2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics  (Page 16/17)

But these transnational communities are not only an economic reality but also a political reality. The political parties of Mexico, Dominican Republic, and Colombia have offices in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York from which they present their electoral candidates, gather funds for the campaigns, and obtain votes that can be decisive in the electoral fights. At the same time, this intense bidirectional traffic of information, goods, and people deeply influence the origin nations. The birth among the organized diasporas of associations with the place of origin, known as HTA ( Hometown Associations ), has a more than considerable volume in the diverse enclaves of Hispanics in the U.S. Its purpose is other than to conserve the cultural bonds and to improve situations in the communities of the origin countries. This way, it is confirmed once again that the Latin migratory experience has differentiating characteristics from that of European immigrant groups. This continuous bond with the origin country will contribute, without a doubt, reinforcing linguistic loyalty with the Spanish language and, therefore, to its maintenance.

The massive presence of Hispanics in the urban world has shot a proliferation of communication medias that use Spanish to communicate with their audience. Only the National Association of Hispanic Publications includes 180 publications that spread 10 million newspaper units and magazines, most of them written in Spanish. If we were to add the 600 radio transmitters, plus 100 TV transmitters with regular programs in Spanish, we can have an idea of the formidable presence of the Hispanic in the media. And it is that 40 million Hispanics, with an annual spending power of nearly 700 billion dollars, constitute a very tempting market for the commercial publicity, which has turned to commercial bilingualism as a marketing strategy. According to Arnulfo Ramirez (1992), many medias in English turn to expressions in Spanish to sell more among Hispanics. On the other hand, the Spanish media turn to English to attract those second or third generation Hispanics whose Spanish begins to weaken, which confirms the advertising slogan, “It's a whole nuevo mundo out there.” The dollar has discovered the Hispanic market, and money, as already known, speaks all languages. And it is that, according to some market investigations, the commercial publicity in Spanish has turned out to be more effective among the Hispanic population than that in English. The advertisements in Spanish are more persuasive; that is to say, they more effectively urge a purchase and remain a longer time in the receiver’s memory than advertisements in English. This practice of commercial bilingualism and the publicity’s preference of the Spanish language demonstrate that that new world out there is a world where Spanish refuses to disappear, and the number of bilinguals continues to increase.

On the other hand, there are the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. The times in which psycholinguistic maintained a negative association among bilingualism and cognitive development, to the point of attributing bilingualism the responsibility of the mental setback of immigrant’s children, were left behind. Luckily, recent studies have demonstrated the opposite; that is to say, a positive association among bilingualism, academic results, and cognitive flexibility. This last advantage goes along with this, since bilingual persons by definition counts with more than one way of naming the same thing, which frees them of the tyranny of words, and allows them to look at the language and not through the language as is expressed by monolingual persons.