"Ingles macheteado es lo que hablo Yo": The Language Ideological Discourses of Latina/o Youth in Urban High School Classrooms

• In Event: "Just Sayin'": The Complexity and Utility of "Nonstandardized" Language Practices Among Multilingual and Multidialectal Youth

Abstract

When asked to describe the “kind” of English she speaks, Yesenia, a Latina youth enrolled in a senior English Language Arts class replied, “Ingles macheteado es lo que hablo yo” (English chopped up into pieces by a machete knife is what I speak). This statement captures what Martinez (2013) has called deficit rationales, “explanations or rationalizations that emphasized [a] lack of proficiency in English and/or Spanish” (p. 280). Deficit rationales were presented with regularity among many Latina/o youth in this study despite findings that revealed the expansive communicative repertoires of these youth as they engaged in meaning making practices in their ELA courses. This paper will examine the implicit and explicit language ideologies of youth as their discourses both align with and against dominant monolingual ideologies circulated and contested in schools (Wortham, 2008).
Informed by the Ethnography of Communication tradition of research (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972), this paper is part of a larger year-long ethnographic study investigating the sociolinguistic landscape (Paris, 2011) of Willow High School, an urban high school attended by Black and Latina/o youth in a Southern California community I call Tajuata. Data were gathered via classroom observations of Black and Latina/o youth participating in both official and unofficial classroom interactions (Gutierrez, Rymes & Larson, 1995) in four English Language Arts classrooms. These data include ethnographic fieldnotes, audio-recordings, participant retrospection (Rampton, 1995) interviews, and semi-formal interviews with student participants.
Analysis for this paper is specifically informed by language ideological inquiry (Schieffelin, Woolard & Kroskrity, 1998) where youth utterances are interrogated to reveal their alignment with and against standard ideologies of language that mediate schooling practices in the US. Additionally, a language ideologies perspective of Latina/o youth utterances attends to the local spaces otherwise ignored in discussions about global mobility among immigrant groups (Guerra, 2008). Findings reveal how Latina/o youth, while indexing dominant ideologies of language in their everyday meaning making utterances, simultaneously counter these positions in discourses that counter dominant ideologies of language.

Author

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis