Speak American?

There was a show on PBS the other day discussing the phases which American English is undergoing today called "Do You Speak American?". It is actually a series of episodes that will be airing in the coming weeks. I was lucky enough to catch on that day the episode that could most interest us: Spanish in the US. As I saw it, the series will be dedicating one episode to several of the major influences currently impacting English, and in a way, see how these varieties are developing. In this particular episode, Spanglish was not the focus; instead, it was Spanish itself in the US that was addressed in the show. As an example, an extreme one I'd dare say, the city of El Cenizo, TX was chosen. Some years ago, this city passed an ordinance making Spanish the town's official language; this meant that all official business matters must be conducted in Spanish. The townspeople talked about how other Texans did not welcome this and quickly showed their aversion, especially the people affiliated with the English-only movements who, since the US has no official language, were against Hispanics taking over with Spanish. The broadcast culminated with a question from the narrator in which he asked whether Hispanics posed a threat to American English with Spanish, or, if they are merging like everyone else in the US, since after all, a significant percentage of Hispanic-Americans who have been here for several generations have already lost Spanish. Nonetheless, I personally don't see either English or Spanish in danger in the US. I do believe Spanish usage will continue to grow here. And even though an article there argues that "most people assume that television and other media change the way we speak, but [that] linguists have searched in vain for supporting evidence." I agree with this, but what mass media allows is for speakers of a certain dialect to experience the changes that are occurring in another dialect, and vice versa; for instance, I've written about how the Portuguese can easily understand the Brazilians because the Portuguese have been exposed to the Brazilian media for decades, while the adverse is not true because the average Brazilian has seen little or no media from Portugal; and even with all this, as I have stated, the Lusitanian speech is not getting closer to the Brazilian one, as one would think. Therefore, mass media might not change the way people speak, but it does have an advantage: an exposure to different dialects of the given language so that when encountered, they may be understood; thus, if anything, words usages and expressions are what mass media effectively transmits, not necessarily pronunciation shifts, and this has indeed been case in Portugal with respect to the Brazilian media. Thanks to a great communication and a vast Spanish media in the US, Hispanics here are exposed to accents, pronunciations and expressions from all the Spanish-speaking countries. Even Spanglish ensures this, because in order to use Spanglish, a knowledge of Spanish is required.
Speaking of Spanglish, after the broadcast, there were scenes from future episodes where they will cover other areas of the Union and other aspects affecting English, among which were shown Asian Americans, Blacks, Southerners, and what seemed to be a portion dedicated to Spanglish. They showed the set and studios of the Spanglish television channel I have already written about: KJLA, calling itself "LATV: The First Bilingual Station in Los Angeles". On the PBS website, there is even a screenshot of a Spanglish message from one of the shows on the channel which exhibits that Spanish/English mixture I've explained before, where each language's own rules are respected:

Transcription of the text on image: Estaba cambiando los canales y mire su programa y se me hizo muy interesante I would like to ask you to play "El Gavilan" se llama Ricardo Cerda. Thanks

On that website too there are several articles containing modest information. Here is something from there which suits the topic:

Correcting the Myths about U.S. Spanish
...

MYTH #1: Spanish in the United States in purely a function of immigration in the 20th and 21st centuries .
REALITY: Spanish has been spoken in the United States as long or longer than English.

MYTH #2: Spanish in the United States is a monolithic entity and is not characterized by the same amount of variation as American English.
REALITY: Spanish in the United States is highly diverse and exhibits a wide array of variation regionally, ethnically and socially. Variation in the Spanish of the United States is due to the results of a founder effect, later immigration from across the Spanish diaspora, and sociolinguistic variables such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age and gender.

MYTH #3: Spanish language use in the United States presents a threat to the use of English.
REALITY: The use of Spanish by Hispanics poses no threat to the dominance of English in the United States. Spanish and English have coexisted in this country for nearly 400 years.

On a side note (side note because it doesn't have to do with the Romance languages directly), there are some interesting articles regarding American English dialects, including one about Chicano English:

It’s not “beginner English,” it’s not Spanglish and it’s not watered-down Spanish. Chicano English is a distinctive U.S. English dialect.
... ...
Because of its origins, Chicano English does have many features, especially in the phonology that show the influence of Spanish. For example, the ‘a’ sound in words like pasta or saw sounds much more like the Spanish “a” than in other dialects of English. In endings like going or talking, Chicano English speakers tend to have a higher vowel, more like ‘i’ of Spanish (as in si), so that the words end up sounding more like ‘goween’ and ‘talkeen’.

Also to be found there are some interactive pages, one which which tests your vowel power, to see if you can understand what speakers from several regions in the US say, and, another one which gives you the opportunity of recognizing where a group of American speakers is from, both looking into your knowledge and understanding of speaking "American".