While I really appreciate Jane Hill’s work – especially the way her focus on linguistic practices adds nuance to the ‘structural racism versus personal bigotry’ dichotomy – I was somewhat troubled by her uncritical use of social categories, and therefore thought that Rosa’s critique was a helpful move forward. By incorporating race into his analysis and looking beyond Hill’s original focus on “historically Spanish-speaking populations”, Rosa shows how Mock Spanish itself has racializing effects, re-inscribing and further articulating the distinction between ‘White’ and ‘Latina/o’ (Rosa 2016, 69, quoting Hill 1998).
In this way, Rosa reminds us that we can’t take racial categories for granted, but he stops short of making the same claim about linguistic categories. Both Hill and Rosa (unreflexively) use named language categories, naturalizing arbitrary boundaries that themselves are products of racializing discourses. Particular words or pronunciations are labeled as Spanish or English, though they seem to be available to a wide range of people, regardless of racial status or so-called language dominance. This is standard practice in linguistic/sociolinguistic/linguistic anthropology research, but it weakens Rosa’s argument. This is most obvious when he describes Inverted Spanglish as “saying Spanish words in English”, which simultaneously emphasizes and blurs boundaries between languages, creating an ambivalence that hides the relationship between race and language that Rosa is trying to expose (74). But I am inspired by Rosa’s insistence on denaturalizing racial categories and think the same can be done with language. As Rosa reminds us, “language ideologies need not correspond to actual linguistic practices”, so ‘language’ cannot remain a stable variable in our analyses (69).
The ‘constructed-ness’ of named languages shines through in the nuanced and transgressive language play the students at NNHS engage in. These students defy linguistic boundaries, combining and layering supposedly disparate ‘languages’ and ‘varieties’ to articulate complex identities. But if we’re trying not to treat ‘language’ as a static entity, how can we understand what they’re doing? I think the concept of indexicality, which we discussed in class in relation to ‘crying racist’, can be of use. Indexicality helps us think of practices like Mock Spanish or Inverted Spanglish not as speaking one language or another, but as using forms/features that index certain identities and qualities. This reframes linguistic practice as a recursive process in which we draw on existing categories (including racial categories) but also further articulate/re-define/play with those categories.
Indexicality seems particularly relevant in an analysis of Mock Spanish and Inverted Spanglish in that they both involve some sort of ‘double indexicality’. Maybe there’s a real term for that, but what I mean is that linguistic forms are taken up and then modified to create new forms (but not so much that the original is unrecognizable) to establish a certain stance towards the originally indexed meaning and as this usage is enregistered, another level of indexical meaning is added (Agha 2005). How can such complexity be captured if we’re stuck with labels like ‘English’ and ‘Spanish’?
With these ideas in mind, I’m moved to destabilize the language categories I’ve been using in my own project. So far, I’ve been thinking about how different languages and varieties are incorporated (or not) in adult ESL, but how can I insist on the fluidity of ‘English’ if I’m treating languages as delimited entities? Instead, I’m thinking that I need to refocus my project on how ‘English’ is constructed in these spaces, paying attention to which practices are emphasized, which are excluded, and which are simply ignored, and how indexicality can help explain these moves.
What about you? Does denaturalizing social categories (like race and language) have any consequences for your work? Does it offer any new insights? Does it change your research questions?
References:
Agha, A. (2005). Voice, footing. Enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 15(1): 38-59.
Rosa, J. (2016). From mock Spanish to inverted Spanish: Language ideologies and the racialization of Mexican and Puerto Rican youth in the United States. Racio-linguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 65-80.
Thank you very much for the post! I thought it was an interesting aspect of describing the fluidity of language and how it is constructed. In my project I’m looking at a construction of community or space in an urban neighborhood and in the book ‘Production of Space’ Henri Lefevbre provides an interesting framework for analyzing space as conceived (mental space), perceived (physical space) and lived space (experiential or social) where, as understood, conceived space is created by power actors, perceived is more objective reality with physical characteristics of a space and lived space comes from a combination of the first two aspects, a ‘lived’ space by members of society. I thought it is interesting to use such framework when trying to analyze a construction of any social phenomenon in order to discern different layers. Thank you very much!