Abstract

The launching of a Spanish version of The Star Spangled Banner, called Nuestro Himno, sparked a controversy that the media embraced. This paper analyzes the discourse in print news coverage of that event in the United States. Through this discourse, we discern U.S. ideologies about language and immigration and explore the moral panic that media coverage captured and reproduced. We propose a sixth characteristic of moral panics: polarized dichotomy. Nuestro Himno provided an open forum for the current debate about making English the official language of The United States, often referred to as the English-only movement. This investigation is situated in the context of the national debate on immigration reform. We find that both detractors and proponents of the Nuestro Himno accept an assimilation model for immigrants to the United States. For many, the English language stands as a symbol of unity, patriotism, willingness to assimilate, and national identity, in short, as a central feature of being “American.”