Watching the World Cup on the Mexican channels has been a real education this past week. I have not once turned over to the English-language channels, and am therefore utterly ignorant of anything that does not involve the World Cup or overly made-up and underly dressed-up women dancing around to loud cheering and leering by moustachioed hosts on the pretence that this has something to do with sport. I don’t miss the American news or the endless repeats, and I’m picking up some useful vocabulary too. “Delantero” means ‘striker’, “tiro penal” means ‘penalty’, and “goooooooooooollllll” means ‘I may be mistaken, but I do believe somebody has scored’.

I am going to buy a dictionary; it is about time I learnt Spanish. I cannot believe I have put it off thus far. I know I should probably learn to drive as well, but how am I going to understand the insults thrown my way on the freeway if I can’t speak Spanish? I see it everywhere, I hear it everywhere, so the problem of exposure will not be an issue. And watching these channels has made me realise that America really is bilingual, and I honestly don’t understand why this is not recognised on an official level. The TV stations are not being broadcast from Mexico – they are American. Sure, they are Mexico-centric as far as football and some shows are concerned, but they are for Spanish-speaking Americans. This is never more clear than in the adverts. Some of them are almost exactly the same as their Anglophone equivalents but re-shot with Spanish-speaking actors (such as the ones for Jack-in-the-Box), others are for products available to all Americans such as mobile-phone plans including maps of the US showing Spanish being spoken in every corner (giving the jarring impession that Spanish is actually the first and not the ‘minority’ language, as if this is some sort of parallel universe). There are certainly more football-themed commercials (unsurprising, being the World Cup), even poking fun at the English-speaking Americans’ distrust of football, such as one which shows a short Hispanic guy buying a new TV at WalMart, ending with a shot of him on the sofa with his large American buddy, who looks in horror at the screen and whines, “soccer??”

It is as though I have dipped my toe into a hidden country within the US. Its boundaries are clearly not simply linguistic, but encompass cultural things such as watching the World Cup. There really is a footy-mad media here in this land. People here really do want to watch soccer on TV with a can of cerveza and some nachos. It’s just that they speak Spanish. the mainstream English-speaking media has really failed to tap into this culture in any real way, and ‘soccer’ therefore becomes associated with the foreign, the non-American. Those who advocate the idea of ‘English First’, in which English is made the sole official language of the nation, do so because they are threatened by the Spanish speaking ‘other’, and their ways of life; yet it feels as though if you want to become a part of English-speaking America, you have to become part of their culture, watching baseball and American football, while relegating football/soccer to the foreign underclass.

Well, no more. I will learn Spanish, if this is the only way I can watch my footy, and I will speak to people at my local Mexican restaurant in their own tongue, learn their mannerisms, understand their culture. Of course, I could just pay the extra and get the cable package that has ESPN or Fox Soccer channel; but for one thing I’d be giving in to the man, and secondly I’d be missing out on those crazy Mexican commentators, like the one who actually gave birth today when Joe Cole scored what he descibed as a “golazo”, or ‘an absolute cracker’.