Mexican Americans’ Attitudes Towards and Use of the Spanish Language

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 24. Latinx Racial/Ethnic Identity

Abstract

This chapter is taken from our book in-progress which focuses on the identities and ethnic experiences of later generation Mexican Americans. We draw on 72 interviews and over 1,500 surveys with Mexican Americans living in San Antonio and Los Angeles to illustrate the diversity and complexity of ethnic-related experiences among this population. In the book we move away from the perspective of the overly determined and largely uniform path to becoming part of the mainstream that dominates the literature on assimilation. We find that this approach leaves behind much of the richness of individual experience and cannot capture the myriad ways in which people negotiate their ethnicity (or lack thereof) on a daily basis and how they ascribe meaning to their ethnicity. In this chapter we examine Mexican Americans’ use of Spanish, which is perhaps the central component of ethnic culture and identity. Although nearly all of U.S.-born individuals are fluent in English, the persistent use of Spanish among Mexican Americans has raised alarms for nativists who fear the future development of two parallel ethnic/linguistic societies. In this chapter we explore the meaning and social consequences of this persistence, as well as the loss of Spanish, for our respondents. We show that the intricacies of language cannot be captured in the common reduction of a question to whether one is fluent or not. For example, we show how, even when the Spanish linguistic content is minimal in a communication, Spanish linguistic markers can be a powerful symbol or marker of ethnicity. Thus, regardless of actual linguistic ability, we find that language as a concept raises a number of issues regarding Mexican Americans’ own ethnic identities and their relationship to members of the ethnic community.

Author

• Christina Alicia Sue, University of Colorado-Boulder