“Spanglish” and Identity within and outside the Classroom

Abstract

The session that AATSP organized at this year's MLA Convention in Boston (held on January 4,2013, from 10:15 to 11:30 am) was dedicated to topic that has been object of constant debate in past decades: use of as marker of identity among US Latinos. I put into quotation marks because, as I explained in my Guest Editorial from September last year, term controversial and best to be avoided. However, since it widely used in US discourse in both academie and nonacademic environments, I included it in call for papers so that potential presenters knew what it was that I expected them to focus on. It was our tacit understanding that we were all going to refer to what one of authors calis various linguistic strategies that characterize what commonly referred to as 'Spanglish'; namely code-switching, code-mixing, borrowings and other contact phenomena commonly employed by ... bilinguals (Sanchez-Munoz). The three presenters that participated in this session (which was well attended and included lively discussion at end) tackled issue of from variety of perspectives. Robert Train from Sonoma State University introduced audience to fascinating world of early nineteenth-century California and bilingual practices of some prominent Anglo to Los Angeles. These immigrants, whom Train calis Mexican ized gringos, demonstrated, as archivai evidence attest, highly skilled bilingual and multilingual abilities in their routine interactions with each other, in addition, of course, to their mastery of Spanish, which appears to have been the lingua franca among immigrants in California prestatehood period. They used code-switching as powerful communicative resource, and Train's hope that language Professionals today can connect these historical memories and identities to our present-day context in order to reconsider prevalent misun derstanding of as mixing of two distinct languages, communities and identities. A central lesson to be learn from past, he adds, is an understanding of complexity of use in lives of Spanish speakers in California across ever-shifting boundaries between monolingual-bilingual-multilingual contact zones and ecologies of use and identity. Returning us to present-day California, Ana Sanchez-Munoz from California State University-Northridge examined functions and use of (as defined in quote from her paper given above) in creative pieces of writing produced by second-generation Chicana/o (and other Latina/o) College students in class of Spanish for Heritage Speakers. For Sanchez-Munoz, Spanglish way for students to deal with complex linguistic and ethnie issues in creative manner insofar as it creâtes another level of meaning for negotiating hybridity of Chicana/o experiences, constructing and reconstructing a third space of. . . identity, linguistic nepantla. The examples she gave from some students' poems demonstrated the creative use of contact features to create an identity space that defies clear boundaries between that ' Anglonness' and 'Mexicanness' that Anzaldua wrote about. The third presentation by Regan L. Postma from The College of Idaho raised impor tant issue of use of bilingual texts in literature courses as means of engaging students in dialogues considering larger issues of language, culture and identity such as dynamic and contextual nature of language, politics and power of choice, and creative possibilites of negotiating linguistically and culturally in multiple and hybrid rather than in singular modes. She illustrated her approach to these issues by analyzing her students'