A Rose is a Rose is a Rose

What's in a name? More than meets the bank account, according to businessman Larry Whitten. The hotelier, who recently bought a hotel in Taos, New Mexico is requesting that his Hispanic employees speak English in front of him and in some cases Anglicize their names. This would mean that Jose Gutierrez could become "Joseph Jones," Imelda Marco could be "Josephine Jones" and Ruben Saenz could be "Ruben Steinberg," to name a few.

Not surprisingly, a hailstorm erupted from the predominantly Hispanic community in that town, though it could have been the same or worse in some other places. Some Hispanic civil rights groups have called Whitten a racist and one even called him "a white N-word," which is a jump considering that he is probably of Irish, English or Scottish descent and not African-American at all.

But Whitten is sticking to his guns because he claims that customers are not going to want to do business with people whose names are hard to pronounce. Considering the average American's penchant for learning a language, it isn't a bad call.

Beyond that, Whitten is partially correct. Although Spanish has morphed into a second language, not everyone can speak it. Unless any of those hotel workers are scientists at Fermi Labs or university lecturers, no one invited them here, either, so the best thing for them to do is to buckle down, crack a book or two and try learning English.

In the end, a compromise is in order: Those not born here get to keep their names if they try learning English, take citizenship classes and stop throwing things at the police during rallies.