"Contrary to popular belief, the first European language spoken on American soil was not English, but Spanish. Explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and his shipmates landed on the Florida coast in 1513, almost 100 years before the British established a permanent settlement in Virginia." "This exploration of the development of the Spanish language in the territory that has become the United States from a sociohistorical perspective draws attention to the long tradition of multilingualism in the United States in the hope of putting to rest the myth that the United States was ever a monolingual nation."--Jacket.