Spanish spoken in Tennessee with Southern accent
"Manos arriba!" the teacher prompts. "Manos arriba!" the officers answer, one at a time. "Manos arriba!"
Their accents are clunky and rolled R's come out sounding more like growls. But the people gathered in this classroom in Tennessee farm country can hardly be blamed for less-than-nimble tongues.
For most, it is only their second day of speaking Spanish.
Over three days, the officers, representing 10 departments from around the state, will learn a holster full of helpful phrases in Spanish, from the mundane, like "papeles del carro," or auto registration, to the more adrenaline-charged "manos arriba" (hands up) and "acuestese boca abajo" (lie face down).
They also are introduced to aspects of different Latin American cultures and to simple but important niceties, such as whether to address a woman as señora or señorita.
Similar scenes are playing out in the South as police officers, firefighters, social workers and other government officials scramble to cope with a population of immigrants from Mexico and Central America that has grown faster in places around this region than anywhere else in the United States.
But unlike California and the Southwest, with generations of Hispanic residents and a deep reservoir of Spanish speakers, the South essentially is starting from scratch when it comes to the language.
Besides crash courses for employees, some agencies are making use of a translator hotline. Others are hiring interpreters and translating documents into Spanish for walk-in clients.
Police in Lexington, Ky., finish their language classes with five weeks of Spanish immersion in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
The training is the latest sign of how immigration is altering the South, with few home-grown Spanish speakers but plenty of work at farms, construction sites and poultry plants.
The presence of immigrant workers here, a novelty not long ago, has fairly quickly been accepted as a fact of life.
While cities such as Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta have seen fast jumps in the number of Hispanic residents since 1990, the immigrant wave also has shown up in rural areas where it once would have been unusual to hear anything but English.
Officials acknowledge that many agencies have been slow to respond. Often, Spanish speakers have shown up at government offices only to be met with uncomprehending shrugs or instructions to come back with their own translators. Many don't return.
The language barrier is viewed as especially critical among public-safety agencies. Police and sheriff's commanders are arranging Spanish classes so that officers can deal with immigrants as they would native-born residents — not just as criminal suspects but as victims, witnesses or motorists running a red light.
Police also see the language training as a safety measure for themselves. The Tennessee class includes a rundown of Spanish phrases that might be used by a suspect to direct a violent attack on an officer.
Critics say the programs are a poor use of public money.
"We think that instead of English-speaking employees going to learn some phrases in Spanish, the immigrants themselves should be learning English," said Jim Lubinskas, spokesman for U.S. English Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based group. He said crash courses probably don't provide enough proficiency.
Art Heun, police chief in Pulaski, Tenn., 80 miles south of Nashville, said it would be ideal if immigrants mastered English. "The fact of it is, that's not happening, and we have to communicate with them," he said. "Why make it difficult on both sides?"
Four of Heun's officers attended the class in Lawrenceburg under a new program called the Tennessee Criminal Justice Language Academy, which plans at least eight rounds of classes by the end of the year.
The idea for the academy, funded this year by a $180,000 grant, came after police met growing numbers of immigrants who did not speak English.
At safety checkpoints, officers got blank looks in response to their questions. Often, the flummoxed officers simply waved the drivers on.
A report issued last fall by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and the Pew Hispanic Center showed that of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, those with the fastest-growing numbers of Hispanics were in the South.
Tops were Greensboro and Winston-Salem, N.C., where the Hispanic population jumped nearly tenfold, to 62,210, from 1990 to 2000. Next were Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Nashville and Atlanta.