English in Their Tool Box: Day Laborers Performing Bilingualism in Arizona and New Jersey

• In Event: Performance and Immigration

Abstract

This presentation examines the role of language in immigrants´ performances as hardworking citizens in the informal economy. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with Latin American day laborers in Southern Arizona and Northern New Jersey, I will explore the ways participants call on bilingualism as a tool for economic and social integration. These contrasting receiving communities, one in the Southwest borderlands and the other in the suburbs of New York, allow us to explore recent immigrants´ motivations for learning English in a site with a historically significant Spanish-speaking Latino/a community, in comparison with a locale where Latinos/as are relative newcomers and Spanish is an incipient, though rapidly expanding, language.

Authors such Butler (1993, 1997), Inda (2000), and Mirón and Inda (2000) have extended Austin’s (1975) definition of performatives in their analysis of the social construction of identities such as gender and race through everyday discursive practices. Drawing on this framework, I explore how day laborers perform bilingualism in combination with other attributes to contest the assumed default identities of monolingual Spanish speaker, unskilled laborer, and undocumented. I argue that performative acts and ´talk about language´ that establish workers’ ability to speak English work in tandem with other performances – of trade skills, race/ethnicity, or citizenship – that contest the ‘illegalizing’ discourses that socioeconomically marginalize immigrant populations.

Author

• Elise Dubord, University of Northern Iowa