¿Puras Groserías? Rethinking the Role of Profanity and Graphic Humor in Latina/o Students’ Bilingual Word Play

• In Event: Transgressive Language Practices: Taboos, Boundaries, and Linguistic Agency in the Classroom

Abstract

Profanity and coarse humor are usually discouraged among children and adolescents, particularly in classroom settings. But verbal performances by bilingual students that include profanity and graphic humor often reveal linguistic dexterity. In fact, bilingual youths’ sophisticated verbal performances can be considered cultural displays of knowledge (Lee, 2007). Through the use of doble sentido (double entendre) and other creative forms of bilingual word play, Latina/o students draw on their linguistic repertoires of practice to demonstrate lexical knowledge, display appreciation for semantic nuance, and enact cultural affiliation. The use of both profanity and graphic humor within such word play often serves to heighten or reinforce these functions. Moreover, this transgresive form of bilingual word play is often encouraged and modeled by adults (Farr, 1994). In this paper, we highlight the creativity and skill embedded in bilingual Latina/o students’ transgressive word play and attempt to re-present this language practice as a potential window into the rich “underlife” of a classroom.

Drawing on scholarship in the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1974; Goodwin, 1990), this paper frames bilingual Latina/o students’ transgressive word play as a creative, skillful, and culturally embedded form of linguistic practice. The notions of communicative competence (Hymes, 1974) and performance (Farr, 1993) are used to explore how such word play might be viewed as both a display of linguistic skill and a form of verbal art. Building on Lee’s (2007) cultural modeling framework, we further attempt to reframe students’ transgressive linguistic practices in order to “reposition what might be historically viewed as vernacular practices as intellectually rich” (p. 26-27).

This paper draws on empirical data collected using ethnographic methods. Building on scholarship in the ethnography of communication (Goodwin, 1990), we propose a framework for re-conceptualizing students’ transgressive word play in the classroom. The data on which we draw come from an ethnographic study of language and ideology in a sixth-grade English language arts classroom (Martínez, 2009). Participant observation fieldnotes, video-recordings, and audio-recordings of student interactions were the primary data sources.

Attention to the sequential organization of talk suggests that students’ use of profanity and graphic humor often functioned to communicate humor, index solidarity and group identity, and enact individual identities in the classroom. We argue that further exploration of these and similar language practices might well reveal other functions and meanings that are obscured when such practices are simply dismissed as inappropriate.

This paper contributes to scholarship in the cultural modeling tradition (Lee, 2007) by highlighting an overlooked linguistic practice. As Orellana & Reynolds (2008) have recognized, bilingual word play can flourish in classrooms when condoned or encouraged, and it may be of pedagogical use to educators. This paper argues that the use of profanity and graphic humor in students’ bilingual word play deserves greater scholarly attention and could, potentially, serve as a pedagogical resource in classrooms.

Authors

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, The University of Texas - Austin

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago