According to the latest information from the US Census Bureau, more than a third of people in Santa Fe County can speak a language other than English, including just north of 40,000 people who speak Spanish with some degree of fluency.
The New Mexico Constitution lists both English and Spanish as important languages. It includes an antiquated mandate for the Legislature to ensure all public school teachers are proficient in both languages, and another stating the "inability to speak, read or write in English or Spanish" should not prevent anyone from voting, holding office or sitting on juries. (Notably, Gov. Susana Martinez unsuccessfully challenged the bit about juries in court when she was the Las Cruces district attorney.)
In spite of constitutional support for a multilingual civic life, or at least a bilingual one, the city of Santa Fe faces practical challenges when it comes to engaging people whose first or preferred language is not English. That includes Spanish as well as Tewa, which predates both in this region, and any others that people might speak.
As of yet, there has been no comprehensive assessment of language barriers among the city departments that interact most frequently with Santafesinos, including the economic development office, emergency responders, the city attorney's office and others. Members of the city's Immigration Committee are pushing for such an assessment to be conducted on the heels of the upcoming mayoral election.
SFR asked all five candidates for mayor about their language abilities and thoughts on accessibility throughout the city. Most don't speak Spanish, the state's second most prominent language. Those who do picked it up from their environment rather than learning it early-on. But all expressed a desire to make the city less English-centric.
Candidates Joseph Maestas and Ron Trujillo both say they speak Spanish, albeit imperfectly.
"Both my parents spoke Spanish, but to us kids, for some reason they spoke English," says Maestas, who learned the language from his grandparents and while working as a teenager at the family liquor store in Santa Cruz, New Mexico. He later improved it through his professional and political career.
Trujillo says he grew up speaking a mix of Spanish and English with his family and later took Spanish courses in college. He now speaks it conversationally: "It's great that I can speak Spanish," he says, "but that doesn't define you as a mayor."
One issue cited separately by candidates Alan Webber and Kate Noble was accessibility to business documents for would-be business owners who prefer a language other than English.
"I see it as an economic development issue, because we really need to embrace our immigrant businesses and potential with our immigrant community," says Noble. She also says her time on the Santa Fe Public Schools board has piqued her interest in how the city could send multilingual alerts to residents.
Webber brings up the broader lack of advice for small businesses available to non- and not-really-English speakers, and considers economic integration to be part of his "sanctuary city" plank—a position he picked up from the local immigrant advocacy group, Somos Un Pueblo Unidos.
"We have the ability to train people in language, train people in cultural sensitivity," says Webber, "and that's the job of the city, to be that kind of a place."
Candidate Peter Ives, like the others, couldn't readily identify the ways most city departments try to reach people who speak limited English, but expressed a similar desire to do more (at least for Spanish speakers).
"We have to keep on identifying those areas where we do not have English and Spanish available and making sure it is for any citizen of Santa Fe who needs it, and who would be helped by it," he tells SFR.
In fact, the city's Immigration Committee has already asked the city to better identify these areas. On Feb. 18 it adopted a recommendation for the city to hire a contractor "to assess language barriers and needs and to recommend translation and interpretation priorities."
Marcela Diaz, a member of the Immigration Committee and executive director of Somos, describes the contracting job as a first step toward knowing where the city could improve.
"At a minimum," says Diaz, the assessment would "include an evaluation of existing language services, the need for translation and in city departments that interface most with general public, [and] what language services similar sized cities provide."
That recommendation has been presented to the City Council, Diaz says, but the city government has not signaled its position on the matter.
Santa Fe committed to "improv[ing] language access to city services and programs for its diverse multilingual residents" when it passed the sanctuary city resolution last February. But Diaz says progress in this area has been limited.
City manager Brian Snyder drafted a memo in December discussing the status of the resolution's enactment, including the provision on improving language access. In it, Snyder wrote that some city employees receive pay incentives for being able to read and write in Spanish, but did not specify which departments.
Asked to describe the city's progress toward implementing the resolution's various mandates, city spokesman Matt Ross referred to the December memo.
That brings it full circle: It was in response to that memo that the Immigration Committee suggested a contractor come in to do the assessment, based on the idea that the city can't know how to bridge language gaps in city services until somebody studies the issue with the necessary depth.
