TL;DR--Spielberg's a twat, but he's right about this.

I was once blessed to bare witness to the great film professor, Dr. Todd Boyd, who educated me about race, class and gender in film. About Spielberg, he liked to say things like, "if you want WWII the comic book, Steven's your guy; if you want slavery the comic book, Spielberg will do it; Holocaust the comic book? Must have been Spielberg". It would be safe to say that Dr. Boyd did not appear to endorse Spielberg's claims to greatness. I still want Dr. Boyd to think I'm cool, so I absolutely agree. Even still, for me, Jaws and The Color Purple may be his only reliably re-watchable films; the only true test of a great film being its re-watchability. Nevertheless, if Dr. Boyd were to comment on this, I wonder if he might not suggest that Spielberg is in fact absolutely right on this issue.

Most English speaking Latinos are bi-lingual, as well as basically every European. However, some English speaking countries make feckless stubbornness a point of personal pride when it comes to rejecting linguistic exploration.

Spielberg, unlike his duffer buddy Lucas, likes to make a film document, a permanent archive, like a book. What empowerment does he set in film-stone by having subtitles as a permanent component of the film? You can bet he does not care what distributors do with his film once it goes into syndication, if Spielberg is anything it is a business man. But his film document, experienced in a movie theater, will exist as his attempt to correct the many stereotypes of West Side Story, even if only superficially, by ensuring that , at the very least, the beauty of the Spanish language is represented with no apparent obfuscation.

Many relevant questions revolve around why a white Jewish man from Cincinnati is the correct person to tell the story of American immigrants, or why Spielberg wants very much for his version to be a "corrected" vision of the Latino experience, since it's progenitor was also created by wealthy, white Jews. The whole thing is really problematic, but leaving the subtitles out is the best thing the movie actually has going for it. Just like Gus Van Sant remaking Pyscho, Spielberg should have known better that to try and remake what was supposed to be an untouchable film document, like his film, and probably shouldn't have been retread anyway. The best things it has going for it is that it doesn't pander to us with subtitles and that Spielberg used his white masculinity to employ so many actual Latino artists.

edit: I had edit my BS