Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 509
Part of Session 131: Latino Social networks and the city (Other abstracts in this session)
Global Urban Centers as Ethnolinguistic Ritual Centers: Language Ideologies, Linguistic Practices, and Latino Panethnic Formations in Chicago
Authors: Rosa, Jonathan Daniel
Submitted by: Rosa, Jonathan Daniel (University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States of America)
In this paper I seek to analyze the role that global cities play in the contemporary creation of diasporic ethnolinguistic identities. I focus on Chicago as an urban sociolinguistic context and “Latino” as an emergent ethnolinguistic category-concept that encompasses Latin American national groups. In the context of Chicago’s Latino population, which is predominated by Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (Cruz 2007), a linguistic repertoire of culturally valorized varieties of English and Spanish structures a striking paradox: the Spanish language is positioned simultaneously as an icon of Latino panethnicity and intra-Latino distinction. From many out-group perspectives, Spanish is a unified language that indexes Latino identity. These perspectives equate the Spanish language with Latino identity; this means that many U.S. Latinos are positioned as members of the Spanish language community regardless of whether they possess pragmatic control of the Spanish language. Meanwhile, from in-group perspectives, Mexican Spanish and Puerto Rican Spanish often play a central role in defining Mexican-Puerto Rican difference. These competing constructions demonstrate the centrality of language ideologies and linguistic practices to the creation of Latino identities.
This paper investigates the sociolinguistic fashioning of a panethnic Latino category in a recently created Chicago public high school whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican. Through the negotiation of ethnolinguistic identities in this context, minute features of language are enregistered – given cultural value as a coherent set – as high stakes signals of ethnoracial and institutional affiliation (Silverstein 2003, Agha 2007). While Mexican and Puerto Rican students demonstrate varying proficiencies in Spanish and English, Spanish is stereotyped as the primordial Latino tongue. Yet, English language hegemony characteristically organizes students’ interactions and presentations of self in the context of this American public high school. These dynamics inform students’ investment in speaking “unaccented” English and manifesting their Latino identities by referencing Spanish. I rework notions such as “crossing” (Rampton 2006) and “bivalency” (Woolard 1998) to argue that students navigate these competing demands by enregistering Spanish and English forms into a set of practices that I call “inverted Spanglish.” I show how this register formation, which consists of Spanish lexical items and English phonology, becomes a sociolinguistic icon and enactment of U.S. Latino ethnolinguistic identity. This analysis informs my suggestion that the unique (im)migration, political-economic, and social histories characteristic of global cities such as Chicago, structure ethnolinguistic transformations such as the emergence of Latino panethnicity.
References:
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cruz, Wilfredo. 2007. City of Dreams: Latino Immigration to Chicago. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Rampton, Ben. 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “The Whens and Wheres – as well as Hows – of Ethnolinguistic Recognition.” Public Culture. 15(3): 531-57.
Woolard, Kathryn. 1998. “Simultaneity and Bivalency as Strategies in Bilingualism.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 8(1): 3-29.