Day 9
Last night I stayed in San Luis Obispo (dubbed SLO by the locals). The town is cute and fairly homogenously white and upper middle class/wealthy. Oprah fairly recently named this town the happiest place on earth and shops now sport t-shirts reading: I am SLO happy! As a walked around the town and had dinner, I thought about why homogeneity makes people so content. Sure, there is less to explain because there is less room for differences of opinion. Still, conversations that can initially begin with conflict or misunderstanding are a jumping off point for growth and change. I imagine I would be much more stagnant in a town like this. It was nice for a night but it made my heartache a bit for Brooklyn.
Most of the day today was spent driving along the coast back to LA. Both yesterday and today we passed by so many signs for towns that come from Spanish words.. Some were familiar like Santa Cruz and Pasos Robles, but others were not like Los Lobos and Atascadero. I thought about how rich the Spanish speaking tradition is in these parts. It is hard for me to say as an outsider if there is a genuine appreciation of Spanish heritage and language or if Iit is just a fun, quirky CA quality like bagels in NY and French town names near the Quebec border. I lean toward the ladder in light of things like Julia Child naming her favorite taqueria in Santa Barbara. I will admit that I bit the bait and tried to see what all the fuss was about. With an hour wait and driving to be done, I decided to pass. Maybe next time.
It does always strike me as strange, as a speaker of Spanish, when I hear a Spanish word (whether a food or town) that is pronounced in a way that is distinctly not Spanish. This is clearly not a California specific issue. My in-laws hail from El Dorado, Kansas, which sounds nothing like ‘golden one’ in Spanish. I know that these words are now part of English too but CA is so full of native and second language Spanish speaking people, couldn’t there just be an agreement that we will use the Spanish pronunciation? I don’t claim to be a linguist and I know little about how language and pronunciation develop. Maybe this is an inevitability that dominant cultures pronunciations will become the norm. Instead, I will bask in this special state where Spanish is beautifully unavoidable!