• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 455

Part of Session 131: Latino Social networks and the city (Other abstracts in this session)

Being a Latin American in La Sagrada Familia: The discursive negotiation of emerging identities and reported agency

Authors: Patiño, Adriana
Submitted by: PATIÑO, ADRIANA (POMPEU FABRA UNIVERSITY, Spain)

La Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, is one of the busiest areas in the city due to the interest in Gaudi’s work. There, we find, on the one hand, the unending stream of tourists from all over the world who come to see the state of what is probably one of the last great building projects in European church history.  At the same time, we find migrants of different origins who have found a variety reasons to settle in the neighbourhood. The main purpose of this paper is to focus on Latin Americans, one of the biggest visible groups living in the heart of this symbol of all things Catalan, in order to study the identities they display, their positionings (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Marshall, 2007) within the local community, as well as the social and inter-ethnic consequences of such ways of positioning.

Initial ethnographic observations have allowed us to identify some of the ways this group, mainly consisting of people of Ecuadorian, Colombian and Peruvian origins, draws on certain symbolic and material resources in order to establish themselves eco­­­nomically. One of them is the commodification (Heller, 2003) of Latin American identities through a “Latino network” where restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets emerge as places to recreate practices from people’s countries of origin, but at the same time to offer native, though often modified products, to the local community and tourists. Language uses play a central role in the service encounters taking place between vendors and customers, as well as the ways they manage multilingualism in the co-official languages of the Region, Catalan and Spanish (albeit in its different Latin American varieties), as well as English, interactionally categorised as the language of tourists. 

A sociolinguisitic ethnographic approach will allow us to triangulate diverse language practices in order to look at the tensions that emerge in such a complex context and the ways participants negotiate their identities and positionings. Thus, reported agency in participants´ narratives will be contrasted with transcribed daily exchanges and observation of the communicative practices of participants carried out in these places, including multimodal and literacy practices. Results should allow us to explain participants’ ideas of what it means to be a Latin American in Catalonia.

References

Heller, M. (2003), Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7: 473–492. 

Marshall, S. (2007). New Latino diaspora and new zones of language contact: A social constructionist analysis of Spanish speaking Latin Americans in Catalonia. In J. Holmquist, A. Lorenzino, & L. Sayahi (eds.) Selected proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. pp. 150-161. 

Pavlenko, A, & Blackledge, A. (2004) Introduction: New Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Negotiation of Ientities in Multilingual Contexts. In Pavlenko, A & Blackledge, A. (eds.) Negotiation of Identites in Multilingual Contexts. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pp.1-33.