So ¿te fuiste a Dallas? (So you went to Dallas?/So you got screwed?): Language, Migration, and the Poetics of Transgression

Abstract

Drawing on recent work on the linguistic production of social markedness, this article explores the cross‐border usage of what I term the “Dallas” chronotope: a form of poetics that critically frames the political‐economic logics that undergird the markedness structure central to the time–space relational construction of migrant illegality. In a community where back‐and‐forth movements between Mexico and the United States result in varying degrees of Spanish–English bilingualism, the Spanish expression “da' las” (to give ‘em)—short for “dar las nalgas” (to give your buttocks; a reference to getting screwed, comparable to the English colloquial expression “to give it up” in reference to a sexual offering)—is invoked as a phonetic equivalent of “Dallas,” the name of the city in Texas, figuratively equating the social violation of migrants with sexual violation of the body. I extend the analytical frame of markedness through an application of the notion of biopolitics to these instances of linguistically mediated spatiotemporality within a U.S.–Mexico transnational context in order to describe how embodied poetics figuratively construct a resilient sense of migrant personhood that undermines its marked status and literally performs resiliency into being.