Spanish or English?

I read an article today from yesterday's Redeye newspaper entitled Conversing no simple matter for bilinguals. It was buried all the way on page 14, but I was still surprised to see it included in this mainly dumbed-down and condensed version of the Chicago Tribune. (Sorry, I can't link to the article, since the Redeye insists on charging to read the articles online- how medieval). (Also, you should know that I think this article is originally from the LA Times, but I could not find it there either...)

The article points to the question that all bilingual Latinos deal with on a day to day basis- during what situations and with what people do you use English and/or Spanish? It sounds like a straightforward question, and sometimes it is an easy matter, but when its not...
Things can go wrong both ways.

The problems are:

If you speak to someone in Spanish:

• they may not know Spanish, and you'll feel like a jerk for assuming that they are of Latino origin or Spanish-speaking.

• They may even know Spanish, but feel insulted or condescended to because of their own prejudices and hang-ups.

If you speak to them in English:

• they may not know English, or worse-

• they may think that you are a sell-out, snobby wanna-be-white person who's embarrassed of your culture.

It sucks either way, and believe me, I've been on both sides.

Of course its hard. As the article deftly points out, you usually only get a couple of seconds at most to make that decision, and you have to base it on both ephemeral and concrete things like "age, clothing, and apparent social status- along with skin, eye and hair color."

But of course those are cues that we can't really depend on. Us Latinos are a very diverse group of people and those racial and class-based judgments are exactly what can and does steer us the wrong way and end up making us look either stupid or elitist.

So what to do? I, for one still try to speak Spanish as much as possible because it does make me a feel a certain kinship with other Latinos out there. I'm sure I'll make some mistakes, but so do mono-lingual white people. How many more times will I be asked 'where are you from' (answer: um, Chicago) or 'what does your name mean?' (answer: nothing really) before I die? To the latter question (as if every exotic-to-them-name has to mean something), I have taken to answering something over the top, like 'my name means flying seabird of the west' so that they can get off my back and I can laugh at them ;)
Sadly, some of them really believe that my name means that, but a few actually realize the stupidity of their question.