El Cenizo, TX - Spanish the Official Language?

This video talks about a town in Texas on the U.S. Mexican boarder. Spianish is the official language of this town, so even the politics are spoken in spanish. Their 24 year old mayor translates meeting agendas into spanish. Before the official language changed to spanish, El Cenizo was not prosperous at all. Now, however, with the city and its people speaking the same language it has a paved roads and a police and fire station. The city also pushes people to speak english as well. El Cinezo also prohibits people from turing in illegal immigrants and actually acts like a safehaven for them, which is a growing thing in several cities across the nation. People don't really seem to care that the city is conducting business in spanish, but tend to be troubled by the fact that they are harboring illegal immigrants.

In our book, Fluid Borders, it says, "American national identity requires English momlingualism because speaking another lanuage has often been seen as a sign of allegiance to another nation or culture and thus antithetical to being a 'true' American." So does that mean that this town is going against American national identities? In my opinion, no. They are only trying to make their town a better place to live and because almost all of its population is made up of legal Mexican-Americans it is easier to speak spanish. Many Mexican-Americans speak only spanish in their homes, so why not do this in the government? It's not like they are abolishing English completely from the whole town. They do still encourage the children to learn English so that if they move away from this town, they will still have an equal chance at getting a good job. I agree with Ruben Navarrette Jr. in this video when he say that the government shouldn't be pushing english or pushing spanish. If the people want this sense of "American national identity," then they can make the choice to speak English or Spanish, it should be up to them. If the United States wanted everyone to speak only English, they would have made it our national language.