ABSTRACT
In October 2014, while I was working on this special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication at the University of Massachusetts, university members and the people of Amherst at large were shocked at the news of a college student of Honduran origin who had returned to his dorm only to find racist graffiti on the door of his room. The message, reading ‘Kill these Mexicans can’t even speak English’ (sic), was particularly painful in a state that prides itself in supporting the Democrats, and reminded the liberal town of Amherst that racism is not a thing of the past. Hispanics were not the only students targeted by racist slurs at the university, but their case comes to illustrate the complex relationship between the anglophone and the Spanish-speaking populations of the USA. At about the same time, in the liberal Democrat-voting state of Vermont, an eighth-grade student wrote a letter to Senator Joe Benning asking him to introduce a bill to give the state a Latin motto. As the issue became public, irate voters wrote incensed messages in broken English assuming that Latin meant Latino: ‘No cause vt ain’t no Latino area’ (see The Vermont Political Observer, 2015). These may be regarded as isolated incidents, but they reflect the mistrust of the other so deeply ingrained in part of US society.
