Business Spanish in the United States: Origins and Continuum

Abstract:The scope of this article is twofold: to revisit the foundational importance of Business Spanish to the United States and to track its early formalization in American secondary and higher education. It will focus on the years surrounding American Independence in 1776, followed by the key role played by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish (AATS) and Hispania from 1917 through the mid-1940s. Each period represents a historical starting point for Business Spanish. The focus on these separate but closely related starting points, the second issuing from the first, distinguishes this article from previous research through its emphasis on the initial groundwork laid. The historical record shows that the foundational importance of Spanish for commerce and trade contributed to the ongoing importance of the study of Spanish itself in the United States. These two starting points also contained within them the dialectic between the practical and the cultural reasons for studying Spanish, and the aspirational balance that might be achieved between competing rationales. Quotations of the protagonists themselves will anchor a palimpsest methodology that allows the rhetoric of earlier times to speak for itself and reverberate into the discourse of contemporary curriculum development.