gcblues: You write, “gringos are way too inflexible and ethno centric.”
I have a friend from El Salvador. She lived in Mexico for a while, where she was looked down upon because her Spanish wasn’t exactly like Mexican Spanish. Isn’t that being inflexible and ethnocentric?
Also, your claim that we ought to learn Spanish because that is what most people in the Americas speak applies equally well to French-speaking Canadians, French-speaking Haitians, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, and Dutch-speaking Surinamese. I’m not sure what all those groups think about this, but they might object that Spanish isn’t that important in their lives for them to bother.
I agree with your general point, though. Americans ought to learn foreign languages, because it makes lots of things (business, war, espionage) easier when we do. I myself am now learning Arabic.
