Businesses use Spanish to cater to patrons, staff
Professionals take language classes
By CHRIS ECHEGARAY • Staff Writer • September 4, 2008

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The servers at China Star buffet in Madison have learned enough casual Spanish to cover the basics.

"Agua?" Water? "Todo bien?" Everything OK?




The Chinese owners hired a bilingual cashier from Mexico, Geney Cortez, to cover anything else their 40 percent Latino customer base needs to communicate. Cortez's Asian co-workers also know enough Spanish to give him grief.

"El no sabe" — he doesn't know what he's talking about — one cracked on a slow Friday mid-afternoon.

Two months from a potential vote to make English the city's official language, more Metro Nashville professionals want their workers to learn Spanish. Businesses large and small find themselves catering to employees and customers who haven't learned enough English to get by.

U.S. Census figures show 12.3 percent of Metro's population speaks a language other than English at home, up from 10 percent in 2000. Some consider learning Spanish a matter of financial survival.

"People from all walks of life are coming in to learn Spanish," said Courtney Rayburn, co-owner of Dos Amigas. The Murfreesboro business offers Spanish translation and lessons to Middle Tennesseans. "We have businesspeople and medical professionals signing up. It's helpful in everyday life."

Councilman Eric Crafton is championing Metro's English-only proposal, and it's being financed primarily through a national group, ProEnglish, with ties to the anti-immigration movement. The proposal would force all Metro government business to be done in English with exceptions to be approved by the council.

The measure, which garnered enough signatures to get on the Nov. 4 ballot, became the subject of a lawsuit after the Election Commission voted to keep it off on a technicality. There's a hearing in Chancery Court at 1:30 p.m. today.

Rayburn, a former Spanish teacher at Antioch High, and others fear the initiative is political fodder.

"The political folks I hear talking about English-only are concerned with immigration," she said. "… I see it as a separate issue altogether."

Same language better
Crafton and his supporters say it will encourage immigrants to learn English more quickly.

"It's not an immigration issue and I never said it was one," Crafton said. "It's about strictly using the English language. It has nothing to do with private businesses. We have to focus on a common culture, common language. That's what made America stronger."

Cortez, the bilingual cashier at China Star, moved to Nashville in the 1990s. He said hearing Spanish words in Metro Nashville's business lexicon is a recent phenomenon. The Latino population surged in the last dozen years — from 4,775 in 1990 to an estimated 46,546 in 2007, U.S. Census figures show — forcing businesses to adapt, including his wait staff.

"They know enough to ask, 'Can I serve you?' and basic stuff like that," Cortez says. "Some people have the aptitude for languages and that helps."

At a Solomon Builders Inc. job site in East Nashville, there are signs posted in English and Spanish. One is about wearing hard hats at the site; the other says they are not hiring.

Although supervisors haven't taken Spanish lessons, there's always a bilingual employee at Solomon Builders construction sites, said Marshall Shumate, director of business development.

"Certainly I think it's a good idea to take classes, and I can certainly see the advantages," Shumate said. "It's not anything new. It's just obvious. To communicate with the workers is better. It adds efficiency and safety."

It's not just business transactions that factor into people learning casual Spanish, according to Paul Van Cotthem, a native of Colombia from Belgian extraction. He has served as a court interpreter and translator in Davidson County.

Van Cotthem said some newcomers want to learn English but can barely read and write in their own language. As a result, others are forced to communicate with them in Spanish.

"They come from small towns where they helped run the family farm," Van Cotthem said. "It's not mandatory to go to school for them, it's optional."

Van Cotthem, who published a manual for newly arrived immigrants with his own money, has witnessed Nashville's evolution into a second language.

"I was at a Kroger 20 years ago when I was speaking Spanish with my wife," he says. "And a man asked us what kind of English we were speaking. That's how uncommon it was here, but not anymore."

Contact Chris Echegaray at 615-664-2144 or cechegaray@tennessean.com.



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