Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

MexiRicans: Interethnic Language and Identity

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/15348450801970688

1534-8458

Kim Potowski, Janine Matts,

Multilingual Education and Policy

Abstract Studies of Mexican and Puerto Rican communities living in the same United States cities suggest that a combination of historical factors and local conditions strongly influence to what extent these two groups interact and form a shared sense of pan-ethnic Latino unity. However, few studies have examined “MexiRican” individuals, those who have one Mexican and one Puerto Rican parent and who experience both cultures and dialects in their homes. This study examines various aspects of ethnolinguistic identity among 24 MexiRican individuals in Chicago, Illinois. It also formally assesses their Spanish proficiency and dialect characteristics. Almost all of the participants possessed a concept of identity that incorporated aspects of both Hispanic backgrounds, and none had experienced pressure to deemphasize or to stress one or the other. As found in other work on Spanish in the United States, Spanish proficiency declined with increasing generational presence. The primary factor related to the expression of Mexican or Puerto Rican features in the MexiRican participants' Spanish varieties was the dialect of the mother, although a few individuals evidenced highly hybridized dialects. Key words: Spanish proficiencySpanish dialectmixed ethnicityinterethnic identity Notes 1But increasingly Dominican, as shown in Table 1. 2 Zentella (1990) Zentella, A. C. 1990. Lexical leveling in four New York City Spanish dialects: Linguistic and social factors. Hispania, 73: 1094–1105. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] discovered that Anglicisms often played a neutralizing role between competing dialects. The use of English resolved lexical conflict or confusion without favoring any one Spanish dialect. 3 Rúa's (2001) Rúa, M. 2001. Colao subjectivities: PortoMex and MexiRican perspectives on language and identity. Centro Journal, 13(2): 117–133. [Google Scholar] participants used several terms to self-identify, but our participants overwhelmingly chose MexiRican, which will be the term used throughout this article. 4 Racializing refers to a process of attributing characteristics to a group based on a perceived category of “race.” This article assumes that, in addition to Whites racializing Latinos, members of different Latino groups racialize each other. 5G2 also refers to individuals born abroad and brought to the United States before the age of 5, but none of our participants were born abroad 6Assuming that these differentiations are valuable, it remains to be determined how to label individuals with one G1.5 parent and one G2 parent, or any of the other possible combinations. 7Both the picture vocabulary recognition task and the story retelling task were part of the Language Assessment Scales, Oral (Duncan & DeAvila, 1990 Duncan, S. and DeAvila, E. 1990. Language assessment scales, oral, Monterrey, CA: CTB/McGraw Hill. [Google Scholar]). 8Some participants who labeled themselves Latino, which they defined as hailing from a Latin American country or belonging to a family whose roots were in a Latin American country, immediately stated that they rejected the term Hispanic because of its association with Spain, although a few individuals used Latino and Hispanic interchangeably. 9Two of the 15 mixed-origin participants in Flores-González (1999 Flores-González, N. 1999. The racialization of Latinos: The meaning of Latino identity for the second generation. Latino Studies Journal, 10(3): 3–31. [Google Scholar], p. 23) initially claimed just one national origin, and only when “pressed to elaborate” did they “reluctantly acknowledge” their second national origin. This is because they had little or no contact with the second group due to split families, a phenomenon that we avoided in this study. 10The large number of MX restaurants and relatively very small number of PR restaurants in Chicago may in part account for G3 individuals' familiarity with the names of food items. 11There was a tropical music station catering to the local PR community on the AM band, but it was bought by a larger MX FM station in 2003. 12Three participants had aunts and uncles who had also married a member of the other group. 13To arrive at a total score, we converted raw scores to a 10-point scale as follows. For the story retelling, the maximum number of points was 5. The 20 items of vocabulary identification were converted to a 5-point scale by dividing the number of correct answers by 4. Thus, a vocabulary score of 16 out of 20 was converted to a 4. In this way, the story retelling proficiency rating carried the same weight as the 20 items in the vocabulary identification task. 14The Spanish variety used on such a task does not necessarily represent the entire Spanish repertoire of an individual, an important topic to which we will return in our conclusions. 15We did ask questions about the amount of contact with different family members and travel to Mexico and Puerto Rico, but did not find any patterns related to participants' dialect variety. An in-depth ethnographic study might reveal interesting trends related to these and other factors, including ratings of the dialect variety of each parent.