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The Times seems to back up the linguist's assessment. She was asked, on the witness stand at her hearing, where she went to high school. She was unable to answer. Her later explanation to the Times, did not help matters: "My brain, my mind was white. That was my first time in court." By "white", though, she meant "blank". Both words are blanco in Spanish. And a city council is a formal public setting; if she was terrified by a courtroom into speechlessness, it is hard to imagine success on the city council.
Another of her explanations also didn't help her case. She said that the linguist who examined her, an Australian, pronounced "summer" as "summa", and so she thought he meant Somerton, a nearby town. If her grip on the context was so loose that a common foreign accent made her confuse a season with a town, this is on her own shoulders.
Finally, Ms Cabrera later told CNN en Español (video in Spanish) that she had subsequently had her hearing tested; her doctor found (on a 1-5 scale) that one ear rated only a 2, the other a 3. But she seemed to have no trouble understanding the CNN interviewers over a fuzzy Skype connection.
Commenters from the left see skullduggery in the decision to keep Ms Cabrera off the ballot. John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun asks
I wonder how a judge would have ruled had he been called upon to decide the qualifications of the elder Richard Daley to be mayor of Chicago on the basis of his mastery of English.Well, you can see Daley here; my guess is that Arizona's Judge Nelson would have let him run for city council. What's more, I don't think Arizona's law is unreasonable. It sounds like Ms Cabrera speaks only basic English, not to a level where voters could trust she could handle her duties in it. I haven't been able to find a video of her speaking English, but I have no reason to distrust the court's expert.
Does this mean, as many conservatives fret, that Spanish is taking over regions of the country, even official domains like city councils? Hardly. This is one person. She does speak English, merely not well enough, probably because she spent much of her childhood in Mexico. And she was not allowed to run for office in the end. Most importantly, this story from a small border town was rare enough that it made the Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. In other words, much more than this will be needed to prove that Spanish poses any real threat to English in America.
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