Spanish was first spoken in St. Augustine, Fla. which was settled by the Spanish before the Pilgrims settled in Jamestown. If there’s one thing that every panel discussion had in common, this fact was it. Spanish was in this country before English was, when Ponce de Leon hit the peninsula and called it la Florida for its extensive flora.

Last week, on Dec. 8 and 9, people from all over the world came together to discuss the value of Spanish within the United States. The Instituto Cervantes hosted this two-day symposium to discuss the language’s strengths and benefits to implementing Spanish in the school system, business and the media. If you followed the live Twitter feed at @ExtraNewspaper, you would have seen the various quotes and ideas coming from people such as Sylvia Puente, executive director of the Latino Policy Forum; John Trainor, publisher of Hoy Newspaper; Gery Chico, chair of the Illinois State Board of Education; Juan Maneual Benitez, political reporter for NY1; David Alandete, reporter for El Pais, a Spanish newspaper; Alejandro Escalona, Chicago Sun-Times columnist and many others who live and work in Spanish.

From the discussion of just how much the United States works with Latin America, to just how much work needs to be done when it comes to advocacy for Latinos, it is an understatement to say that these panel discussions were overwhelming.

According to the education panel, Illinois is the first state in which is is mandatory to have bilingual classes during early childhood education. The need for bilingual teachers is scaring a lot of those who work within education because it is these teachers who are going to understand and know how to teach English language learners. What has been discovered, according to over 20 years of research, is that teaching a student in their native language while implementing a second language slowly will allow them to grow extensively, developing their cognitive skills along with becoming fully bilingual. Dual language education, where students learn and are taught in both languages might be the best bet for having students achieve and succeed in school. Transitional bilingual classes are the second best, slowly integrating students into English only classes, although hurting them because their Spanish is stunted due to its halt in curriculum. Ultimately, English as a second language could be detrimental to students, not only stunting but completely neglecting their Spanish development and teaching students completely in English. These students tend to drop out of high school or do not continue on with higher education, stated the panel.

In addition, the issue of Spanish being a second-class language has got to stop, said Reyna Hernandez. That’s how Spanish will finally be accepted and implemented into schools for the benefit of the students. Ironically, while native Spanish speaking students are being stripped of their language at school, higher class students are on waiting lists for language academies and dual language schools to learn Spanish as English-only speaking students. If Chicago Public Schools saw native Spanish-speakers as already ahead of the curve instead of behind it, students will be able to learn in a more fully and well-rounded manner.

When talking about the media, there were only a few things that came up which were on point and worth discussing further. The fact that there aren’t many Latinos in English-written papers is a problem, pointed out Escalona. He said that since the majority of the minority are Latino, there should be more Latino reporters. The issue of Latinos in newsroom has always been there, but the fact of the matter is that since there’s 50 million Latinos in the country, newsrooms should be representative of the population.

Alandete, foreign correspondent for El Pais, pointed out that many Latinos that he has spoken to in Washington, don’t seem to be on the same page in the sense of unification and progressing Latinos forward.

I fee that the most interesting speaker of the media panel was Kristin Moran, who did a study on the “niche market” that so many media outlets and marketers try to target. What many people know is that the Millennial generation is hard to pinpoint and at the same time, is the largest growing demographic.

She warned against Nielsen ratings, which state that the majority of Latino households speak and watch Spanish television. But what those ratings didn’t include were the opinions of the youngsters who live with their parents. The children and teenagers tend to watch more English television, watching Spanish-language programming with their Spanish-speaking parents. This is the intermittent generation that does not know the language barrier because they can speak and understand both English and Spanish.

Moran found that of the Latino families that she surveyed and worked with, most of them wanted to see their stories and experiences portrayed on mainstream television, not separately, like Tr3 has done, creating a whole network for this niche market. Dora the Explorer and Diego were also created especially for the Latino market, but have become so popular, no one cares where they’re from ethnically.

People don’t watch the Wizards of Waverly Place because the mom is Mexican and married to a retired wizard. They watch it because it’s popular. With this point, Moran posed the question: so are these specialty markets in which the media portrays as something so unique it needs its own everything correct? Is it making people feel inclusive to their American, monolingual, monocultural counterparts? Or is it segregating this generational market even more saying, “You’re so special, you need your own market, channel and network”?

Again, what she found is that Latinos wanted to be included in mainstream America, displaying their stories and experiences on network television. After listening to this, I realized that this was me. This was my market and I could understand exactly what Moran was talking about because it was my family she interviewed, in an abstract way, of course.

Overall, these panel discussions brought to light interesting information as well as leaving its listeners with food for thought. At least, the world of bilingualism, in which I live and work, my pride in my ability to function in Spanish grew just a bit more.