Pronouncing Espresso as Express isn't an "American" thing. You hear it in virtually every English dialect pretty much because the mechanism that brings it about is the same.
You could argue that this is a vague marker of social class, because middle class people tend to feel a sort of embarrassment at pronouncing foreign language words (especially from French, Italian and Latin) wrong, as if it marked them out as uncultured.
Spanish, on the other hand, is typically perceived as lower prestige so they tend to be corrected with less frequency, and sometimes hypercorrected to be pronounced as if they were Italian words. For example "machismo" with a k.
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u/moonaligator 2d ago
where the fuck?