Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 538

Part of Session 151: Language and Hyperdiversity in the Global City (Other abstracts in this session)

Migrant struggles over language in the informal economy: Diversity of communicative powers in urban peripheries

Authors: Sabate Dalmau, Maria
Submitted by: Sabate Dalmau, Maria (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Transnational migration has caught the attention of many researchers in today’s increasingly hyperdiverse Catalan network society (Castells, 2004). However, the complexity that characterises these multi-layered networks with very diverse linguistic backgrounds and legal and work statuses (Vertovec, 2006) in terms of their access to social networking and communicative power enacted by their differing language capitals has largely passed unnoticed.

In this paper I analyse the unseen struggles among heterogeneous groups of migrants for accessing the social capital required to overcome marginalisation and to negotiate identity via the mobilisation of their hybrid, multilingual linguistic capitals and repertoires. More specifically, I focus on the language-regulated power dynamics of twenty migrants (employers and employees) organised around an informal migrant-tailored call shop (a locutorio) located in a peripheral contact zone (Pratt, 1991: 33) in the outskirts of a global city, Barcelona.

Firstly, I investigate the relationships of dependence/subordination between the documented middle class migrant business entrepreneurs who achieve upward mobility via the establishment of these informal businesses, on the one hand, and their under-salaried migrant employees, whose precarious legality statuses depend on their bosses’ entrepreneurial will, on the other.

I claim that, for the owners, the new migrant workforce’s non-elite linguistic capitals are a commodity that successfully attracts the emerging groups of clients who are non-Western literate, as well as those who choose to communicate in a migrant-regulated space outside the institutional regimes of Spanish multinationals. The workers, by contrast, find themselves offering real multilingual customer services and acting as informal linguistic brokers (Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000) to survive transnationally, bridging language barriers with no protection, at times undergoing linguistic exploitation.

I conclude that these highly disruptive social relationships between a new powerful managerial class and a new army of overworked labourers hinge upon the complex language-triggered power dynamics between those migrants who enact a business-minded cosmopolitan identity and those migrants who, from the margins, fight for a place of their own in the urban spaces of the globalised new economy. I claim that this is a new venue for exploring how vertical (top-down; institutional) and horizontal (grassroots; bottom-up) networked communication among these two groups works within the emerging hyperdiversity in the Catalan context, on the one hand, and for putting a renewed lens on the silenced reproduction of social inequality, on the other.

The data include participant observation over two years of fieldwork (2007-2009), in-depth interviews with locutorio workers and locutorio users, and visual and documentary materials (SMS, notes, posters, videos, ringtones).

Castells, M. (ed.) 2004. The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Martin-Jones, M. and Jones, K. (eds.). 2000. Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-15.

Pratt, M. L. 1991. Arts of the contact zone. Profession 91. New York: MLA, 33-40.

Vertovec, S. 2006. The Emergence of Super-Diversity in Britain, Centre for Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper 25, Oxford: Oxford University.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Migrant struggles over language in the informal economy: Diversity of communicative powers in urban peripheries