It depends on the school district. Some require students to learn Spanish, a lot don't. There is no uniform standard for learning foreign languages in high school.
At my high school, for example, learning a foreign language was elective, and the choices were Spanish, French or German. At my university, it was required to take a few semesters of a foreign language, but they did not specify the language. They offered a wide variety of foreign languages to choose from.
But I would say most people in the US don't know how to speak Spanish, even if they took a few semesters in high school. There are a lot of people who are mad about Spanish being an option on telephone help lines and such.
The first paragraph was discussing how the US government classifies immigrants. A white Spanish immigrant is classified as Latino. The US government does not consider Latino to be a race, so they then ask "what is your race" after classifying someone as Latino. Most Latinos, if they are not black, are wrongly classified as white Hispanic (which is a separate category from non-Hispanic white) by the US government, unless they otherwise indicate their race. An immigrant from Brazil is considered Latino, but not Hispanic, even if they are of German or Italian origin, like most Brazilian models.
We don't really have a "mulatto" (is that a pc term?) category. There was not as much race mixing between the African slaves and European settlers in the US as there was in Brazil. Mixed race people are mostly considered black, although that may be changing. I think the US government finally let people classify themselves as multiple races on the 2000 US Census.
Bookmarks