when Congress gets down to another round of mine safety improvements, they can also take up the language and immigration issues as integral parts of the whole of mining.
Afterall, as the International Herald Tribune puts it:
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Three of the six men trapped in Monday’s cave-in are from Mexico, according to the Mexican Consulate. “People come here because they know that there’s enough work to go around,” said Salvador Lazalde, a local Hispanic leader whose cousins work in a nearby open-pit copper mine and who worries that one of the trapped miners is from his hometown, a village in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. “If the pay is good, people say the risk is worth it. They know that starting the job.” Exactly how many Hispanics are working the mines in Utah is not clear. But as the global coal market has heated up, some mining companies across the West have filled a rash of new jobs in recent years with immigrants from Mexico. Immigrants are often more willing to settle for low wages and accept the dangers involved in digging coal thousands of feet (meters) beneath the surface.
