Stylized Spanish in the New Latino Diaspora

• In Event: 72.025 - Abriendo Brecha: Third Spaces, Heterogeneity, and Social Justice in the New Latino Diaspora

Abstract

Many schools across the US are experiencing rapid increases in Spanish-speaking students. These schools, along with media and policymakers, attend closely to whether and how well Spanish speakers are learning English, but they pay little attention to how their Spanish language practices influence their English-speaking peers. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in one U.S. elementary school, we investigate the interactions and language practices of Spanish-speaking (primarily Mexican) and English-speaking (primarily African American) children. We draw on Rampton’s (1995, 2006) notions of language crossing and stylization, exploring how English-speaking students employed stylization or crossing by adopting the Spanish phonology and lexis of their Spanish-speaking peers, investigating how these practices allowed both groups of children to inhabit and evaluate certain identities while serving a variety of interactional functions. We describe crossing and stylization practices that run counter to familiar hegemonic language ideologies in which English is the language of status and power. These practices do not remove the dominant status of English in the school, but they do expose interesting counterhegemonic action that, if valued and drawn upon at school could lead towards more justice-oriented learning spaces for children from minoritized backgrounds.

We collected data at Grant Elementary for a three-year period, from 2008 through 2011, which included participant observation and videotaping at home and in school, and interviews with focal children, their parents, and educators. Our ethnographic analyses iteratively draw patterns out of field notes, documents, transcribed interviews and video transcripts. During this time period, we began to notice how children from English-speaking, non-Latino backgrounds showed great interest not just in their Spanish-speaking peers’ language practices, but in their Mexican backgrounds and in the Spanish language itself. Our discussion in this paper centers on how together, these two groups of children forged a third space in which they were able to recognize and explore difference, and to assign value and high status to language practices and social identities often marginalized in schooling settings (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez and Tejeda, 1999). Our findings suggest that, regardless of the Standard English variety taught and required for academic endeavors at school, in this third space children were busy expanding their linguistic repertoires, playing with positioning and footing, and laying claim to and negotiating multiple social identities. We argue that attention to these processes may help educators see them as resources for learning that can inform their teaching practice.

Authors

• Holly Link, University of Pennsylvania

• Sarah Gallo, The Ohio State University

• Stanton Wortham, University of Pennsylvania