There's Spanish, And There's Some Other Spanish

 First, let me acknowledge that my level of Spanish is limited to about twelve terms (one of them is 'dónde está el baño', which basically means I kinda need to know where your bathroom is located....this is a handy term to remember).  Also...it's helpful to remember the phrase 'urgentemente', which means 'fast' or 'urgent'.  

This week....the Biden White House National Security Council adviser....Roberta Jacobson....stood up and said that the US border was OPEN, in English.

After she finished that comment....she then suddenly flipped over and said the phase in Spanish....'the border is NOT closed'.  If you think about it....the first comment doesn't translate to the second comment, but it's supposed to mean the same thing.

Then, this funny thing happened.

Someone walks up to Jacobson at the podium, and slips her a piece of paper....then she utters: “la frontera esta cerrada” (the border IS closed) in Spanish.

The confusion factor?  Well....it went from a marginal '4' to a '9' real quick.

So we need to say this up front, and it's never been openly discussed by the US news media.

If you took a Mexican, a El Salvadoran, a Peruvian, a Guatemalan, and a Honduran in a room....to have a focus group.....you'd discover that they marginally understand each other's Spanish enough to get by (it'd be like 3rd grade kids from Australia, Canada, England, the US south, the US NY City crowd, and Jamaican folks) with different accents trying to communicate.

On Jacobson's grasp and understanding of Spanish?  It's anyone's guess.  She might be at the 3rd-grade level, or the 10th-grade level.  Is it Mexican-Spanish, or Puerto Rican-Spanish?  Unknown.  I kinda doubt that she was hired on her Spanish language abilities.  

If you brought this up with President Biden, he'd open his commentary up on on 1980s Mexican soap operas he'd watched....like 'Cristal' or 'La usurpadora', or that Spanish women always seemed overly dramatic in kicking the ass of their men-folks.

If you just stand back and admire this landscape....you need around a dozen special people hired by President Biden, who have one single unique language ability....like El Salvadorian-Spanish, Puerto Rican-Spanish, Texas-Spanish, Mexican-Spanish, or even Uruguayan-Spanish.  

The fact that maybe ten-percent of the border crossing folks are from way beyond Latin America?  Oh.....well....lets not bring up that forty-odd Chinese folks cross the border weekly, or that a dozen Iranians are usually picked up over an average month.