In August 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani went viral for speaking in Mandarin to promote a new program providing free Broadway tickets.
He announced the program in Spanish, English and Bengali. Viewers praised his inclusive approach to language. Nearly 50% of people living in New York City speak a language other than English.
Forty-five years ago, another politician highlighted the country’s linguistic diversity.
On October 5, 1981, Texas congressman Mickey Leland spoke for nearly 2 ½ minutes in Spanish on the floor of the House of Representatives. A recording of Leland’s speech can be found below and a translation of the speech can be found on page 23187 of the Congressional Record of the Speech.
The House was debating the extension of Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 1975 amendment required jurisdictions to provide bilingual voting materials to voters.
Even amid laughter and disruptions, Leland affirmed his desire to learn Spanish to “speak the language of millions of citizens of this country.” He hoped to highlight the experience of Americans who only spoke Spanish or had Limited English Proficiency (LEP). He declared, “su cultura es una cultura Americana y una parte íntima de nuestra cultura que la hace más rica y más fuerte.”
“Even though you can’t understand what I’m saying, maybe you can understand the hypocrisy of rejecting citizens just because they speak only Spanish,” Leland expressed. As a Black congressman, he represented a constituency that was 43% Black American and 31% Mexican American.
Leland was born in 1944 in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. He grew up under Jim Crow and attended segregated Phillis Wheatley High School. In 1978, he founded the National Black-Hispanic Democratic Coalition. He understood firsthand how anti-Latino racism went hand in hand with anti-Black racism.
On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act. It outlawed literacy tests and polling taxes, racist policies that had disenfranchised Black voters.
In 1975, Congress added Section 203 Language Minority Provisions to the Voting Rights Act. It designated certain groups that had “suffered a history of exclusion” as being “language minorities.” The law only protects groups that speak “Spanish, Asian, Native American and Alaska Native” languages. It does not provide protection for all languages. A location must also have 10,000 voters or more than 5 percent of its voting population to be eligible.
By 1981, some politicians argued that these protections were no longer necessary. Others, like Rep. Robert McClory of Illinois, attempted to repeal the act altogether. While McClory claimed that bilingual materials were too costly, the core of his argument was that the federal government should not spend money communicating with non-English speakers.
“It is the English language which citizens in this country must learn if they are to enter the mainstream of American culture,” he spoke on February 5, 1981. “I am Irish and proud of it, but I do not believe that my State of Illinois has any responsibility to provide ballots in Gaelic.”
For Leland, however, a person’s lack of fluency was not an individual fault. It was a consequence of American policies “den[ying people] educational opportunities.”
As a Washington Post article on October 6, 1981 put it: Leland’s speech “took the wind out the sails of the bilingual opponents.” McClory’s attempt to eliminate the amendment lost by a vote of 283 to 192. In 1982, Congress ultimately extended Section 203 to 1992 and has continued to renew it since. It will be debated once more in 2032.
In 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order that declared English as the country’s official language. He claimed that “from the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language.” In actuality, the United States has never been monolingual. At the nation’s founding, people spoke Spanish, French, German, African and creolized languages, and hundreds of Indigenous languages. Today, 22% of people in the United States above the age of five speak more than English at home.
Neglecting this linguistic diversity has left millions of voters without support during elections. The Trump Administration’s erosion of voting rights risks even greater disenfranchisement.
As Leland observed four decades ago, “there is [still] considerable work to be done in the Voting Rights Act to counter the gerrymandering… and outright intimidation of voters.” The solution to these attacks is guaranteeing that every American has an equal and safe opportunity to vote. As Leland argued, plurality not only enriches American culture, it is American culture.
Watch Leland’s Speech: