U.S. Mexican Spanish West of the Mississippi: Social Context and Linguistic Features [1 ed.] 9781315172187, 9781138045040, 9781032531526

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U.S. MEXICAN SPANISH WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI

U.S. Mexican Spanish West of the Mississippi proposes a macro-dialect of the most widely spoken Spanish variety in the western United States from a number of social and linguistic angles. This book is unique in its focus on this one variety of Spanish, which allows for a closer investigation of the social context and linguistic features through a number of diferent topics. Comprised of 13 chapters divided into two sections, this textbook provides insight into the history, demographics, migration, and social issues of US Mexican Spanish in the first section and its lexicography, phonology, and structure in the second. Useful for scholars interested in Spanish in the United States, dialectology, and sociolinguistics, this is also an ideal resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Spanish. Daniel J. Villa is Professor Emeritus of Spanish Linguistics at New Mexico State University, USA. His primary research interests are in Spanish of the Southwest, US Spanish, language maintenance and loss, and Spanish for native and heritage speakers. Jens H. Clegg is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA. His research interests include US Spanish, language contact, bilingualism, and sociolinguistics.

U.S. MEXICAN SPANISH WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI Social Context and Linguistic Features

Daniel J. Villa and Jens H. Clegg

Designed cover image: ‘Map exhibiting the routes to Pike’s Peak’, D. McGowan and George H. Hildt, 1859 / World Digital Library First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Daniel J. Villa and Jens H. Clegg The right of Daniel J. Villa and Jens H. Clegg to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-138-04504-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-53152-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17218-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

PART 1

Social contexts

1

1 Introduction

3

2 US Mexican Spanish west of the Mississippi

14

3 A (very) brief history of migration: the spread of Spanish speakers

30

4 Identity: what is in a name?

47

5 US Mexican Spanish speakers: race, power, and language

64

6 Language policy and planning

81

7 Bilingual dynamics: Spanish and English in contact in the West

98

PART 2

Linguistic perspectives 8 Thinking about how we think: the relationship between theory and practice

115

117

vi

Contents

9 The lexicon: part 1

132

10 The lexicon: part 2

146

11 Phonology

161

12 Language structure

176

13 Concluding remarks

192

Index

205

PART 1

Social contexts

1 INTRODUCTION

The United States as a Spanish-speaking nation

A common thread that runs through the literature dedicated to the study of Spanish in the United States is the mention of the ever-increasing number of its speakers in this country. Spanish represents the second most widely spoken language in our nation, after English. In 2020, the US Census calculated that some 40.5 million people over the age of 5 years spoke Spanish at home. To put this into perspective, Jenkins (2013: 31) observes that there are more Spanish speakers in this country than there are Canadians in Canada. The United States is one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. At the same time, the Spanish-speaking populations here are by no means homogenous. As we can detect diferences between the English spoken in Maine, Alabama, and California, the same holds true for Spanish. Its speakers have their origins in the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Europe – in short, from across the Spanish-speaking world. You might think it a bit odd that in the last sentence we state some Spanish speakers have their roots in this country. A common idea holds that Spanish in our nation is a “foreign” language, introduced as a result of Spanish-speaking immigrants arriving in the early part of the 20th century. In reality, all languages in the United States, including English, are immigrant languages; the only truly “native” ones are those spoken here before the arrival of Europeans on our shores. Spanish holds the distinction of being the oldest non-indigenous language in the United States, existing here continuously since before the arrival of the first English speakers in the Americas. The oldest Spanish-speaking community in what is now the US West was established in northern New Mexico in 1598 with the arrival of colonists at the Tewa pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh. While it is the case that Spanish speakers continue to arrive to this very day, in the western United States, they integrate into a Spanishspeaking tradition that has existed in North America for some 500 years. DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-2

4

Social contexts

We can clearly see the historic stamp that early Spanish colonists left on our geography. The state names of California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and Montana have their origins in Spanish, as well as those of the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, La Jolla, Santa Fe, Las Cruces, San Antonio, Plano, and Amarillo. The American cowboys learned much of their trade from Mexican vaqueros, and so words such as lariat, lasso, chaps, mustang, pinto, vamoose, and hoosegow come from the Spanish la reata, lazo, chaparreras, mestengo, pinto, vamos, and juzgado, respectively. The expansion of Spanish-speaking populations here has drawn the increasing attention of language researchers, with a corresponding growth in the number of publications dedicated to better understanding its dynamics. Recent books on the topic of US Spanish include Lipski’s 2008 book Varieties of Spanish in the United States, Escobar and Potowski’s 2015 book El español de los Estados Unidos, and Fuller and Leeman’s 2020 book Speaking Spanish in the US: The sociopolitics of language, to name only a few. These volumes present comprehensive analyses of the diferent kinds of Spanish we speak in this country and the sociopolitical milieus in which they exist. This book difers in that it does not seek to present an inclusive view of all areas of the United States; rather, it focuses on a region that possesses unique historic, demographic, geographic, social, and linguistic characteristics: the lands west of the Mississippi River. Why “west of the Mississippi”?

As European-origin immigrants began their push inland in the 17th and 18th centuries from their initial settlements on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, “the West” became known as the wilderness, lands beyond what was considered civilized territory. As the immigrants moved farther away from their initial Atlantic coastal communities, the “uncivilized” lands moved farther west. The colonial powers with the greatest presence in North America in the 18th century, Britain, France, and Spain, jockeyed with each other for dominion over the lands usurped from its original inhabitants. After years of war, these nations signed the 1763 Treaty of Paris. On the North American continent, this treaty established British ownership of Canada and the territories east of the Mississippi River, the latter including what was known as the Northwest Territory. Spain controlled the lands to the west of the Great River (Taylor 2001: 432–433). The British then lost their colonial holdings when its former subjects rebelled, and the United States of America emerged as a new nation with the signing of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. War broke out again between Great Britain and the United States in 1812, ending with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. A portion of that treaty ceded the Northwest Territory to the United States. At that time, then, the Mississippi River formed the western boundary of our fledgling nation. As a result, when our newly minted country began its own expansion in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, lands to the west of the Mississippi became the uncivilized frontier. At that time, a portion of the newly defined West was still claimed

Introduction

5

by the Spanish Crown (from this point on, we will refer to these regions as simply the “West”). Spanish speakers inhabited parts of what is now the US Southwest, but in reality, the vast majority of the West was still principally dominated by its original inhabitants. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 nearly doubled the size of the fledgling United States. The Mississippi became the de facto dividing line between civilization and wilderness. Language further reinforced this division; the majority of those in the civilized world east of the Great River spoke English, and those inhabiting the untamed lands to the west of it did not. It is for these historic and linguistic reasons that this book centers on the Spanish we speak in the West. This focus is due in part to the fact that here are many myths and popular misconceptions about US Spanish. One is that there is a single type of Spanish spoken in this country. As we will see, our Spanish-speaking communities have diferent origins, which is reflected in how we use the language. We focus on the Mexicanorigin Spanish found in the West, as it is the principal type of the language spoken here. It is also found east of the Mississippi, but in contact with other kinds of Spanish. To illustrate this diference, Table 1.1 presents the Hispanic1 groups in the state of New York. At a total of 57.3%, Hispanics of Caribbean descent (Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba) form the majority of the group. Adding in the other TABLE 1.1 Origin of Hispanics in New York State, 2020 American Community Survey

(ACS) Origin, New York Hispanics

Population

Percentage of total

Total Hispanic population National origin Puerto Rico Dominican Republic South America Mexico Central America Cuba

3,720,707

100%

1,078,084 851,630 605,407 464,480 414,400 78,286

28.9% 22.8% 16.2% 12.4% 11.1% 2.0%

TABLE 1.2 Origin of Hispanics in California, 2020 ACS

Origin, California Hispanics

Population

Percentage of total

Total Hispanic population National origin Mexico Central America South America Puerto Rico Cuba Dominican Republic

15,380,929

100%

12,635,258 1,418,798 375,806 227,838 105,913 17,808

82.1% 9.2% 2.4% 1.4% .6% .1%

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Social contexts

regions of the Spanish-speaking world (excepting Mexico) results in a total of 87.6% of New York Hispanics, with those of Mexican origin consisting of just 12.4% of the group. Compare this with California on the opposite coast. As you can see, Mexican-origin Hispanics at 82.1% form the vast majority of that group in the Golden State. At 9.2%, Central Americans are the next largest segment, followed by South Americans at 2.4%, with Caribbean-origin Hispanics making up just over 2% of the total. Mexican-origin Spanish speakers have a diferent history in the West than in the East. Carter and Lynch (2015: 370) document this fact in their discussion of Spanish speakers in southern Florida: “Miami is definitively Caribbean, as about 65% of Miami’s Latino population is Cuban (54%), Puerto Rican (6%), or Dominican (4%). . . . The Mexican-origin population of Miami is only 3%.” Regarding the history of the Hispanic population of that city, they establish that prior to the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, “Miami’s population was predominantly Anglo White, African American, and Jewish” (2015: 369). Regarding the growth in Miami’s Hispanic population, they continue, “By 2010, 64.5% of residents in Miami-Dade County identified as ‘Hispanic or Latino’, a figure that reaches 95% in some areas of the city” 2015: 370). Compare the brief history of the Mexican origin population in Miami to their centuries-old presence in cities such as Santa Fe, New Mexico; San Antonio, Texas; and San Diego, California. As a result of this short historic and small demographic presence in the East with regard to other Hispanic groups, they may experience cultural and linguistic realities that their Western compatriots do not. Mexicanorigin Hispanics living in New York, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia inhabit diferent social environments and linguistic landscapes than those who have settled in Colorado or Oregon. In focusing on the West, we strive to ofer baseline analyses of the largest Spanish-speaking group in this country, those of Mexican descent, in a vast region that is home to the majority of those speakers. These baseline studies can then serve those who research Mexican-origin Spanish east of the Mississippi in ascertaining if language variation is due to contact with other Spanish varieties or with English. Structure and philosophy of this book

We divide this volume into two main parts. Part1 centers on what some call the “external” features of language: its history; the migrations of its speakers; their identities; the relationships between language, race, and power; policies that seek to regulate language usage; and contact with English. This part does not presuppose an extensive background in linguistic studies, as it draws from many fields. We dedicate Part 2 to “internal” language features, such as the lexical, phonological, and structural aspects of the Spanish we study. We include these topics for those interested in the inner workings of the language, opening the hood to see what makes it run, to use an automotive metaphor. Previous or current studies in linguistics will definitely be a plus in reading the second part of the book.

Introduction

7

Beginning with Chapter 2, we include at the end of each additional bibliographic resources and questions and topics for further discussion. Regarding additional readings, in some instances, there are a variety of excellent sources of information, such as those on the historical development of Spanish. However, some are more accessible than others, and we will duly note details such as that. Regarding activities, questions, and topics for discussion, much of what we present is highly dynamic in nature. For example, the question of a coherent national policy on immigration is an open one. The only current consensus is that we do not have one and that such a policy needs to be established. We thus cannot provide an answer to the immigration question since none currently exists. As a result, we point out that a national immigration policy is something to be monitored, as among many other issues it will have an impact on the languages we speak in this country. In all chapters, demographic data is drawn from the US Census Bureau; if any other source is employed, it will be noted. These data are something of a two-edged sword. On one hand, they represent the largest sampling of the US population available to us. The data are by no means exact; the Census commonly includes its calculated margin of error with the figures it presents. However, there exists no larger or more precise data set, and as a result, the Census is commonly employed in studies such as ours. On the other hand, this information is always dated. The US Constitution mandates that the Census be conducted every ten years. In the early years of this nation, this meant that there were large gaps created by the decade-long Census period. More recently, advances in technology allow the Census to be updated on a regular basis. This information is available through the American Community Survey (the “ACS” we refer to in the tables earlier). Even with this development, we still face a lag in data availability. The Census simply cannot publish its information the moment it is collected. For example, as we write this text, only certain portions of the 2020 Census are available. In some instances, we must rely on older information. By the time you read this, almost all the demographic data will certainly need updating, no matter how often we revise them before this volume’s publication. As an example, in Chapter 2 we claim that the northernmost border of the Spanish-speaking West is the one Washington State and Idaho share with Canada. To support that statement, we cite Villa et al. (2014), who identify ten Washington counties that contained at the time of writing a Hispanic population of 10% or more of the total residents. As we write this during the opening of the third decade of the 21st century, we checked the Census website to revisit that same region; if Villa et al. were to publish the article now, they would have to add five more counties. By the time you read this, the only way that you can determine the main Spanish-speaking areas in Washington will be by checking current Census data (which for us still lies in the future). We return to this point later. As a quick aside, we have heard it said that writers should avoid the use of “you” in this type of volume, as we just did in the previous paragraph. Authors are supposed to write “one” instead, as in “to verify the facts presented here, one opens a browser, then searches the Internet using the following keywords . . .” – something

8

Social contexts

to that efect. In spite of this, you will note that we do write “you,” and we really mean YOU, the person holding this book and reading these lines. In presenting you with the issues regarding the Spanish language we speak in the West, we draw on any number of sources, not just Census data. We base our arguments on the most reliable sources we can identify, ones you can check on. The importance for us in making this assertion lies in addressing the confusion that surrounds our Spanish. In general terms, the opening decades of the 21st century witnessed any number of unprecedented occurrences in American society, one of which was the introduction into public discourse of the phrase “alternative facts.” Whatever that might mean, it is the case that you can double-check just about all the information we ofer in these pages on the Internet or at your local library, be it public or at an academic institution. It is not “alternative.” There exist many language resources, such as dictionaries, texts, reference guides, glossaries, grammars, online resources, and the like, that let you do a lot of verifying at home or at the library. You can even find quite a few sources in used-book shops, available for only a few dollars. The main point here, though, is that the information presented in the following pages can be verified in a number of other sources. The constitutional status of Spanish in the state of New Mexico represents an example of this. A common myth holds that New Mexico is “ofcially” a bilingual state. It is not. However, Spanish speakers here do enjoy certain state constitutional protections regarding Spanish language use that no others in the Union provide. A way to verify this is to find a copy of the New Mexico Constitution online (it is available on a number of websites), download a copy, and then search on the word “Spanish.” You will then be able to clearly identify those constitutional protections Spanish-speaking New Mexicans possess. Other experiments you can simply carry out yourself. For example, a common myth regarding the Spanish language is that it originated in Spain. You can check on this by asking the next person you meet, “Where does Spanish come from?” She may look at you a little funny, wondering why on earth you would ask such an obvious question, but will probably answer “Spain, of course,” or something of that nature. But as we will see, Spanish is no more a native language in Spain than it is a native language in the Americas; it was exported to the Iberian Peninsula (modernday Spain and Portugal) as it was exported to other countries later. The point here is that much of what we present in the following pages you can verify firsthand; you can try your own experiments and check facts in newspapers, magazines, academic journals, the Internet, and many other places. But we hedge this by noting that we, the authors, include anecdotal evidence in our analyses. We have dedicated our careers to studying Spanish in the West and have taught about it over many years. We are not bystanders watching things from a distance; we live and work in the language communities we describe. We unavoidably have personal observations on the dynamics presented, ones that have not been published and cannot be found on the Internet.

Introduction

9

For example, Villa and his wife, who live in southern New Mexico, recently stopped by a local drive-in for a quick meal. As they were eating their hot dogs, they noticed a family sitting nearby, apparently consisting of grandparents, parents, and two young children, all enjoying a treat. They spoke only Spanish among themselves. Theoretical models of non-English languages in the United States hold that the children should not have been speaking Spanish. That is, in general terms, grandparents speak the language of their homeland, their children are bilingual in that language and English, and the grandchildren speak only English.2 And yet there they were, the children talking with the adults in Spanish. Villa suspected this was not due to the fact that the family spoke only Spanish. Before leaving, one of the adults, accompanied by a child, ordered a treat to-go. The clerk asked what they wanted in English, and the adult repeated the question to the child in English, who replied in English. A problem with this kind of data is that it cannot be easily replicated. The interaction noted in the preceding text all happened over a matter of a few minutes, and the relationship between the individuals is a matter of conjecture. Villa thought it would be rude to break in on their Sunday-afternoon treat to quiz the participants about their age, relationships, social background, language use patterns – in short, all the elements necessary to document their use of Spanish. Still, the fact remains that young children were observed speaking the language, a crucial element in the survival of any non-English language in this country. We ofer this brief anecdote in order to point out that not 100% of what we present here can be double-checked. However, when anecdotal evidence is presented to you, we will make sure we point that out so you can take it with the proverbial grain of salt. Chapter overview: Part 1

Chapter 2 presents an introduction to the region studied and the analytical tools employed throughout this volume. Both the geographic and political borders of the greater West are established and, consequently, the reasons for the focus on that region and not the entire United States. In Chapter 2 and throughout the book, we use a bold typeface when initially introducing technical terms and include a brief explanation of how we use them. This is particularly important as even among linguists these concepts are not universally agreed upon. For example, some researchers question the use of words like “Spanish” and “English” to identify certain means of human communication. As we use both those terms throughout the volume, it is necessary to explain why we recur to them while, at the same time, recognizing the problematic issues they embody. Chapter 2 also addresses the topic of linguistic borders, as opposed to the geographic or political ones. That is, some boundaries are determined by the peoples that inhabit a physical landscape; borders can also exist between and within languages themselves. Turning to the populations included in this work, Chapter 3 ofers a broad overview of the historic migrations that result in our speaking Spanish in the West. We

10

Social contexts

share certain eras with all other Spanish-speaking peoples in the world; others are unique to the West. We do not mean to provide an exhaustive review of a wellresearched topic but rather to establish the relationship our Spanish has with that spoken in the rest of the world as a result of human migration. Again, controversy surrounds our Spanish, with some claiming it is not really related any longer to other Spanishes and that it has devolved into some sort of hybrid tongue. In revisiting the history of Spanish speakers, we mean to dispel such misperceptions. Chapter 4 then looks at who speaks US Mexican Spanish. We agree with Fuller and Leeman (2020: 2) in their assertion that Spanish (or any language) does not exist as a separate entity, divorced from its speakers, but rather as an integral element of their human interactions. We do look at certain particulars of the language but are constantly mindful that such details represent those who negotiate their day-to-day lives through speaking Spanish. Mexican-origin Spanish speakers in the West do not, by any means, represent a homogenous group. Some have roots that stretch back to the earliest settlements of this region, others have only recently arrived, while still others belong to historic migrations that have occurred over the intervening centuries. Chapter 5 continues to explore this diversity in the social environments that Spanish speakers inhabit in the West, both historic and present-day. For example, Spanish speakers in Texas possess diferent social and cultural histories than those in New Mexico, California, Nevada, Oregon, or Washington. We examine the construct of “race” and how that construct originated, developed, and continues to afect Hispanic populations in the West. Also presented are the battles, principally legal, that Hispanics fought to work toward obtaining full rights as citizens. Chapter 6 then presents a diferent type of struggle, one centered on the “regulation” of how we speak Spanish in the West. Other countries in which Spanish is the principal language have mechanisms that attempt to control how speakers use the language, what is acceptable or not, what is “correct” or “incorrect.” This is accomplished in part through language academies whose principal goal is to determine appropriate means of employing both the spoken and written forms of Spanish. All countries whose principal language is Spanish have such an academy, and the United States as well. In this chapter we look at the relationship between such institutions and the Spanish we speak in the West. While this volume focuses on the Spanish language, we cannot ignore its interactions with English. Given the constant interplay between the two languages, in Chapter 7 we examine the phenomena arising from that contact. Some label what we speak as “Spanglish” or a related term. Debates rage around the subject. Some view the term as representing linguistic resistance, while others claim this “Spanglish” is a malformed, corrupt, and despicable perversion of Cervantes’ tongue. While we certainly cannot resolve these issues in a single chapter, we do wish to discuss them, as such attitudes impact Spanish speakers here. We focus in particular on language scholars who promote the notion that our Spanish has become a hybrid language, as there exists little or no empirical evidence to support that position.

Introduction

11

Chapter overview: Part 2

We note earlier that Part 2 is dedicated to the “nuts and bolts” of the Spanish we speak in the West. In Chapter 8, we begin with some fundamental notions as to how we approach such a study. Throughout this book we engage in a constant process of categorization regarding not only language itself but geography, identity, politics, ethnicity, race, and attitudes as well. We deem this process of such central importance to the theoretical underpinnings of this book that we dedicate this chapter to how categorization impacts the various topics we cover. We then provide examples of how that impacts not only the study of Spanish structure but the topics discussed in Part 1 as well. Chapter 9 analyzes the development of the US Mexican vocabulary from its Latin roots to its continued development up through the middle of the 19th century. Again, there exist deeply rooted beliefs in both professional and popular realms that what we speak is no longer the Spanish language but rather some sort of a hybrid form of communication, often unintelligible. A detailed examination of a central aspect of its structure, vocabulary, reveals that US Mexican Spanish shares a core lexicon with all other kinds of Spanish, whether they are spoken in Europe or the Americas. In establishing this fact, we analyze a sample of the language drawn from a data collection created by researchers in Mexico, basing our assertions on verifiable sources. Chapter 10 continues our vocabulary analysis, picking up in the middle of the 19th century, where Chapter 9 ends. We choose this breaking point as it corresponds to the historical moment when half of Mexico’s territory passes to the hands of the United States as a result of the Mexican–American War, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. It is at this historic juncture that Spanish in the West comes into intimate contact with English. Some language purists point to this contact as the major cause of the “degradation” of our Spanish into some incoherent linguistic mishmash. We examine the documented impact of English on US Mexican Spanish, as well as that on other world Spanishes, in order to debunk this misconception. Chapter 11 presents the sound system of US Mexican Spanish. After discussing the general sound structure of consonants and vowels, the chapter moves on to describe variations found in some Spanish dialects in the West. It concludes with thoughts as to why some monolingual English speakers may have negative attitudes toward the US Mexican Spanish sound system and, by extension, toward the language itself. Chapter 12 looks at certain structural aspects of the language, beginning by comparing and contrasting verb selection in Southwest Spanish, Mexican popular Spanish, and middle-class Latin American Spanish, based on language samples from those three general populations. The 50 most common verbs are classified in each type of the language and then analyzed with regard to their frequency of appearance in each of the sources. It then moves on to a discussion of certain verbal variations that have come to be associated with US Mexican Spanish, once again comparing their usage with that found in other Spanish varieties. The chapter then continues with

12

Social contexts

an examination of a grammatical structure in US Mexican Spanish, verb + patrás, that has been attributed to the influence of English. Once again, a collection of data samples of Southwest Spanish and other varieties is employed to ofer both quantitative and qualitative analyses of this grammatical structure. Finally, Chapter 13 ofers some concluding observations on US Mexican Spanish. It begins with a list of frequently asked questions, FAQs, that recap a number of the key concepts of this book. It addresses a seemingly unrelated topic, climate change, with regard to its impact on the distribution of the Spanishspeaking populations in the West. This includes migration within the United States and to the United States from abroad. It includes observations on how that migration interacts with language policy and our educational system. It closes with a look at the past in order to better understand the language dynamics we currently experience. Some notes on electronic resources

As with many texts produced in the age of the Internet, this volume relies on online resources. To follow academic norms in citing sources, we include the electronic address of the texts and databases we employ. Some, such as the US Census and the Real Academia Española, the Royal Spanish Academy, have a uniform resource locator (URL) that has remained unchanged for as far back as we can remember. At the same time, the Census will often reorganize its internal links, such that we cannot be precise on the exact location of information within the Census website. You will need to search for any particular table or chart. Similarly, organizations that update articles on a regular basis, such as the Pew Research Center, will archive a text we cite, oftentimes storing it with a new URL. If that occurs, an article we cite that you wish to consult will not be found at the address we include in our citation. At that point, you will need to exercise your web-surfing skills, perhaps using the title of the article or some key words from it in order to locate the source. Additionally, as noted earlier, there are many excellent online language resources available, such as various collections of authentic language samples. You will note that we cite one in particular, created by Juan Lope Blanch and his team of researchers, titled Español hablado en el Suroeste de los Estados Unidos, “Spanish spoken in United States Southwest.” It is one of many excellent data collections but has the advantage of being available with no special permissions. Many collections require some type of registration, almost always free, which can cause a delay in gaining access to them. The open access to the Lope Blanch collection facilitates quick access to an important data source for this book, which is why we refer to it extensively in this volume. So given these caveats and observations, we now move on to a description of the region studied in this volume and the Spanish we speak here.

Introduction

13

Notes 1 We discuss the use of the label “Hispanic” in Chapter 4. 2 See Chapter 7 for a more detailed explanation of the language loss model.

References Carter, Philip M., and Andrew Lynch. 2015. Multilingual Miami: Current trends in sociolinguistic research. Language and Linguistics Compass 9: 369–385. Escobar, Anna María, and Kim Potowski. 2015. El español de los Estados Unidos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fuller, Janet M., and Jennifer Leeman. 2020. Speaking Spanish in the US: The sociopolitics of language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Jenkins, Devin L. 2013. El suroeste creciente: Un breve análisis sociodemográfico de la población hispanohablante de los Estados Unidos. In El español en los Estados Unidos: ¿E pluribus unum? Enfoque multidisciplinarios, Domnita Dumitrescu and Gerardo Piña Rosales (eds.), 31–46. New York, NY: Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Taylor, Alan. 2001. American colonies. New York: Penguin Books. Villa, Daniel J., Naomi Lapidus Shin, and Eva Robles Nagata. 2014. La nueva frontera: Spanishspeaking populations in Central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: 149–172.

2 US MEXICAN SPANISH WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI

The concept of borders

An important starting point for this book is to define its scope of study and how the title reflects its contents. Therefore, an initial step lies in describing the region we study. But before beginning, it is necessary to recognize that in using the terms “US,” “Mexican,” and “Spanish,” we engage in a process of classification using words that are themselves problematic. For example, today’s “US” is not the same as the “US” of the year 1800, 1846, or 1958. Borders are fluid and can change over time. As we will see, the word “Mexican” does not necessarily refer to the nation “Mexico.” Calling the language we study “Spanish” depends on language ideologies; what is “Spanish” for us is “Castilian” for others. In addressing the complexities of these issues, we rely on categories to sort things out. This might seem rather straightforward, a black-and-white task. A thing is either one thing or it is not, like black cannot be white and white cannot be black. However, as the popular saying goes, things are not always black-and-white (and hence the “gray areas”). Terms such as these represent ways we have devised to name our world, but the meaning of any one word can change depending on who is doing the naming. In Chapter 8, we present a detailed discussion on the process of categorization employed in utilizing such terms; we address the issue of naming later in the chapter. Thus, regarding this book’s title, the portion that reads “US Mexican Spanish” seeks to establish a common way to identify the specific collection of dialects that scholars have researched for over a century now. The “US” portion of the title follows the tradition of using the name of the country to label a variety. “Mexican” identifies the predominant origin of the variety, setting it apart from other varieties of US Spanish, such as Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Salvadoran Spanish. “Spanish” DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-3

US Mexican Spanish west of the Mississippi

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indicates that it belongs to the global collection of varieties of the Spanish language and is not some kind of a new language, a point addressed in Chapter 7. The phrase “west of the Mississippi” establishes the region of the United States in which Mexican-origin Spanish is by far the most common and thus less likely to be influenced by contact with other varieties of the language. We note here that due to historic migration patterns, Spanish is not the most common language in our nation, yet it is no more “foreign” than English. There exists a debate among some language scholars if the Spanish spoken here is “in the United States” or “of the United States” (Dumistrescu 2015: 2). The former implies a “foreign” language, with the latter referring to a “native” one. We will demonstrate that US Mexican Spanish is as much of the western United States as Spanish is of Mexico, of Central and South America, and indeed, of Spain. Geographic boundaries, physical and constructed

At this point we want to underscore the fact that when we refer to concepts such as “nation,” “state,” “border,” or “region,” to name only a few, we employ constructs that we, as human beings, have invented in order to help us make sense of the world that surrounds us. Consider the concept of “border.” In the title, we use the phrase “west of the Mississippi,” establishing the Great River as one boundary of the greater region we study. It is a geographic feature that we select to establish a line between the eastern and western United States. Humankind did not build the river; it represents a physical referent that you can walk up to and skip a rock on. It existed long before human beings walked these lands. But its role as a border is something we assign to it. On the other hand, the southern border of the western United States does not possess such a geographically well-defined dividing line; rather, it is something of a hybrid. A portion of that boundary is demarcated by another river, the Rio Grande. However, sections of it in New Mexico and west Texas are dry now for much of the year. Drought and water-hungry cities and farmlands have reduced it to little more than an empty irrigation ditch; during the winter months, you can walk from bank to bank and not get your feet wet. Farther downstream, the Rio Grande again becomes a “full-time” river, fed by tributaries in the United States and Mexico. It empties into another natural boundary, the Gulf of Mexico, which you can also skip a rock on. However, from the Rio Grande in west Texas to the Pacific Ocean in California, the US–Mexico border consists of imaginary lines. In these areas, there exists no type of physical boundary such as a river to separate one country from the other. The Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts are exactly the same on one side of the border as they are on the other. Some stretches of this region are delineated by human artifacts, fences. However, these structures may or may not precisely demarcate the two countries; in some places, it is possible to stand on the south side of the wall and still be in the United States. The fences represent more of a symbolic barrier

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than anything else; indeed, only certain portions of the border have a wall. Unlike the Mississippi, a force of nature, the presence of the wall depends on the vagaries of politics in Washington, DC. Much of the northern border of the West consists of imaginary lines as well. Regarding human constructs, it is demarcated by the 49th Parallel, an imaginary line used in a system devised to map out our globe. This geographic abstraction, agreed upon as the boundary between British and American territories in the 1846 Oregon Treaty, relies on no physical divisions such as rivers or bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico. As is the case with much of the southern border, Canada and the United States are physically indistinguishable from each other on both sides of the border. Finally, if much of the northern and southern borders are principally political constructs, the region’s western border is not. The Pacific Ocean forms a definitive geographic boundary from southern California to northern Washington. The contact of continent and ocean clearly demarcates the western limits of the continental United States. While the northern and southern limits of this border are abstract lines, the boundary to the west is a physical reality that you can walk up to and dip your toes in. In sum, these northern, southern, eastern, and western borders, either physical or constructed, demarcate a land area about twice the size of Western Europe. It is the “West” we refer to in this volume. Linguistic boundaries

Up to this point, we have depended on geography to define the West. In refining its borders, though, instead of geographic features, we focus on the people who inhabit the greater region. First and foremost, we have an amorphous border, one created by language. Mentioned earlier is the concept of “nation.” For some, this means, in essence, a delimited area in which one people speak one language. We can look on a globe and find France, where they speak French; Germany, where they speak German; England, where they speak English; and so on. Yet it is more often the case that in any given region, people may speak more than one language. Such is the case not only in the West but in the entire United States as well. While English is indeed a common language in our country, west of the Mississippi it exists together with Spanish, Navajo, Apache, Tewa, Lakota, and many other tongues. These language borders are even more ephemeral than the human-devised ones described in the previous section. Language borders are fluid, changing with population movements. As we will see, the northern border of the Spanish-speaking Southwest was at one point considered to be Colorado; it is now found in the state of Washington. Heading southeast from there, it now extends out to the Kansas plains. We establish the Mississippi as the geographic eastern border of the region we study, as it consists of a tangible, physical referent. But in reality, the lands just to the

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west of the river, found in the states of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, are home to few Spanish speakers. For this reason, we exclude those areas from our analyses. We also omit North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana due to their small Spanish-speaking populations. Additionally, the Canadian side of the northern border is not included for the same reason; the 2001 Census of Canada puts the total percentage of Hispanic Canadians in British Columbia at only 0.8% of the total population of that province (www.statcan.gr.ca). Based on Spanishspeaking populations, we thus move the eastern border farther to the west, starting with Idaho in the north, followed by Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and finally, Texas in the south. In employing this means of establishing borders, we follow the example of Woodard in his 2011 American Nations. He relies on the inhabitants of the United States to establish regions rather than reference political boundaries. For example, Woodard names a portion of the region we study El Norte, “the North,” consisting of southern portions of California and Arizona, New Mexico, extending up into Colorado, and then to southern Texas, down to the Gulf Coast. He includes in El Norte the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California as well. He writes: [T]he northern Mexican states have more in common with the Hispanic borderlands of the southwestern United States – historically, culturally, economically, and gastronomically – than they do with the rest of Mexico. The borderlands on both sides of the United States – Mexico boundary are really part of a single norteño culture. (2011: 10) We agree with his observations on the ties between northern Mexico and the region we study and, in part, for these reasons do not include the Mexican-origin Spanish speakers living east of the Mississippi, as noted in Chapter 1. However, we expand Woodard’s redrawn map up to the US–Canadian border, including what he calls “the Left Coast” and portions of “the Far West” (Woodard 2011: x–xi). We do so based on the Hispanic inhabitants of the West as a percentage of the total population of a given area. We specify these populations state by state in Chapter 3. Additionally, in discussing the history of US Mexican Spanish following the conquistador invasion in the 16th century, we extend the linguistic southern border down to the altiplano of central Mexico, going back to an era in which a large portion of the West was claimed by the Spanish Crown. Thus, regarding Spanish speakers, we delimit a linguistic region that currently covers North America from northern Mexico in the south to Washington and Idaho in the north, from the eastern boundary described earlier to the Pacific Ocean in the west. Geographically, we cover the same area with the exception of the southern boundary, which is the international US–Mexico border. Figure 2.1 presents a graphic version of this area.

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FIGURE 2.1

The western Spanish-speaking United States.

To identify various kinds of Spanish in the West, we will refer to Texas Spanish, Arizona Spanish, Kansas Spanish, Washington Spanish, and so on as a convenient way to specify certain dialects of the language. We realize that these are arbitrary and artificial boundaries but use these labels as a matter of convenience. The importance of the boundaries previously described, both geographic and linguistic, lies in the fact that the United States is one of the largest Spanish-speaking countries in the world based on its number of speakers, a remarkable fact, given that Spanish is not the principal language in this nation. Following the tendency to use geographic borders to define a variety of a language, researchers working on the Spanish spoken here commonly refer to it as “US Spanish.” But as noted in Chapter

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1, the situation of US Spanish difers from that in other Spanish-speaking countries. It is made up of a number of varieties, due the origin of its speakers, who come from all regions of the Spanish-speaking world. Lipski (2008), in his Varieties of Spanish in the United States, ofers perhaps the most comprehensive exploration of this collection of varieties (and we believe that we use “variety” in essentially the same way as he does; we discuss this concept in the following text). In that book, he dedicates a chapter to what he labels “Mexican Spanish in the United States” (vii). However, in specifically naming this variety, he and other scholars do not have a common term for it. He employs “Mexican American Spanish” (see Chapter 4 of his book). Parodi (2014), in turn, uses “Chicano Spanish,” “LA Vernacular Spanish,” and “California vernacular” (our translations) to label the dialect she researched in Los Angeles. Bills and Vigil (2008) employ “New Mexican Spanish,” subdividing that into “Traditional Spanish” and “Border Spanish.” Villa et al. (2014) label the dialect they study as “Washington Spanish.” It is for this variation that we propose the label “US Mexican Spanish,” to provide a coherent way to refer to the collection of dialects spoken in the region described earlier. Language Physical realities, linguistic abstractions, and ideologies

Regarding the construct of “language,” if you ask someone, “What is language?” a very possible response might be, “It’s what you speak,” or some variation of that answer. While defining “language” might seem a straightforward task, the concept is complicated by what Fuller and Leeman (2020) identify as a monoglossic ideology. In examining this concept, they write, “How many languages are there in the world? It isn’t really possible to know, not because we don’t have time to travel around the world to count them, but because languages aren’t clearly defined countable objects” (81). They continue, “[T]here is no easy (or even any difcult) way to determine just what any ‘language’ includes” (81). Erker (2017: 2) also discusses this point of view. He notes, “[T]he idea that languages can be delineated into regionally circumscribed varieties is one that is common to the popular imagination and linguistics alike, and it is routinely applied not just to Spanish, but to all broadly spoken languages.” He argues, in essence, that just looking at language itself is not enough to understand how it varies; he writes, “For this [understanding], one needs people” (3). The concept of a monoglossic ideology is one that we, as authors, must squarely face, for we wish to not only determine what a language includes but also how to distinguish between diferent types of the same language. It is for these reasons that in this work we do not perceive of language as something separate from its speakers. Rather, we start with those speakers, their history, identity, and social presence in the larger society they inhabit. We perceive of language as a window into these

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issues. To accomplish this, we gather examples of the ways they speak Spanish. We label these collections corpora, bodies of language data, both oral and written, and base our arguments on those data. Moving forward, we will detail and describe each corpus as we present it. In the preceding paragraph, we use the verb “to speak,” to produce sounds. But we must point out that there are any number of languages that do not use sounds at all, such as American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), Chinese Sign Language (CSL), and Japanese Sign Language (JSL), among others. Therefore, it is necessary to specify that in this book the word “language” refers to the kind that includes sounds. We then need to establish that the abstract concept “language” refers to a physical reality. For example, in using a linguistic term such as phoneme, a basic unit of sound sometimes labeled as a “vowel” or “consonant,” we employ an abstraction. However, that abstraction is based on physically concrete phenomena. Regarding physical realities, Makoni and Pennycook (2006: 1) note, “The rotation of the earth on its axis is a natural phenomenon, but the measurement of time is an artifact, a convention.” Similarly, terms like “phoneme,” “vowel,” and “consonant” are artifacts and conventions, but they refer to natural objects. At some point in time, you probably have run across the well-worn question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Our answer would be yes. Sounds are vibrations in the air, and those vibrations do not disappear simply because no one is there to perceive them. Sounds waves exist in the same physical reality as, say, light waves do. Sound and light waves do not depend on human perception in order to exist. In a spoken language, then, people produce those physical vibrations that other users of the language can interpret, both the production and reception conducted by physical systems of the human body. It is in interpreting those sounds, however, that we introduce abstractions. For example, we can label a certain series of sounds as “American English” and another as “British English.” We could just as easily call the two “X” and “Y,” respectively. There are historic reasons, though, that we use “American,” “British,” and “English.” Here we note that not just language researchers make use of physical realities in creating abstractions; people with absolutely no training in linguistics engage in the same process. In the world we inhabit, we regularly make judgments about language users. For example, our students often ask us, “Do I have an accent?” because you cannot hear your own accent. One response is, “Travel to London and see how many words come out of your mouth before you’re identified as a Yank!” There are enough notable diferences between American and British English that the English people, with no special training, can readily identify someone from the United States, and vice versa. Whether everyday language users or linguists, we employ physical objects like sounds, and how those sounds are put together, to judge if someone speaks like us or not and, by extension, if they might have a diferent worldview than our own. We can then proceed to create ideologies about a wide range of those diferences, such as what is better, British or American football? We point this out as we create

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abstractions in everyday life in general and in this book in particular, but these abstractions are firmly grounded in the physical properties of what we call “language.” We introduce a selection of those abstractions in what follows. More linguistic boundaries Idiolect, dialect, variety, and language

Within any language, every speaker possesses what we call an idiolect. That is, no two individuals use their language in the exact same way. The sounds, words, grammar, and other features will vary, even if only slightly. Many factors play into how each person’s idiolect is formed. Where they are born, grow up, go to school; their family, relatives, and friends; their socioeconomic status and birth order, among other factors, all afect how individuals speak their idiolect. That, in part, is why when you call home and one of your close family members answers, all you have to do is say “Hi!” and they know immediately who you are, even if you have seven siblings. And this was true before they invented caller ID! The concept of an idiolect is key to the analyses presented in this volume. In order to describe language features, some language researchers depend on their observations and intuitions in order to carry out the task. We do not question that such methods can produce valuable insights into language use. However, as noted earlier, we prefer to base our descriptions on how individuals speak Spanish collectively as a community, grounding our work in samples of their language use as found in previous research and the corpora mentioned earlier. For example, Eva Robles Nagata interviewed Spanish-speaking workers from Washington who traveled to Montana for the cherry harvest. The interviews were then transcribed, with the result that we have empirical examples of how people speak Spanish in Central Washington (see Villa et al. 2014 for a description of this project). In some research paradigms, this is known as a “bottom-up” approach to analysis, starting with the speakers and not the researcher. Given that no one speaks a language exactly the same as others, certain groups of people do share commonalities that set them apart from other groups. For example, English speakers from New York can commonly distinguish their speech from English speakers born and raised in Alabama. We identify those shared language commonalities as dialects. For our purposes, that term means a collection of characteristics that distinguish one community of speakers of a certain language from another community of speakers of that same language. The diferences in accents, another way of saying “sounds,” are not the only way of distinguishing one dialect from another. Vocabulary and grammar play an important role as well. A classic example is the word you use to identify a sweet, carbonated, non-alcoholic beverage. Is it “soda,” “pop,” “soda pop,” “coke” (not the brand name), “fountain drink,” or perhaps another? Is the plural form of “you” “you guys,” “youse guys,” “y’all,” “you’uns,” or simply “you”? If you are preparing to go on a shopping trip, are you

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“getting ready to go to the store” or “fixin’ to go to the store”? These types of usages, and many more, go into making up what we call a “dialect.” The term variety identifies a collection of dialects that share common characteristics. We mention earlier the diferences between British and US English. So given the fact that there are dialectal diferences between New York and Alabama English, they are still both forms of US English. Again, the same factors mentioned earlier come into play. If Americans use words like “truck,” “hood,” “trunk,” “cookie,” “apartment,” “potato chips,” and “overpass,” the British will say “lorry,” “bonnet,” “boot,” “biscuit,” “flat,” “crisp,” and “flyover,” respectively. Thus, we can talk about English varieties as “American English,” “British English,” “Indian English,” “Australian English,” “Singapore English,” or “Canadian English,” to list only a few. Together, this collection of varieties is sometimes labeled as “World Englishes,” or simply “the English language.” We now turn to the idea of naming a language, as we have just done. A common saying in linguistics is that languages have armies, that is, a political entity can establish what a language is or is not, based on military or other powers. If it wishes, it can set aside any linguistic notion of “language.” To illustrate this, consider the following. Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese are two means of communication that are mutually unintelligible; speakers of one cannot understand the speakers of the other. However, Mandarin and Cantonese are commonly classified as dialects in China, not separate languages, in part due to that country’s desire to establish a unified national identity. On the other hand, ways of speaking that are mutually intelligible are sometimes identified as separate languages, as is the case in the Nordic countries. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish share a fairly high degree of mutual intelligibility. Yet due to political boundaries and national identities, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are commonly established as separate languages, not dialects. Thus, we have more than one way to identify languages. One, mutual intelligibility, places an emphasis on the ability of one group of people to communicate with another. This, generally speaking, would be a traditional way linguists would categorize them. Using this method results in counting three languages mentioned in the preceding paragraph (Cantonese, Mandarin, and say, Nordic). Using a diferent method, one based on political power, results in four (Chinese, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian). Notice the change in the labels needed to make each system work. So what is it, three or four languages? And what are their names? And what if we multiply this by all the ways that humans have of communicating with each other? It would appear that those who assert languages cannot be counted refer at least in part to this conundrum: who gets to name a language? This brings us back to the concept of a monoglossic ideology. Writing about “named languages,” Saraceni and Jacob (2019: 1) observe: Based on the recognition that linguistic borders are little more than political constructs, many sociolinguists prefer to describe language behavior as social practice where speakers make use of shared linguistic repertories in fluid and dynamic ways rather than adhering to the static rules of pre-packaged and labelled languages.

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They assert that this point of view rejects “a theory of language fundamentally emanating from, or at least being tied to, monolingual ideologies of 19th-century European nationalism” (2019: 1). The “this is America, speak English” monolingual ideology reflects that European nationalism, but on this side of the Atlantic. However, they continue to note that rejecting older ways of linguistic categorization should not lead us to lose sight of the fact that invented and artificial as they may have been, named languages and their borders do exist and play very important roles not only as layman’s concepts but also as part of the long process of political and cultural de-colonization in many parts of the world. (2019: 1) It is for reasons such as these that we note the arbitrariness of geographic and linguistic boundaries in studying US Mexican Spanish but, at the same time, continue to employ traditional terms. We contend that, in large part, naming a language depends on its speakers’ status. If abjectly subjugated, they must accept names given to them; in breaking free of their bonds, they gain the right to do their own naming. We look at these issues as they pertain to Spanish speakers in the West in Chapter 5. Thus, we come to the name “Spanish.” In a monoglossic framework, it might seem fairly straightforward what that means: Spanish as a unique national language, as opposed to French, English, German, and so on. However, as noted earlier, the question arises as to who is doing the labeling. For example, some Spaniards prefer the label “castellano” to “español” in referring to the language. However, castellano translates into English as “Castilian,” which others use to reference one of the various dialects of Peninsular Spanish (i.e., español castellano “Castilian Spanish” as opposed to español andaluz “Andalusian Spanish”). And in New Mexico, some speakers refer to the language as “mexicano,” which translates into English as “Mexican” but refers to the Spanish language. So if someone asks, “¿Ese vato habla mexicano?” in English that can mean, “Does that guy speak Mexican?” but more closely translates as, “Does that guy speak Spanish?” Keeping these issues in mind, in this book we use the word “Spanish” to refer to a human communication system, or “language,” that the Romans exported to the Iberian Peninsula (before there was a country called “Spain”) some two millennia ago, which was then carried to the Americas beginning in 1492. Its speakers live principally in North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, and Spain. Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, and Cuba are a few of what are sometimes called Spanish-speaking countries. Current estimates indicate that over 450 million people speak Spanish as a first language. Although diferences exist in how Spanish is spoken in those countries, Argentinians can travel to Spain and converse with the Spaniards there (ironing out along the way some dialectal diferences). The same holds true for a Mexican traveling to Peru, a Bolivian traveling to Uruguay, or an Arizonan traveling to Costa Rica.

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US Mexican Spanish in the West as a macro-dialect

In the study of the common features in the dialects of western US Mexican Spanish (hereafter USMS), phrases employed to identify those features are macro-dialect, dialect complex, or dialect family. As an example of this, when we analyze the Spanish of speakers in San Antonio, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Los Angeles, California; Salem, Oregon; and Yakima, Washington, we find many similarities between their dialects. Our use of the term “dialect” here means that we also recognize that there are diferences, but the number of similarities outweighs the number of diferences. That represents one principal goal of this volume, to understand why Spanish speakers in Brownsville, Texas demonstrate striking linguistic similarities to those in Sunnyside, Washington, which lies over 2,000 miles to the northwest. To put this distance in perspective, if you left Paris, France, and traveled those 2,000plus miles to the east, you would reach the eastern Russian city of Ufa, well past Moscow, passing through multiple language zones on the way. Given the vastness of the greater region studied here, there exist large swaths of the West in which empirical “boots on the ground” research on USMS has yet to be conducted. A reader of the proposal for this book noted that issue and wondered how we would deal with this huge research gap. Our strategy is to employ demographic US Census data to fill in those gaps; as Jenkins (2013: 33) establishes: There are no demographic factors that distinguish Hispanics in the Northwestern U.S. from those of areas to the south besides higher demographic density and proximity to the border since the origins of these Hispanics are similar to those in the Southwest. As such, it seems reasonable to include [Northwestern] states in discussions about Southwest Spanish, or rather, Spanish of the Western United States (our translation and emphasis). We, of course, include states not only in the Northwest and do so for the precise reasons that Jenkins identifies. We turn to the US Census to identify Mexican-origin populations whose demographic characteristics parallel those in areas in which empirical research has been conducted. This process serves as a proxy in suggesting a macro-dialect that includes all areas we wish to cover. Regarding the USMS macro-dialect we propose, some of its features become so widespread that when speakers of another dialect or variety come into contact with them, they absorb those features into their own speech. We often refer to this phenomenon as dialect leveling, speakers adapting their dialect to another. Such is the case with the Salvadoran and Guatemalan communities in the Los Angeles area that Parodi (1999, 2014) describes. She reports that those two Central American groups and those of Mexican origin tend to live in the same areas of Los Angeles and interact with each other on a daily basis. Regarding the Salvadorans, she notes that even the contact generation, those who moved to the LA area from their home countries as adults, begin to use LA Spanish. That includes but is not limited

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to Mexican-origin words and English-origin loanwords instead of those from their home dialect. She theorizes that this occurs due to the fact that Mexican-origin people form a large majority in LA and have a long historic presence there. The US Census calculates that in 2020 that group constituted 73.1% of the total Hispanic or Latino population in LA County (www.census.gov) (again, we will define the labels “Hispanic” and “Latino” in Chapter 4). Salvadoran and Guatemalan-origin individuals formed 15.6% of the total Hispanic or Latino population, a distinct minority. Parodi (2014: 1109) ofers a number of examples of Salvadorans substituting USMS words for their own. A few include botella or mamila instead of pacha “baby bottle,” apretado instead of tilinte “stretched tight,” camarones instead of chacalines “shrimp,” and callado instead of bayunco “quiet person” (1999: 924). She continues to identify the loanwords they acquire, which include biles (bills, documents requesting payment), yarda (house’s yard), marqueta (market), and parquearse (to park a car) (924). This appears to be a one-way street, with all speakers of non-USMS dialects adopting LA Spanish vocabulary. There may be a few exceptions to this, such as the Salvadoran words “pupusa” and “pupusería,” thick corn tortillas with a variety of fillings and the place where they are sold, respectively. So it is the case that some non-USMS words may be added to the LA Spanish vocabulary. However, as Parodi (1999: 1108) notes, the majority of Spanish speakers in her study, whatever their origin may be, use the LA dialect of USMS. The exception is in the home, where non-Mexican-origin speakers tend to use their native dialect. But it is not only speakers of other US Spanish varieties that experience dialect leveling; those who speak another national variety of Spanish do so as well. As part of a class project, one of our students interviewed a young man from Mexico City who, in talking about diferences between his Spanish and USMS, observed the following: [E]s difícil porque yo a lo mejor yo no sé qué es mapear y yo digo trapear, ni él me entiende a mí, ni yo entiendo a la otra persona. Entonces pues son cosas diferentes como en vez de la bomba de gasolina es la pompa de gasolina. [I]t is difcult because I probably I do not know what mapear [USMS “to mop”] is and I say trapear [Mexican Spanish “to mop”], he does not understand me, I do not understand the other person. So, then there are diferent things like instead of the gasoline bomba [Mexican Spanish “pump”] it is the gasoline pompa [USMS “pump”]. In spite of his protestations that he cannot understand the USMS usages, he provides an accurate equivalence in his dialect of the new USMS words he has encountered, indicating that he has added them to his personal vocabulary. Again, we cannot establish with any degree of certainty that mapear and pompa are unique to USMS; however, what we can say is that they have been identified in

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the traditional New Mexican Spanish dialect found in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, the oldest continuously spoken one in the United States. Aurelio Espinosa, in his pioneering research on that dialect, lists them along with other English loanwords, such as bil “bill,” chequiar “to check,” cuque “cookie,” queque “cake,” and troca “truck,” the same that Parodi (2014: 1109) identified in 21stcentury LA Spanish. Following Espinosa, Rubén Cobos began collecting samples of that dialect in the 1940s and continued his research into the 1970s (Cobos 1987: vi–vii). He published a collection of the vocabulary drawn from that work in his A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish. He lists both pompa and mapear (he spells it mopear) in it, as well as the words Espinosa (1914) and Parodi (2014: 1109) mention. To sum up, we realize that in proposing a macro-dialect, we create an absolute abstraction. That is, there is no single individual who speaks the macro-dialect. However, it is based on the language of a collection of individual speakers, and those interested in determining if someone’s idiolect pertains to a dialect of USMS can employ it in working toward a better understanding of that person’s Spanish. The standard language ideology

We assert earlier that we use a “bottom-up” approach in our analyses of USMS. However, as also noted, not all researchers utilize this research method. Another way to establish concepts such as idiolect, dialect, variety, and language is to construct an idealized version of a language and compare all usages to that construct, commonly labeled as “standard language,” that is, standard Spanish, standard English, standard French, standard German, and so forth. Fuller and Leeman (2020) discuss a standard Spanish ideology, citing Lippi-Green’s (2012: 67) definition of the construct of a “standard”: [A standard language is] a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant block institutions and which names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class. An “abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language” is, in essence, one that nobody speaks and that is employed to establish if some usage or another is “correct.” Given the fact that everyone’s idiolect varies in one way or another, by definition, no dialect or variety will be free of some dissimilarity with the standard. This standard language ideology, then, represents a set of beliefs as opposed to an empirically based presentation of a group’s language use. This point is of particular importance to the study of USMS, as well as other varieties of US Spanish. A common thread in much of the research dedicated to them refers to the “non-standard” features of the Spanish spoken across the nation

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in general and in the West in particular. This phrase replaces the earlier “substandard” as used, for example, by Barker (1972) in his description of Spanish/ English bilinguals’ language usage in Tucson, Arizona (see Chapter 5 in his book). Given advances in sociolinguistics, such overtly prejudiced terminology fell out of favor. Yet “non-standard,” the replacement for “sub-standard,” inherited the semantic baggage of its predecessor. It implies usages that fall outside the norm of elite members of a society and are therefore somehow deficient or unacceptable. Bruzos Moro presents this vision of Spanish in the United States in writing, “[El español en Estados Unidos] es una lengua con escasa legitimidad cultural e intelectual por su vinculación a la inmigración y a la pobreza” (2016: 5). “[Spanish in the United States] is a language with scant cultural and intellectual legitimacy because of its connection to immigration and poverty.” This idea of a “standard” permeates the field of Spanish-language instruction as well. For example, Pentón Herrera writes: Como maestro de español con la meta de contribuir a la permanencia de una forma culta y digna del español dentro de la población hispanoparlante en los Estados Unidos, muchas veces siento que permitir préstamos lingüísticos (spanglish) en la clase de español me roba la oportunidad de enseñar términos académicamente elevados a mis estudiantes. As a Spanish teacher with the goal of contributing to the permanency of a dignified and cultured form of Spanish among the Spanish speaking population of the United States, I often feel that to permit linguistic loans (Spanglish) robs me of the opportunity to teach academically elevated terms to my students. (2019: 469, our emphasis) The use of concepts such as “a dignified and cultured form of Spanish” clearly implies the idea that the US Spanish–speaking population’s language is not. “Academically elevated terms” contrasts with “sub-” or below-standard language forms the students utilize. This bias toward an inexistant “standard” is deeply rooted in the history of the Spanish language; we discuss this history in detail in Chapter 6. We ofer this brief introduction to a standard language ideology as it permeates both popular and academic attitudes toward Spanish in the West, as well as in the rest of the nation. In sum, this chapter serves to introduce a number of the topics this volume covers, such as USMS as a set of dialects that form a variety of the Spanish language, its history, what links it to other varieties of Spanish, and what sets it apart. To date, most studies on the dialects of US Spanish spoken in the US West have focused on the southwestern states, but recent demographic changes in the West from border to border require us to look beyond that region in order to better understand the dynamics of this “national language,” as Lipski (2008: 18) labels it.

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Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 2

1 What types of borders exist in your area? These can be physical, political, or even technical and might include city, county, and state boundaries, voting or congressional districts, and telephone area or zip codes. How are these areas named? For example, some people refer to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and surrounding areas as “the 505,” its area code. Others might say, “This is how we roll in the 88005,” using a zip code to identify a place. 2 Do these boundaries afect you in one way or another? For example, some cities might ban the purchase of fireworks on the Fourth of July, while it is legal to buy them outside the city limits. Gambling is generally illegal across the nation, but in certain areas, it is an integral part of the culture (think Las Vegas, Nevada). Certain parts for, and modifications to, car engines might be generally acceptable across the country, but not in California, due to antipollution legislation there. 3 Identify the dialect of the Spanish or English you speak, or both. What do you use to identify the dialect: vocabulary, accent, phrases, dichos “sayings,” or perhaps some other feature? To identify these, think if anyone who speaks the same language as you has commented on or questioned something you said. 4 Select a dozen or so words in Spanish, from any source. Look them up in the online Diccionario de la lengua española, “Dictionary of the Spanish Language,” produced by the Real Academia Española, “Royal Spanish Academy” (rae.es). Does the meaning of those words change or not depending on which country they are used in? For example, comer “to eat” seems to be used fairly consistently across the Spanish-speaking world, while tortilla “tortilla” is not. 5 Have you encountered the “standard language” ideology in either Spanish or English? Think of a time when you were told “Don’t say X, say Y” in English or “No se dice X en español” in Spanish. Additional readings Cobos, Rubén. 1987 [1983]. A dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish. Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press. (This is an excellent source for the vocabulary found in one dialect of USMS.) Fuller, Janet M., and Jennifer Leeman. 2020. Speaking Spanish in the US: The sociopolitics of language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. (Chapter 4 is especially pertinent to this discussion). Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. (Chapter 4 is especially pertinent to this discussion). Woodard, Colin. 2011. American Nations: A history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America. New York: Penguin Books. (Chapter 1 is especially pertinent to this discussion).

References Barker, George C. 1972. Social functions of language in a Mexican-American community. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

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Bills, Garland D., and Neddy A. Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Bruzos Moro, Alberto. 2016. El capital cultural del español y su enseñanza como lengua extranjera en Estados Unidos. Hispania 99: 5–16. Cobos, Rubén. 1987 [1983]. A dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish. Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press. Dumistrescu, Domnita. 2015. Pragmatic and discursive aspects of the U.S. Spanish. Informes del Observatorio: 1–25. Erker, Daniel. 2017. The limits of named language varieties and the role of social salience in dialectal contact: The case of Spanish in the United States. Language and Linguistics Compass 11: 1–20. Espinosa, Aurelio M. 1914. Studies in New Mexican Spanish, part III: The English elements. Revue de Dialectologie Romane 6: 241–317. Fuller, Janet M., and Jennifer Leeman. 2020. Speaking Spanish in the US: The sociopolitics of language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Jenkins, Devin L. 2013. El suroeste creciente: Un breve análisis sociodemográfico de la población hispanohablante de los Estados Unidos. El español en los Estados Unidos: ¿E pluribus unum? Enfoque multidisciplinarios, Domnita Dumitrescu and Gerardo Piña Rosales (eds.), 31–46. New York, NY: Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge. Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Makoni, Sinfree, and Alastair Pennycook. 2006. Disinventing and Reconstituting languages. Disinventing and reconstituting languages, Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook (eds.), 1–41. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, Internet Resource. Parodi, Claudia. 1999. Koineización e historia: La sincronía, ventana de la diacronía. Homenaje al profesor Ambrosio Rabanales. BFUCh XXXVII (1998–1999): 915–931. Parodi, Claudia. 2014. El español de Los Ángeles: Koineización y diglosia. Lenguas, estructuras y hablantes: Estudios en homenaje a Thomas C. Smith Stark, Rebeca Barriga Villanueva, Esther Herrera Zendejas, and Thomas Cedric Smith-Stark (eds.), 1099–1121. México, DF: Colegio de México. Pentón Herrera, Luis Javier. 2019. Explorando el spanglish: Abstrusa tesela del mosaico lingüístico estadounidense. Hispania 102: 467–472. Saraceni, Mario, and Camille Jacob. 2019. Revisiting borders: Named languages and decolonization. Language Sciences 76: 1–10. Villa, Daniel J., Naomi Lapidus Shin, and Eva Robles Nagata. 2014. La nueva frontera: Spanish-speaking populations in Central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 1: 149–172. Woodard, Colin. 2011. American nations: A history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America. New York: Penguin Books.

3 A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY OF MIGRATION The spread of Spanish speakers

The following presents a history of the peoples who participated in spreading the Spanish language from the Italic Peninsula to the US West. The importance of focusing on the speakers of the language is that language by itself does not migrate. We cannot assert that Spanish arrived by itself in the Americas in 1492, as if it grew wings and flew over the Atlantic Ocean. It was Spanish speakers who did so, in ships, carrying their language with them. In Chapter 2, we examine the concept of “language.” Here we link that concept to human migration and how those movements resulted in Spanish becoming a language widely spoken across a large region of a nation whose principal language is English. As we will see, all varieties of Spanish share common roots; it is with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 that it diversifies into the many non-European types we speak today, one of which is USMS. As Erker (2017: 1) succinctly notes, “Spanish wasn’t born a global language. Long before it became ‘Spanish’ . . . it was the local way of speaking for a comparatively tiny group of people in central northern Iberia.” In this brief history, we focus on the Spanish exported to North America. The roots: 200 BCE to 1492 CE1

Spanish is a direct descendent of Vulgar Latin, the spoken language of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire. The word “vulgar” has come to mean coarse, gross, and uneducated. However, in referring to the language of the Romans, the Latin vulgus means “the common people,” “the multitude,” “the public.” So Vulgar Latin means the common, everyday spoken form of the language the majority of Romans used some two millennia ago. In expanding the empire, Roman soldiers, farmers, tradespeople, engineers, and others who spoke Vulgar Latin carried it to the Iberian Peninsula, today’s Spain and Portugal, beginning about 200 BCE. However, these DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-4

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migrants did not enter into an empty territory; they encountered various peoples living in those lands. As a result, the speakers of Vulgar Latin incorporated not only the existing inhabitants they encountered into their communities but elements of their languages as well. In Chapter 9, we will detail this process; the important point to note here lies in the fact that since its beginnings, today’s Spanish descends from the language of the people, not an educated elite. Since the latter were a minority, their dialects of the language were not transmitted to the new communities; rather, it was the language of the vulgus, the majority. Also, since their inception, Vulgar Latin and then Spanish reflect contact with other peoples and, hence, other languages. A major cause of the development of Spanish as separate from other types of Vulgar Latin, such as Italian, Portuguese, and French, was the fall of the Roman Empire. There is no set date for that event, but many place the fragmentation of the empire in the 4th or 5th centuries CE. As a result, during the 5th century, the control of a large portion of the Iberian Peninsula passed from the Romans to invading groups of Germanic peoples. Their descendants, who mixed to one degree or another with the former Romans, held sway in a large part of the Peninsula until the momentous year 711. It was then that the Moors invaded from North Africa and, in only seven years, had conquered the majority of the Iberian Peninsula, leaving just the northernmost regions in the hands of a Latin-speaking population as well as the ever-resilient Basques. The Moors maintained a presence in the Peninsula for almost eight centuries. However, the Vulgar Latin speakers relegated to the north began a protracted struggle to re-establish their rule over the peninsula, moving slowly southward in battle after battle. It is during this time that we observe Vulgar Latin become recognizably Spanish, sometimes labeled “Old Spanish.” For example, El Cantar del mio Cid, “The poem of the Cid,” dating to the 11th century, represents one the earliest texts written in the new Peninsular vernacular. The eforts of the descendants of Romans and Goths were ultimately successful, and the last of the Moorish rulers were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the well-recognized year 1492. Up to now we have tried to avoid calling the geographic region discussed here “Spain,” because it was not a consolidated political entity up to that time. However, with the removal of the last Moorish rulers, we can now refer to Spain as a country in a political sense, falling under the dominion of the Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. It was Isabella’s Vulgar Latin, the Castilian dialect, that was established as the national language of the new union. Having vanquished the Moors, the Reyes Católicos turned their attention to building an empire, which in part resulted in their giving money, ships, and men to Christopher Columbus in order to find a new route to the Indies and its riches. As schoolchildren across the United States learn, Columbus set sail in that fateful year, but a lesser-known fact is that Antonio de Nebrija published the first modern grammar written for any variety of European Vulgar Latin in order to codify the Castilian dialect, a topic we return to in Chapter 6.

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The early colonial period: 1492–1598

The results of Columbus’ voyages are well-known, creating long-term, fundamental changes in the histories of Europe and the Americas. We turn our attention to the appearance of Spanish speakers in North America, focusing on their northward movement from central Mexico. In the process of establishing the Spanish Empire in North America, Hernán Cortés battled and conquered the Aztecs in 1521. The riches plundered from the vanquished Aztecs fueled the flames of avarice in the Spaniards, who set out to find new, readily acquired sources of treasure. In their movements northward, they discovered large deposits of rich silver ore near the present-day city of Zacatecas, occasioning its founding in 1546. As we will see, it is at this point in time that US Mexican Spanish begins to emerge as a unique variety, just a little over 50 years after Columbus’ arrival. At this particular historic juncture, it is important to emphasize that the Spanish conquistadores, priests, and subsequent settlers did not take a homogenous language to the Americas with them. Spain was, and remains, a multilingual and multidialectal nation. Scholars continue to debate the peninsular origins of Spanish in the Americas, but sufce it to say that once Spanish speakers started their journey to the Americas, they modified the language in ways that their European compatriots did not. The migrants did not act alone in this re-creation. The Aztecs’ language, Nahuatl, had been the lingua franca of what is now Mexico, serving as a common means of communication among the linguistically diverse indigenous populations of that era. It was supplanted in that role by Spanish. As was the case in earlier migrations, Europeans mixed with indigenous peoples. The result of this merging was, and continues to be, labeled mestizaje, the blending of indigenous and European genes. Initially, the mestizos, “mixed people,” were bilingual, speaking both Spanish and Nahuatl. These speakers introduced a whole new set of vocabulary items into Spanish and absorbed only certain aspects of its grammar. As a result, it comes as no surprise that the Spanish emerging in the newest regions of the Spanish Empire was not the dialect, or dialects, of the ruling Spanish classes. To this day, the only place where people still speak Castilian Spanish lies in certain regions of the Iberian Peninsula. The American varieties result from a process called koineization. Very briefly, this happens when speakers of two or more dialects of the same language come into close contact and mutually modify their ways of speaking. The resulting variety is distinct from its predecessors, in essence becoming a unique form of the language (for a detailed discussion of this process, see Sanz-Sánchez 2016). Here we return to an assertion we made at the beginning of this chapter. The koineization described here did not occur as a result of the two languages, Spanish and Nahuatl, modifying themselves to then wait for speakers to learn them. The mestizaje mentioned earlier genetically derives from speakers of one language producing ofspring with speakers of another. Their children grow up speaking, or at least familiar with, both languages. They, their parents, and their own children are those who produce the changes that result in a new variety of the language emerging.

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This linguistic and genetic blending happened throughout the Americas in general and in Mexico in particular. In spite of the fact that the Spaniards came to Mexico as conquistadores, military invaders who vanquished the Aztecs, the mestizos absorbed the Spaniards’ descendants, forging a new identity and a Mexican variety of Spanish related to but distinct from Peninsular Spanish. This melding had historic precedents, occurring earlier when the conquered descendants of the Peninsular Romans absorbed the invading Germanic peoples. There was an attempt to create a caste system in Mexico in order to separate Europeans from the mestizos, but the success of that system was ultimately doomed to failure, as were any eforts to impose Castilian Spanish as a common language. In the Zacatecas region, a number of families became hugely wealthy from the silver mines and wished to increase that wealth by identifying new deposits of precious metals, among other riches. The scion of one such family, Juan de Oñate, petitioned the Spanish Crown for permission to travel northward with a group of colonists in order to annex new territories to the empire. Permission was granted, and after a number of delays, the colonists left the Zacatecas area in 1598 for the north. As only certain members of the group, such as soldiers and priests, were identified, we do not know its exact composition but can reasonably suspect that it included any number of mestizos (see Sanz and Villa 2011 for a detailed description of the demography of this group). As they moved into new territories, they carried their northern Mexican Spanish with them. The later colonial period: 1598–1821

The colonists followed a route that became known as the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Middle Country. In April of 1598, Oñate’s small group arrived at the south bank of the Río Bravo, known more commonly in the United States as the Rio Grande, near the modern-day city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. After fording the river and claiming the lands to the north for the Spanish Crown, they continued their trek northward. The small band reached the Tewa pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh in September of that year, located in what is now northern New Mexico, and settled there. In 1607, they decided to establish a new plaza, Santa Fe, which remains New Mexico’s capital to this day. In 1659, Fray García de San Francisco, a Franciscan priest, established El Paso del Norte, modern-day Juárez, and in 1706, Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdés founded Albuquerque, all located on the Camino Real. The Spanish Empire continued to expand its northernmost territories beyond La Nueva México during this period, creating new settlements in far-flung regions. Soldiers, missionaries, and colonists moved into what is now Texas, Arizona, and California, creating systems of presidios (fortified military installations), missions, and cultivated lands. These entradas (entries) occurred in fits and starts, given that much of the terrain that made up the northernmost regions of the Spanish Empire in North America was, and remains to this day, inhospitable. Vast deserts stretch from California to west Texas, and mountain chains in Colorado and Utah presented

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formidable challenges to east–west transportation until the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. Swampy regions in eastern Texas discouraged settlers from populating that area. Given these geologic and environmental barriers, Weber (2003: 14–15) notes that the next region to be populated by Spanish speakers in the 18th century CE was to the west of New Mexico. Eusebio Kino was a key contributor to the colonizing of the Pimería Alta, today the Mexican state of Sonora and the southern region of Arizona. Again, indigenous resistance to the Spanish-speaking settlers was fierce, and it was not until the end of the 1700s that colonists were able to establish a tenuous foothold in the Santa Cruz Valley, with the Tucson presidio forming the northmost point in the colonized area. The next area to be settled was Texas. Spanish-speaking colonists managed to establish a foothold in San Antonio in 1718. Again, indigenous resistance to the arrival of the settlers was ferocious, and as was the case in Arizona, it was not until the end of the 1700s that some degree of control was achieved, principally around the site of modern-day San Antonio. The last colonized region of the northern rim of the Spanish Empire lay in coastal areas of la Alta California, now the state of California. Junípero Serra established the first mission there in 1769 at the site of modern-day San Diego. Although the Spanish Crown had an earlier presence in that region, due to navigators sailing up the Pacific coast, it was not until the founding of the missions that Spanish speakers became part of the linguistic landscape of that region. To sum up this period, we cite Weber (2003: 16), who observes that “[b]y 1821, pioneers from Mexico had probed their far northern frontier, planting colonies in four areas . . .coastal California; Southern Arizona; the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico; and Texas, especially around San Antonio.” Little or no direct communication existed between the colonies previously described. Weber continues: Each of these provinces developed in isolation from the others, for throughout the period of Spanish sovereignty over Mexico, no lateral lines of communication crossed the Southwest. All roads led to Mexico City. Yet, the society that developed on New Spain’s northern frontier never became an exact copy of the society of central Mexico. (2003: 16) In Chapter 10, we examine the linguistic impact of these settlement patterns on both northern Mexican Spanish and USMS, in particular with regard to the development of a macro-dialect. At this point, we note that the Spanish government, whose seat was in Mexico City, had difculties in maintaining the northern perimeter of its vast holdings, in part due to the difculty of transporting supplies there. The lack of support caused no small amount of resentment among many of the colonists and their descendants, who saw themselves as abandoned by the Spanish Crown. This resentment would continue to fester over the years.

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The Mexican national period: 1821–1848

After centuries of Spanish domination, wars of independence erupted throughout the Americas in the early 19th century. The Mexican bid for liberty was initiated in 1810, and in 1821, Mexico emerged as a separate nation. As a result, Mexico’s borders, after negotiations came to a close in 1823, were as seen in Figure 3.1. The newly formed nation found itself saddled with conflicts inherited from the centuries of Spanish rule. Among these was the support of its northern territories, which remained difcult to sustain and administer for the central Mexican government, located in Mexico City, as the colonial and Aztec capitals had been. For perspective, the distance between Mexico City and San Antonio, Texas, is over 800 miles by road. That may not seem like much today, given our modern means of transportation, but in wagons or on horseback, it was at least a twomonth trip.

FIGURE 3.1

The Republic of Mexico’s borders, 1823.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Mapa_Mexico_1823.PNG#filelinks.

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During the opening decades of the 19th century, English-speaking settlers arriving from the east continued their westward trek into Mexican territory, traveling to what is now Texas. Initially, Mexico welcomed them as a means of developing its northern regions. The recently arrived settlers mingled in with tejanos, descendants of the earlier Spanish-speaking colonists. While diferent in culture and language, they all shared a common dislike for the increasingly centralized Mexican government. Resentment grew and finally erupted into open rebellion. English-speaking settlers and tejanos, along with newly arrived adventurers, banded together to secede from Mexico. In 1836, they signed the Texas Declaration of Independence to create the Republic of Texas, reducing Mexico’s northern territory significantly. Political troubles continued in the greater region. During the 19th century, the concept of “manifest destiny” surged across the United States, in essence the idea that the country had a God-given mandate to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. How universal this sentiment became is a matter of debate, but in order to continue its westward expansion, the United States ofered to purchase land from Mexico; the Mexican government declined the ofer. The United States then moved troops into the newly acquired Texas territory, and in 1846, the United States invaded Mexico. After almost two years of fierce resistance, Mexico surrendered, and in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought an end to the hostilities. Mexican sovereignty over the former northern regions of the Spanish Empire lasted only 27 years. The US territorial period: 1848–1912

With the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded over half of its territory to the United States. These added lands include what is now all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. The United States became a nation that did indeed stretch from sea to shining sea. Figure 3.2 illustrates the westward expansion. In drafting the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a major point of contention among US legislators was what to do with the Mexican citizens living in the newly conquered territories. After much debate, it was decided that all Mexican nationals who stayed on their lands would be awarded full US citizenship. Those who wished to retain their Mexican citizenship had to return to Mexico, south of the new border. Guadalupe Hidalgo held particular significance for US politics at that time. Article IX of the treaty, in part, states the new citizens were entitled “to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States,” further establishing that “[former Mexican citizens] shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction” (www.ourdocuments.gov/, our emphasis). There were about 80,000 Mexican citizens living in the new US territory in 1848. Approximately 60,000 lived in New Mexico, with the majority of the

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Idaho

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Minn. S.Dak. Wyo. lowa

Nev.

Nebr. Utah Colo.

Calif. Kans.

Ariz.

Okla.

Mo.

Ark.

N.Mex. La Texas

Republic of Texas, 1836-1845; annexed by US 1845 a

Disputed area: Claimed by Texas 1836-1845; claimed by US 1845-1848 Mexican Cession, 1848 Gadsden Purchase, 1853

FIGURE 3.2

The expansion of the United States into Mexican territory.

Source: www.gao.gov/assets/gao-01-951.pdf.

remainder residing in Arizona, Texas, and California. These are the ancestors of those US citizens who point out that their families did not cross the border – the border crossed them. At the time of the annexation, tensions ran deep between the North and the South on the issue of slavery. Slaveholders in the South were determined to maintain a balance between free and slave states. The inclusion of the new territories and, by extension, new free-state citizens would throw that delicate balance of, as the former Mexican citizens had lived in a country that outlawed slavery in 1829, with the result that many were opposed to the practice. The disruption caused by Guadalupe Hidalgo of the free/slave states balance, in part, led to the American Civil War. During this era, plans were afoot to build a transcontinental railway in order to link the nation’s two coasts together. Planners considered various possible routes and came to realize that the southern option would be best if it ran through what was still Mexican territory. Thus, the United States ofered to purchase additional territory from Mexico. The Mexican government, perhaps wary of another armed

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conflict, acceded, and in 1853, an additional treaty was drawn up. Known in English as the Gadsden Purchase and in Spanish as the Tratado de La Mesilla, it transferred southern portions of the modern states of New Mexico and Arizona to the United States. Ratified in 1854, this treaty, in addition to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, established the modern border between the two countries. Designers ultimately chose a central route for the new intercontinental rail line, but when a southern route was constructed toward the end of the 19th century, it passed through Gadsden Purchase territory. In the lands acquired from Mexico, the first admitted as a state was California in 1849. Kansas followed in 1861, Nevada in 1864, Colorado in 1876, Wyoming in 1890, Utah in 1896, and Oklahoma in 1907. The year 1912 saw the admission of New Mexico, the state with the largest Hispanic population, in January and Arizona in February as the 47th and 48th states of the Union. This finalized the geography of the contiguous United States. The delay in the admission of New Mexico as a state was due in part to the number of Hispanics living there, not only non-White citizens, but Spanish speakers as well. As part of this history, New Mexico stands apart from the other states in that those who wrote its constitution were concerned about the language rights of New Mexican Spanish speakers. There is a myth that New Mexico is an ofcially bilingual state. It is not. However, New Mexican Spanish speakers enjoy significant constitutional protections in legal and educational domains. Enforcement of those rights has been uneven after statehood, but nevertheless, they remain firmly embedded in the state’s legal structure. We return to this issue in Chapter 5. Development in the western United States lured additional Mexicans to migrate to the north. For example, the construction of the southern transnational railways created a huge demand for labor that the US workforce could not provide. The mining industry in Arizona recruited skilled Mexican miners to work at extracting and processing valuable ore. Growth in the agricultural sector also required addition labor. As a result, the Mexican-origin population continued to grow in the United States, principally in the former northern edge of the Spanish Empire and of Mexico.

The US period: 1912–present

The bloodletting caused by the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the subsequent Guerra Cristera in 1926, an armed insurrection based on religious beliefs, resulted in Mexican citizens fleeing north to escape the violence. As the fighting broke out in northern Mexico, many of the refugees arrived from northern Mexican states. World War I, which the United States entered in 1917, caused labor shortages and resulted in a continued influx of Mexican workers, principally from northern Mexico. The US Census estimated that in 1930, about 1.5 million Mexican nationals or Mexican-origin citizens lived in the United States. The Great Depression of the

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1930s reversed this trend; members of both groups were rounded up and deported to Mexico. World War II and the Korean War caused the migration pendulum to swing the other way. Once again, as during World War I, the United States faced a labor shortage. The US government established the Bracero Program in 1942, aimed at shoring up the economy in critical areas such as food production (one translation of “bracero” would be “field-worker”). The Bracero Program’s aim was to have Mexican workers arrive seasonally to perform specific tasks, such as harvesting crops, and then return to Mexico. However, bureaucratic red tape resulted in the program becoming cumbersome, and many US contractors welcomed Mexican workers, who simply avoided it and looked for employment on their own. As a result, not all workers who arrived returned to Mexico. Once again, the majority of braceros hailed from northern Mexico. The Bracero Program ended in 1964. It would be another force, however, that would cause the spread of US Spanish speakers outside of the traditional southwestern heartland: inflation. Up to the mid-20th century, the exchange rate between the Mexican peso and the US dollar had remained fairly stable at around 12.5 pesos to 1 dollar. Then, the worldwide oil crisis of the 1970s battered the Mexican economy, and inflation set in. The peso was devalued to about 48 to 1 dollar in 1976. The economic turmoil continued into the 1980s. When Villa and his wife were students in Guadalajara in 1985, the exchange rate was hovering around 50 to 1. Los tapatíos, the native Guadalajarans they studied with, gloomily predicted the rate would hit 100 to 1 by the end of the year. It did and continued falling to 500 to 1, then 1,500, and on to 2,000 to 1. As they continued their graduate studies in the late 1980s, the peso continued to become worth less and less, such that by the time they moved back to New Mexico in 1992, the exchange rate was about 3,000 to 1. Eforts to stabilize the Mexican economy led its government to re-value the peso, and in 1993, it introduced the nuevo peso, the “new peso,” which removed three zeros from the original peso. At that point in time, then, the exchange rate was 3 new pesos to 1 dollar. The optimism about the economic reforms turned out to be premature, though, and in 1994, the peso continued its downward slide, 5 to 1, then in following years, 7 to 1, then 10 to 1, to the point that currently the rate is hovering around 20 to 1. As the online inflation calculator Inflationtool notes: The inflation rate in Mexico between 1970 and today has been 904,431.65%, which translates into a total increase of $904,431.65. This means that 100 pesos in 1970 are equivalent to 904,531.65 pesos in 2021. In other words, the purchasing power of $100 [pesos] in 1970 equals $904,531.65 today. (www.inflationtool.com/mexican-peso/1970-to-present-value)

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While the peso was continuing its slide in the 1990s, the US economy was booming. The National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org/) observes that the decade 1990–2000 saw the longest economic expansion in US history up to that point in time. One result of that growth was that more and more people here could aford the great national dream of owning a home. The housing market soared, and along with it the need for construction labor. At the same time, another change was underway. The birth rate has been dropping in the United States, to the point where we are now having children below what is called the replacement rate. Essentially, this phrase means that two adults need to have two children to replace them when the parents depart this vale of tears, with the result that the population remains stable. One result of not having enough children to maintain the replacement rate is a shortage of workers. A colleague tells a story that illustrates this population trend. As a young teenager living in Oregon in the early 1970s, she and her classmates rode what they called “berry busses” to the Willamette Valley to pick berries for pocket money. She said that the riders were almost all young people under the age of 16, as Oregon labor laws at that time allowed young teens to work in the berry fields. Oregon is still a major fruit producer, but the berry busses are now a thing of the past, like slide rules, disco, and bell-bottom pants. There are simply not enough young people to bring in the crops anymore, and so growers have had to look elsewhere for labor. This situation has repeated itself from the southern to the northern borders of the country in general and the West in particular, and not just in agriculture, but also in the construction trades, the service industry, and other sectors of our economy as well. Beyond the Southwest

As a result of the aforementioned, the last decades of the 20th century and the early ones of the 21st have seen a shrinking native-born labor force and an increase in the demand for labor. As a consequence, Spanish speakers began to move beyond the Southwest to regions outside the heartland to areas they had not traditionally inhabited in significant numbers. In studies on Southwest Spanish, an established norm in classifying a state as Spanish-speaking is if that state has a population of 10% or more Hispanics. Bills (1989), a pioneer in the use of Census data for understanding US Spanish, suggests this figure as a 10% presence of a group in a population becomes noticeable due to its educational needs, consumption patterns, and political presence, among other factors. Using that criterion, he includes Colorado in the Southwest, as the 1980 Census reported that the presence of Hispanics in that state was 12% of its total. He defines the Spanish-speaking Southwest, then, as consisting of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado (Bills 1989). Using that same criterion, the states in the West in which the Hispanic population is 10% and above are listed in Table 3.1 (www.census.gov, 2020 ACS).

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TABLE 3.1 Western states with 10%+ Hispanic populations

State

Total population

Hispanic population

Percentage Hispanics

New Mexico Texas California Arizona Nevada Colorado Utah Oregon Washington Idaho Kansas Nebraska Oklahoma Wyoming

2,097,021 29,145,505 39,346,023 7,151,502 3,104,614 5,773,714 3,271,616 4,237,256 7,705,281 1,839,106 2,937,880 1,961,504 3,959,353 576,851

1,031,788 11,441,717 15380929 2,192,253 890,257 1,263,390 492,912 588,757 1,059,213 239,407 382,603 234,715 471,931 59,046

49.2% 39.3% 39.1% 30.7% 28.7% 21.9% 15.1% 13.9% 13.7% 13.0% 13.0% 12.0% 11.9% 10.2%

Finding the future in the present

Up to this point in the chapter, we have been able to trace the history of USMS speakers based on historical records and data from sources such as the US Census. In looking at their presence in the future, some researchers make a number of predictions, such as in Tienda and Mitchell’s 2006 Hispanics and the Future of America. We, on the other hand, are painfully aware that we have no crystal ball. For example, when we began initial work on this book, we did not expect to weather a worldwide pandemic, one result of which was to essentially halt migration on a global basis. As the rays of hope of emerging from this pandemic glimmer ever brighter on the horizon, we can only wait and see what lasting results on migration this international health disaster will bring, what the future does indeed hold for us. Thus, we return to a point we brought up in the introduction to this volume. You, the reader, live in what is for us the future, although you experience it as the present. For example, the Census data we employ is already behind the times, given that the Census Bureau cannot make new data immediately available. You will have access to information that we do not now. Given the unavoidable delays of the publication process, no matter how often we update our findings on, say, the numbers of Spanish speaker in the states listed in Table 3.1, they will not reflect the numbers in your present. We can, however, suggest some ways to update our work that you can carry out. One is to consult current data the Census provides. Another is to monitor the results of the COVID pandemic, which brought certain societal needs into sharp focus, such as our food supply. During the pandemic, new phrases became a common

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currency in the national discourse. One is “essential worker.” This refers to those workers whose labor is considered of such importance that they continue working, instead of sequestering at home, whatever the health risk might be. Unsurprisingly, workers involved in food production, from field to the grocery store, from pens and corrals to the meat counter, are all essential. As it has for more than a century now, this nation looks southward to migrants to carry out such work, not only in the fields and in the packing plants, but also in the entire supply chain necessary to bring food to our tables. A useful tool for understanding population movements from one region to another is the Harris–Todaro model of migration. Initially developed to better understand rural-to-urban migration in Africa, it has since been used to study national and international migration in other regions as well. A basic tenet of this model lies in that individuals decide to migrate based on expected wage gains between region A and region B, rather than on wage diferentials alone. A simplified formal representation appears in Figure 3.3: We = pW2 – W1 FIGURE 3.3

Simplified model of wage diferential as a result of migration.

Where We is expected wage diferential due to migration. The probability of finding work in the new location is p, and W2 is the current wage in the new location. W1 is the current local wage. Suppose a worker earns $1/hour at a local job. That individual can earn $7.50/hour by moving to a new location if a job is available. If jobs are plentiful in the new location, the worker might calculate a 0.7 chance, a pretty good one, of getting a job. Thus, the expected wage diferential (We) is W2 multiplied by the probability of getting a job (on a scale of 0 to 1, 0 being no chance at all, 1 an excellent chance) minus the current wage of the local job. In this example, 7.50/hour times 0.7 gives $5.25/hour. This, minus the current wage, results to an expected wage gain of $4.25/hour, or over four times what the worker currently earns. We illustrate this decision-making process to migrate using minimum-wage data for Mexico and the United States. At the national level, the minimum wage for the former is 213 pesos per day; for the latter, it is 60 dollars per day. Using the current peso–dollar exchange rate, Mexico’s minimum wage equals about $10.65 per day (the exchange rate fluctuates), versus the US minimum daily wage of $60. In calculating the benefits of relocation, estimating the probability of finding a job in the new location may be informed by communication networks. Let us suppose that potential migrants have contacts, familial and otherwise, in the potential job market. Communicating with them results in the information that jobs are relatively abundant, so that upon arrival there exists a fairly decent chance of finding minimum-wage employment, say, 70% out of

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100, or 0.7%. Following the previous model, pW2 equals $42 ($60 × 0.7), minus W1 ($10.65), resulting in an expected wage diferential of $32.35 per day, or about $940 per month. In other words, what workers would earn for a month’s worth of minimum-wage work in the United States would require almost three months of work in Mexico. Of course, this simplified version of the model leaves out many other factors that potential migrants take into consideration before relocating. This includes the possibility of finding work in their current situation, travel costs to the new location of expected employment, the cost of living in the new job market, its political and social climates, the security and reliability of support networks, to name only a few. Regarding our abstract model, most people would not sit down and draw a 0-to-1 scale and select an arbitrary point on it. They need to interpret comments such as, “There’s help-wanted signs everywhere” (a current reality in many job markets in the United States) as opposed to “Nobody’s hiring” (the situation during the dark days of the pandemic). To illustrate the impact of the cost of living mentioned in the preceding paragraph, workers in a chain of popular fast-food restaurants earn a starting wage of about $16 per hour in Daly City, California; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Yakima, Washington, or $2,560 per month (all information was drawn from Internet searches). Average monthly rents for apartments of approximately the same size are $2,300, $800, and $925 in those cities, respectively. Let us say that a recent high school graduate in Houston, Texas, wants to relocate someplace away from home and considers those three cities as possible destinations. The graduate currently has no job and, having searched the Internet, knows that the restaurants in all locations are actively hiring. As noted earlier, earnings will be about $2,560 a month before taxes in all three cities. Thus, rent in Daly City would consume almost 90% per month of the worker’s potential gross income, while in Las Cruces that figure would be some 31%, and in Yakima 36%. Unless the graduate has some burning desire to live in California and is willing to live on a very thin shoestring in order to do so, the Daly City option would be eliminated. Economic factors have impacted Mexican Spanish speakers’ decision to migrate to the United States since 1848. Monitoring the economic variables we present earlier will help in understanding the national and international ebb and flow of Spanish-speaking communities in the greater US West. At the same time, social upheaval, such as the Mexican Revolution, has contributed to migratory movements. Such disruptions continue, particularly in Central America. The second and third decades of the 21st century have witnessed the arrival of entire families from Central American countries due to gang violence, natural disasters, and climate change, with related crop failures in the countries of origin. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) (www.migrationpolicy.org/, “Central American Immigrants in the United States”) states, “In 2017, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were the top three origin countries for immigrants from Central America, followed by Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize,” referencing Table 3.2.

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TABLE 3.2 Central American immigration to the United States

Region and country

Number of immigrants

Share (%)

Central America (total) El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Nicaragua Panama Costa Rica Belize Other Central America

3,527,000 1,402,000 959,000 655,000 263,000 107,000 83,000 49,000 10,000

100.0 39.7 27.2 18.6 7.5 3.0 2.4 1.4 0.3

Source: Migration Policy Institute (MPI) tabulation of data from the US Census Bureau 2017 American Community Survey (ACS).

Regarding the region we study, the MPI continues to note that California and Texas are two of the principal states of destination for Central Americans. The 2020 ACS data put their presence as about 9% of California Hispanics, and about 6% of those in Texas. In Chapter 2, we introduce the concept of dialect leveling. Central Americans moving into Spanish-speaking communities in regions such as California and Texas will find themselves immersed in USMS. It remains to be seen if they will adapt their speech to the norms of their new neighbors or if they will maintain their dialects of origin. If the former, the number of USMS speakers will grow due to their presence. If the latter, we will witness changes to USMS. Either way, only time can tell what outcome will result from the contact between the diferent varieties and dialects. In sum, USMS has its most distant roots in the Italic Peninsula, whose inhabitants engendered the “comparatively tiny group of people in central northern Iberia” that Erker (2017) mentions. European migrants transported it to the Americas beginning in 1492, and their descendants and indigenous populations immediately began a process that would establish it as separate Spanish varieties. Spanish-speaking colonists carried their new variety with them as they populated regions that would become part of the United States in the mid-19th century. Initially confined to the US Southwest up to the first half of the 20th century, it is now the principal variety of the Spanish we speak in the greater US West. We can only wait and see how the future unfolds for USMS speakers here. Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 3

1 Select ten Spanish words at random. Look them up in the online Diccionario de la lengua española (www.rae.es). Which language do they come from? 2 Search for “online English etymological dictionary” on the Internet. Using that dictionary and the source cited in exercise 1, identify everyday words in Spanish

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and English that come from a common source. For example, azúcar “sugar” and algebra “algebra” come from Arabic, problema “problem” and sistema “system” from Greek, and tomate “tomato” and coyote “coyote” from Nahuatl. Why would both languages share that common source? 3 US English, especially in the West, has borrowed many words from Spanish. In addition to the ones listed in Chapter 1, list a dozen or so that we frequently use in our English. 4 If you were to migrate to another region, what specific factors would you consider before moving? How would you obtain information on those factors? 5 Can you identify your ancestors’ origins? Were they members of the First Nations, or did they participate in the more recent migrations since 1492? Do you know why they migrated? Additional readings Davies, Mark. 2006. A frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners. London: Routledge. Kessler, John L. 2002. Spain in the Southwest: A narrative history of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Lozano, Rosina. 2018. An American language: The history of Spanish in the United States. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Penny, Ralph. 2000. Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, David J. 2003. Foreigners in their native land: Historical roots of the Mexican Americans. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. (An excellent source for historical information on Mexican American communities up to the early 1970s).

Note 1 The history of the Spanish language is a topic that possesses an extensive bibliography. Among the best-known authors in the field are Joan Corominas, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Ralph Penny, and Robert K. Spaulding. With regard to the availability of their work, Corominas will probably be found only in academic libraries, as it consists of a multivolume set. We have found the Menéndez Pidal volume, written in Spanish, in electronic format on the Internet. Penny is perhaps the most accessible treatment, due to its newer publication date. It is for that reason that we include it in the “additional reading” section. Spaulding was out of print but is now available as part of the University of California’s UC Press Voices Revived series. We particularly like the sections of Spaulding’s book that address the earliest historic periods, written in a narrative style. To verify the origin of the most frequently used words in the Spanish language, consult Mark Davies’s Frequency Dictionary, also listed in the “additional reading” section.

References Bills, Garland D. 1989. The US census of 1980 and Spanish in the Southwest. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 79: 11–28. Davies, Mark. 2006. A frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners. London: Routledge.

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Erker, Daniel. 2017. The limits of named language varieties and the role of social salience in dialectal contact: The case of Spanish in the United States. Language and Linguistic Compass 11: 1–20. Sanz, Israel, and Daniel J. Villa. 2011. The genesis of traditional New Mexican Spanish: The emergence of a unique dialect in the Americas. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 4: 417–442. Sanz-Sánchez, Israel. 2016. A diachronic perspective on Latin American Spanish verbal morphology: Reassessing the role of koineization. Diachronic applications in Hispanic linguistics, Eva Mendez Núñez (ed.), 239–281. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Tienda, Marta, and Faith Mitchell, eds. 2006. Hispanics and the future of America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Weber, David J. 2003. Foreigners in their native land: Historical roots of the Mexican Americans. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

4 IDENTITY What is in a name?

“Us” and “Them”

In the introduction, we assert that this book focuses on the Spanish we speak in the US West, but that at the same time we cannot avoid discussing English, as the two coexist side by side, one with the other. It is here that we must look at this coexistence. In Chapter 2, we introduce the concept of categorization, and this process extends to how we talk about ourselves and others, in part to distinguish the “us” from the “them.” This happens at many diferent levels; we may use our profession, family relationships, hobbies, political afliations, or geography to label ourselves. We can be a professor, a son, a father, a brother, an uncle, a cousin, a husband, a gearhead, a New Mexican, and a US citizen, to name only a few possibilities. At the same time, in speaking Spanish, we can be un profesor, un hijo, un padre, un hermano, un tío, un primo, un esposo, un mecánico, un nuevomexicano, y un ciudadano. The preceding translations are relatively straightforward (with perhaps the exception of “gearhead”; “un aficionado de la restauración de carros clásicos” seems to be a bit of a mouthful, so just “mecánico”). But it may rapidly become problematic. How you label yourself (and your speech community) can also change with the language you speak. Consider the following conversation with a native northern New Mexican Hispanic: Interviewer: ¿Cómo, cómo, cómo se dice la gente aquí? En español. (I: What, what, what do people call themselves here? In Spanish.) Consultant: Pues, ah . . . (C: Well, uh . . .) I: Hablando español, ¿cómo se dice? (I: Speaking Spanish, what do they call themselves?) DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-5

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C: Pues, mexicanos nomás yo creo. (C: Well, just Mexicans I think.) I:Mexicanos. (I: Mexicans) C: Uh, y cuando uno ’stá hablando con gringos, es . . . se, se supone uno llamarse “Spanish Americans, Spanish Americans, yeah”. (C: Uh and when you’re talking with gringos it’s . . . you, you’re supposed to call yourself “Spanish Americans, Spanish Americans, yeah”.) I: Sí, sí. Pero en español . . . (Yeah, yeah. But in Spanish . . .) C: Bueno, todos mexicanos. (Well, we’re all Mexicans.) I: Todos te dicen mexicanos. (I: Everybody calls you Mexicans.) C: Mexicanos. (C: Mexicans.) (Villa and Villa 1998: 507) The consultant was born, raised, lived, and died in La Villita, a small northern New Mexico village. He is buried in the local cemetery there along with his wife and many generations of his ancestors. His were the people who became US citizens due to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Since 1848, all his forebears have been US citizens. Yet in this interview, he self-identified as a “mexicano” in Spanish. You might think that the translation of “mexicano” in English would be “Mexican,” but it is not. As he makes clear, if you are speaking English with a gringo, you call yourself a “Spanish American.” In the following, we look at the complexities that identity labels can entail. To begin, we have in-group labels and out-group labels, what we call ourselves and what we call others or others call us, respectively. Some such labels may be fairly innocuous, such as “friend” in English or “amigo” in Spanish; both can usually be employed with in- or out-group members. Others must be used with care. For example, if close friends play a prank on me, I might call them “jerks,” followed by a hug. Or if I play the prank, they might call me a jerk. However, if I am at a bar and a stranger bumps into me, spilling my beverage, using the same label for that stranger might lead to an unpleasant confrontation. Similarly, in USMS the word “güey” can mean “dude,” “bro,” or “homie” if used with an in-group member, or “loser,” “dumbass,” or “numbnuts” when addressing an out-group member. Caution must be exercised when employing these types of labels. Both with in- and out-groups, there exist what are sometimes called umbrella labels, technically known as “hypernyms,” for identifying large portions of a group. For example, of the group “residents of the United States” there exists a subgroup called “sports fans.” We can divide this group further by the sport: football, baseball,

Identity 49

soccer, track, boxing, and gymnastics fans, to name just a few. These can further be divided into smaller segments of the hypernym; in football, we find Steelers fans and Cowboys fans. We may even go into finer details, such as those who closely follow the performance of their favorite team’s quarterbacks as opposed to wide receivers. The importance of these divisions becomes evident as we attempt to identify those who speak USMS. Sex and language

Before looking further at identity labels, we must mention some linguistic details about Spanish. Nouns are often marked, or “conjugated,” for class. A final “-o” refers to a class A noun, an “-a” refers to a class B noun, and an “-e” to a class C noun. Number, or the plural form, is indicated with an “-s” or “-es.” For example, the nouns libro, libros (book, books) belong to class A, mesa, mesas (table, tables) to class B, and estudiante, estudiantes (student, students) to class C. And with that definition we are quite aware that a number of readers may well frown with disapproval. One reason for such a reaction lies in that in using a phrase such as “class A,” we have broken with a cherished long-term tradition in language study by using the label “class” instead of “gender” to categorize nouns. The gender label worked perfectly well when it only meant “grammatical category.” However, recently, “gender” has begun to acquire the meaning of “sex,” as in the biological sense of the word. In fields such as physiology, living entities are often classified on their genetic makeup, two of which are “male” and “female.” As Torgrimson and Minson (2005: 785) note, “it is clear that sex is a key biological variable that should be considered in all basic physiological and biological research.” They continue, “The term gender is becoming more common in scientific publications to describe biological variation traditionally assigned to sex.” The tendency to blur the distinction between the two has also occurred in language studies. For example, following a tradition in Latin grammars, Spanish grammars commonly refer to “class A” and “class B” nouns as “masculine” and “feminine” (a third Latin gender, “neuter,” has largely disappeared from Spanish). It is also the case that nouns for living things are often marked to indicate sex diferences: burro “male burro” and burra “female burro.” However, mesa does not mean a female table, nor does libro signify a male book. Changing the ending can change the meaning of a word; for example, libra can refer to a pound (measure of weight). But these differences have nothing to do with biological gender, as in muchacho (young human male) and muchacha (young human female). This grammatical detail creates difculties when abandoning the binary male/ female view of biological gender. As the biologist Fausto-Sterling notes (www.pbs. org/wgbh/nova/article/fausto-sterling/): While male and female stand on the extreme ends of a biological continuum, there are many other bodies . . . that evidently mix together anatomical components conventionally attributed to both males and females. The

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implications of my argument for a sexual continuum are profound. If nature really ofers us more than two sexes, then it follows that our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits. Reconceptualizing the category of “sex” challenges cherished aspects of European and American social organization. This brings us back to the question of out-group umbrella labels for the gender continuum Fausto-Sterling suggests. With regards to those of Spanish-speaking origin, two common labels in English are “Hispanic” and “Latino.” As opposed to Spanish, English does not commonly mark nouns for gender, either grammatical or biological. The latter often uses separate words: burro is stallion, with burra mare (a distinction also used with horses). The label “Hispanic,” then, refers to no specific point on the male/female continuum suggested earlier. However, “Latino,” borrowed from Spanish, comes imported with the masculine -o gender marking. Earlier, this difficulty was resolved with a forward slash: Latino/a. But this still suggests a binary gender distinction. One attempt to get around this was to employ the symbol “@,” resulting in Latin@. But some still perceived a binary combination of “O” and “a” in its use. The current solution to this issue is to replace the gendered marker with a nongendered one, “x,” which results in “Latinx.” In its adaptation to the English sound system, people often pronounce it “latinex,” rhyming with “Kleenex.” You can then refer to the Latinx population without referencing biological gender, as the article “the” in English is also unmarked for gender. However, articles in Spanish are gender-marked, such that el, la, los, and las (all meaning “the”) need to be modified if they are borrowed into English as well. As a result, the popular music group Los Lobos becomes “Lxs Lobxs,” and Los Angeles would be “Lxs Angeles.” The singular forms el and la are problematic as well, perhaps being rendered as “x” and “lx,” respectively. Another adaptation would be to follow the French orthographic norm “l’-,” which would give “l’muchachx.” Another recent trend is to replace all gender markings with an “e.” Nouns that end in -e in Spanish are already unmarked for gender, like the word for student, estudiante, which can refer to any point on the gender continuum. Much like the use of “x” to replace gender markers, this would result in “latine” for latino/a. The articles are also adapted. El and la both become “le,” and los and las become “les.” This would result in “Les Lobes” for Los Lobos, and “Les Angeles” for Los Angeles. El/la muchacho/a would become “le muchache,” and los/las muchachos/as “les muchaches.” While there is much debate as to the best solution, to the best of our knowledge, no broadly accepted usage or orthographic norm has emerged. From a conservative angle, the Real Academia Española has dug in its heels and insisted that the current Spanish gender-marking system needs no change and can already handle this variation. With regards to identity, a simple solution to this problem would be the use of “Hispanic” for its lack of gender marking. And yet there are many who reject this label; in the following we explore that disfavor.

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What is wrong with “Hispanic”?

In previous chapters, we use the label “Hispanic” to identify certain individuals who speak USMS. Some readers may take little note of that word, while others might shake their head or show some other sign of disapproval. Such rejection might be due in part to a common idea that the word was invented by the government to set aside, and perhaps homogenize, this diverse group. As Tienda and Mitchell write, “Ofcially coined in the 1970s by congressional action and government regulation, ‘Hispanic’ in fact refers to a population that difers enormously by history, nationality, social class, legal status, and generation” (2006: 1, our emphasis). Such a statement might lead you to believe that the government invented the word, hence the term “coin.” The government may have appropriated the word “Hispanic,” but it did not create or invent it. In the last chapter, we saw how Spanish descended from Vulgar Latin. It turns out that due to Vulgar Latin speakers (the Normans) conquering England in 1066, a great number of Latinate words now infuse the English language. One of them is “Hispanic,” from the Latin “hispanicus,” “of ” or “belonging to Hispania,” the latter being the Roman word for Spain. Thus, the word itself has been around for about 2,000 years. Regarding the government’s motivation for adopting the label, López et al. note: In 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the only law in this country’s history that mandated the collection and analysis of data for a specific ethnic group: Americans of Spanish origin or descent. The language of that legislation described this group as “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.” (www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/15/who-is-hispanic/) Other groups were also interested in finding an umbrella label that could refer to the diverse “Spanish-speaking background” population. At approximately the same historical moment when Congress was working on the “Americans of Spanish origin or descent” legislation, leaders of Mexican-, Puerto Rican–, and Cuban-origin groups were seeking ways to move their political and economic agendas onto the national stage. Executives of Spanish-language media organizations sought ways to reach to all groups, with the ultimate goal of increasing their market share among US Spanish speakers. These common goals resulted in eforts by government ofcials, activists, and the media to create what Mora (2014: 8) calls “Hispanic panethnicity.” She writes that these stakeholders did not precisely define who Hispanics were; rather, they “used descriptors like hard-working, religious, and family-oriented – adjectives that could be applied to any group – to describe the unique characteristics uniting Hispanics” (2014: 156, emphasis in original). Ultimately, their eforts were successful, and the label “Hispanic” gained national currency (for a detailed description of this process, see Mora 2014).

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At the same time, those who promoted the use of that label also sowed seeds of dissent toward its use. Mora (2014: 159) notes, “In the Hispanic case, census ofcials wrote reports contending that Hispanics were united by their ‘common heritage from Spain’ which stretched back to more than five centuries in the Americas.” As we saw in Chapter 3, peoples throughout the Americas rose up to free themselves from the yoke of the oppressive Spanish Empire. They forged new identities separate from their former European masters, recognizing the fact that indigenous peoples form an integral part of their collective histories. Thus, “Hispanic” could refer to those who seek to deny their indigenous heritage in order to focus on a Eurocentric construct of their identities. Since “Latino” is commonly used to refer to those in the Americas who share a mestizo history, it seems preferable to a Eurocentric label such as “Hispanic.” So then, how to resolve this issue? We do not think we can definitively answer the label question we just posed. What we can do, however, is to look at how others are working around it, and choose the US Census Bureau as an example. The “umbrella” question: is person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?

The US Constitution mandates that a census of everyone in the country be carried out every ten years (for a history of the US Census, see www.census.gov/programssurveys/decennial-census/about/census-constitution.html). The information provided by the Census has become so valuable that it is now updated on an annual basis, available through the American Community Survey (ACS). In order to make the data collection task manageable, the Census uses two questionnaires: the short form, consisting of ten questions, and a much more detailed long form (for images of the Census forms since 1790, see www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_ decades/questionnaires/). Currently, the general Census uses only the short form, while the ACS collects detailed information employing the long form. As you can imagine, a mountain of data comes from these questionnaires. For the purposes of this chapter, we look at only the two 2020 short form questions that deal with an individual’s ethnicity and race. Regarding ethnicity, the 1976 legislation mentioned earlier mandates that the Census must also collect data on “Americans of Spanish origin or descent.” In order to elicit this information, and recognizing the fact that no single word can fill the bill, the Census asks: “Is person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?” (Person 1 is the individual filling out the form.) In addition to the first two labels, “Spanish origin” is also included to create as wide an umbrella as possible. Regarding the link between language and identity, Leeman (2015: 3) observes that in the 1910 Census, a question regarding this relationship was included, as “language was seen as quasibiological and hereditary characteristic of individuals,” such that “US-born children were classified as having the same mother tongue as their parents, whether they even knew that language, let alone spoke it.” So “Spanish” here can mean “someone in

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my family speaks or used to speak Spanish” as opposed to “someone from Spain.” Anecdotally, Villa used the short form for in-class discussions on language and identity for many years and found that students generally did not find this question problematic. We return to the question of which label to use in this volume. The Census’ solution, “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” would be unwieldy and hugely inconvenient; in addition, it does not resolve the gender continuum issue. Similarly, “Latinx” has yet to be normalized for broad use in popular and academic venues. Additionally, it also is Eurocentric, coming from the Latin latinus. López et al. (2021, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/15/who-is-hispanic/) note that it has yet to be a widely recognized label. On the other hand, they observe that many use the Hispanic label to self-identify. Thus, we reluctantly settle on “Hispanic” in spite of its being problematic, as it is widely recognized and genderinclusive. Ethnicity labels: self-identification

After the “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?” question, person 1 has a number of options, as seen in Figure 4.1. If person 1 answers No, they move on to the next question. If the answer is Yes, then person 1 has a number of options. The three principal US Hispanic groups are listed, followed by a write-in section that allows essentially any other origin to be specified. Additionally, those of Mexican origin have three ways of self-identifying: Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano. The need for multiple labels may be attributed to the common association of a label with nationality: Canadians come from Canada, Russians from Russia, Italians from Italy, and Mexicans from Mexico. However, “Mexican” can also indicate ethnicity as well; many US-born Hispanics self-identify as “Mexican.” In their case, “Mexican” means “I am an American citizen who has an ancestor or ancestors born in Mexico.” But this is very much an in-group usage, as we will see in the following. Is “Mexican” a dirty word?

An article in the Albuquerque Journal reports that in 2011, Democratic House Majority Whip Sheryl Williams Stapleton called Republican Governor Susana Martínez a “Mexican” and then felt obliged to apologize for using that label (Robertson 2011). The article continues, “Referring to someone as a ‘Mexican’ in New Mexico – where many residents pride themselves on Hispanic, or European, ancestry – often has been construed to be an ethnic slur” (Robertson 2011). In the greater region we study, the state of New Mexico possesses a history that helps to understand why “Mexican” might be considered that ethnic slur. Recall the fact presented in Chapter 3 that New Mexico was the next-to-last state admitted to the contiguous United States, despite it having some of the

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FIGURE 4.1

US Census question on Hispanic ethnicity.

Source: www.census.gov/.

oldest non-indigenous communities in the country. This was due in part to the reluctance of Eastern politicians to include those who they viewed as non-Whites in the US citizenry. As an example of this sentiment, Nieto-Phillips (2004: 51) writes, “Standing before the Congress in January 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun

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of South Carolina implored his colleagues to exercise restraint.” Nieto-Phillips continues: As ofcials thousands of miles away negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, lawmakers in Washington pondered the spoils of the United States’ war with Mexico. Calhoun warned his colleagues that the United States should not annex all or large parts of Mexican territory, for to do so, he claimed, meant admitting Mexicans into the United States, something that would precipitate a collapse of the racial order. (2004: 51–52) Calhoun and those like him perpetuated the myth of the Black legend, which claimed that the Spanish Empire and, by extension, all those they conquered were a cruel, degenerate, lazy, and inferior race. In the words of Calhoun in his address to the Senate in 1848: I know further, sir, that we have never dreamt of incorporating into our union any but the Caucasian race – the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the government of a white race. The greatest misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the white race. (Weber 2003: 135) This sentiment was not uniquely Senator Calhoun’s, being common at that time. Given this level of prejudice against Mexicans and anything Mexican, it is little wonder that creating a positive label with no negative connotations was of paramount importance. A solution to this issue was for New Mexicans to create a new identity, with “Mexicans” transforming themselves into “Spanish Americans.” As Nieto-Phillips (2004: 53) notes, “Spanish Americans began to invoke their European racial identity and long history of conquest and colonization to gain acceptance and recognition of their political rights through statehood.” This process took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see Nieto-Phillips 2004 for a detailed discussion of that historic period). Its results may be why the use of “Hispanic” is perceived by some as an attempt to assume a Eurocentric identity while ignoring indigenous roots, as noted earlier. It also sheds light on the perception that “Mexican” may be considered by some an ethnic slur. Whatever the case, many Hispanics continue to use “Mexican” as an ethnic identity marker. Others who wish to underscore their origin but also clearly establish their citizenship may use the “Mexican American” label. Regarding this usage, Dowling (2014: 31) cites a participant in her study who states, “I think we need to be proud to be Americans of Mexican descent and that our culture is a beautiful culture.”

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Dowling finds this to be a recurrent theme in her research on Mexican Americans in Texas. This insistence on specifying citizenship may in part be due to Texas history. Recall that in Chapter 3, we list Texas as the first of former Mexican territories admitted as a state in 1845. At that time, slavery was still legal in the South, and Texas entered the Union as a slave state. When the Civil War erupted, Texas seceded from the United States to join the Confederacy, later becoming part of the Jim Crow South. While Mexican citizens were admitted as full US citizens, their status was still suspect, as reflected in the Calhoun comments earlier. The echoes of this past may be why some choose “Mexican American,” not only in Texas, but throughout the greater West as well. This brings us to “Chicano.” The origin of the term is uncertain. Lipksi (2008: 77) ofers perhaps the most concise linguistic explanation for its origin: “The word Chicano is a shortening of the archaic mexicano in which the letter x was pronounced as [ʃ] (like English sh) until the middle of the seventeenth century.” That is, meshicano became shicano then chicano in Spanish and subsequently borrowed into English as Chicano. Anecdotally, Villa’s father mentioned that the Spanish-speaking community in Clovis, New Mexico used the word in the 1930s to distinguish between locals and northern New Mexicans: “¿ese vato es chicano o manito?” (Is that guy Mexican or Spanish American?) Mexican-origin civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s looked for a way to label their social movement that would set them apart from other Hispanic groups. If some advocated for “Hispanic” to create a panethnic identity, they also needed a way to establish that they had concerns specific to the Mexican origin community, and “Chicano” filled that need. Thus, their struggles became known as the Chicano Movement. It may be the case that some Mexican-origin individuals negatively associate the label Chicano with political activism, or social class, and avoid its use. Dowling (2014: 31) records one of the participants in her study as saying, “[When I think of Chicano,] I think of César Chávez. I think of low-class uneducated Mexican Americans. I think of rebellion.” Others remember la lucha and celebrate the advances brought about by the marches and protests by using it. Whatever the case may be, “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” and “Chicano” tend to be in-group labels, establishing a cultural and linguistic link with Mexico. In employing those labels as a proxy, we have an indication in any particular Hispanic community who is of Mexican origin and who is not; we address this next. Finally, note that in reporting data, the Census reduces “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” and “Chicano” into one single group labeled “Mexican”; we follow that norm in all further discussions of ethnicity. Other Hispanic self-identity labels

If the respondent is not of Mexican origin, they can indicate this by choosing Puerto Rican, Cuban, or writing in another country of origin. A note on the “Other Hispanic or Latino” category. After listing Hispanics by national origin in the Americas, the Census includes a generalized class, which it sub-divides into “Spaniard,”

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“Spanish,” and “Spanish American.” The first would indicate a person born in Spain or one of their descendants. The second could indicate a Spanish-speaking country of origin, or belonging to the group “Spanish speakers.” The third is the label NietoPhillips (2004) analyzes in detail: “Spanish American,” as opposed to “Mexican American.” Regarding the last label, it is perhaps falling out of favor in New Mexico, in spite of its history there. The 2020 ACS reports that only 6,115 individuals chose “Spanish American” as their identity label, just some 0.5% of the total Hispanic population. On the other hand, 75,953 self-identified as “Spaniard.” We leave aside the “Spanish” label, due to its having minimally two readings. The 2019 ACS establishes that 821 people born in Spain lived in New Mexico, far fewer than the self-reported Spaniards. We might reasonably suspect that those who wish to establish a cultural or historical link with Spain, as opposed to Mexico, are now opting for a diferent label. Regarding the diversity of the Hispanic population in the West, see results drawn from the 2020 ACS survey for Los Angeles County in California (Table 4.1). As you can see, the Hispanic population of LA County is not homogenous. While Mexicans form the significant majority of the total population of all Hispanics, groups from all regions of the Spanish-speaking world are represented as well. The same for other regions holds true. For example, Census data for Seward County, Kansas, give the results listed in Table 4.2.

TABLE 4.1 Hispanics by specific origin, LA County, CA, 2020 ACS

 

Population

% of total

Total Hispanic or Latino Mexican Puerto Rican Cuban Dominican Central American South American Other Hispanic or Latino

4,851,344 3,649,149 48,846 42,578 5,858 798,470 134,666 171,777

100% 75.2% 1.0% 0.8% 0.1% 16.4% 2.7% 3.5%

TABLE 4.2 Hispanics by specific origin, Seward County, KS, 2020 ACS

 

Population

% of total

Total Hispanic or Latino Mexican Puerto Rican Cuban Dominican Central American South American Other Hispanic or Latino

13,607 11,430 66 221 14 1,757 37 82

100% 84.0% 0.4% 1.6% .1% 12.9% 0.2% 0.6%

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While the numbers of residents in the two counties difer greatly, the percentages of the various ethnic groups are generally similar. We now turn to the intersection of identity and language variety. The use of ethnic labels to identify Spanish speakers and the variety they speak is an approximation. But given the large areas in which little or no field research has been carried out, the only options to shed light on the kinds of Spanish spoken in the West are those found in the Census. There exists a great need for future master’s theses and doctoral dissertations that will fill in these empirical gaps. In the meantime, we aim to identify the macro-dialect based on the extant work available to us. Do you have to be Mexican/Mexican American/Chicano to speak USMS?

The answer to this question is a resounding NO. We again cite Leeman (2015: 3), who notes that at one point “language was seen as quasi-biological and hereditary characteristic of individuals.” You do not have to be born into a Mexican-origin family to speak USMS. This is clearly documented by Parodi, who, in researching LA Spanish, writes: A while back, when I had just arrived from Mexico to Los Angeles, I was at UCLA talking with Ana, an American student of Hispanic origin. I realized she spoke perfect Mexican Spanish. On asking her where her parents were from, the reply was not Guadalajara, Michoacan or the Federal District [Mexico City], as I expected. It was El Salvador. Very surprised, I then asked why she didn’t speak like a Salvadoran. Ana couldn’t answer me, but she told me she was born in Los Angeles and had gone to schools in which the majority of students were Hispanic. Shortly after I found many cases similar to this student’s: the majority of Hispanics, whether of Mexican origin or not, speak Los Angeles Mexican Spanish. (2004: 23, our translation) We cite Parodi at length as she establishes that in at least one region, USMS has become the community norm. Again, we note that this is a bottom-up phenomenon. In Chapter 6, we look at how one variety or another becomes a common means of communication and what role language academies have in that process. Here we will simply observe that regarding a community norm, it is the speakers who determine that status. That was the case during the spread of Vulgar Latin and remains so for USMS. For example, while the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE, the North American Academy of the Spanish Language) is a normative institution in the United States dedicated to determining Spanish-language usage here, research such as Parodi (2004) demonstrates that it has little or no impact in the day-to-day life of USMS speakers.

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There is another group of USMS speakers that, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be studied in detail. This consists of individuals who have no familial connections with the Spanish language, that is, non-Hispanic Spanish speakers. Once more, this challenges the stereotype that speaking Spanish is some kind of a hereditary trait. Anecdotally, these are people who have grown up or spent a significant period of time in Spanish-speaking environments, either here or abroad. We ofer four such anecdotal cases to shed light on this group. Among the following are students Villa had in class a number of years ago whose families had no history of Spanish language contact of any kind: Michael, Jacob, and Elizabeth. The fourth, Jonas, is a family member’s friend (all names have been changed). Each self-identifies as non-Hispanic. In the first case, Michael’s father was a pastor who moved his family to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in order to pursue his ministry. Michael was about 5 at that time, and he grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in that city. He was sent to the local school and educated primarily in Spanish. His peers were all monolingual Spanish speakers, so he spoke northern Mexican Spanish outside the home, and English with his family. At some point in his mid-teens, Michael’s family returned to the United States, and he completed his high school education in southern New Mexico. Upon graduation, he enrolled at the local university. Jacob grew up in eastern Arizona and graduated from high school there. He was exposed at an early age to Spanish as his family owned a farm that hired Spanishspeaking workers. He then embarked on a religious mission in north central Mexico and spent approximately three years there. He immersed himself in the local communities and spoke only Spanish at home, as his housemates were monolingual Spanish speakers. Due in part to this intense contact, he became fluent in that region’s dialect. Upon returning home, he enrolled at the same southern New Mexican university as Michael due to its proximity to his family. When she was 7, Elizabeth’s mother relocated to Puerto Peñasco, Baja California, opening a used-clothing store there that catered to tourists. As in Michael’s case, she attended the local school, taught only in Spanish, and learned the language there. She spoke northern Mexican Spanish with her peers, and English at home and with English-speaking customers at her mother’s shop. Her mother subsequently moved to southern New Mexico when Elizabeth was in her mid-teens, where she finished high school. Upon graduation, she enrolled in the same local university as Michael and Jacob. Jonas grew up in central Texas. As a child, he had a caregiver who was a monolingual Spanish speaker. He reports he was fluent in the language by the age of 5 or 6. His caregiver moved away, and he had no significant contact with the language until high school. He reports that a number of his classmates were from Monterrey, Mexico, and he and his friends spoke Spanish among themselves. He also visited other Spanish-speaking countries during his secondary-level education. Generally speaking, then, he spoke Spanish at home with his caretaker, then with friends at school and abroad, and English in all other spheres. Upon graduating, he enrolled in a university in California’s Bay Area.

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As with the Central American population documented in Parodi (2004), these students readily adapted to USMS. For example, Jacob, in order to pay for his college education, worked in an auto parts store. He absorbed not only common USMS vocabulary but also an extensive lexicon of technical terms referring to auto parts as used by the local Spanish-speaking mechanics. This included plogas vs. bujías “spark plugs,” brecas vs. frenos “brakes,” cranque vs. cigüeñal “crankshaft,” and róquer vs. balancín “rocker arm,” to name only a very few. Given the large number of similarities between northern Mexican Spanish and USMS, these students noted no difculties in adapting to the latter. Finally, we underscore that fact that these students acquired Spanish in the community, as opposed to, say, a high school classroom. Again, the evidence presented here is strictly anecdotal; future research will shed light on the acquisition of USMS by those who have no cultural, linguistic, or historic connection with it. In sum, we restate the assertion that there is no primordial link between Mexican heritage and speaking USMS. Shifting identities

In Chapter 8, we discuss the process of categorization, and depending on the philosophical underpinning used for creating categories, someone or something can belong to more than one group. This is the case for identities. People do not necessarily need to belong to only one group, say, “Mexican” or “Chicano.” Waters (1990: 17) notes that a common idea of ethnic identity regards ethnicity as a stable category to which people belong because their ancestors belonged to that group. However, she asserts that some people can choose which group they wish to belong to: Census and survey data on later-generation white ethnics in the 1970s and 1980s have yielded an interesting and what may appear at first to be a startling finding – ethnic identity is a social process that is in flux for some proportion of the population. Far from being an automatic labeling of a primordial characteristic, ethnic identification is, in fact, a dynamic and complex social phenomenon . . . reinterview data . . . show changes in ethnic identity among individuals interviewed at two diferent points in time, [and] age data . . . suggest changes in ethnic identification at particular points in a life cycle. (1990: 16) People who were born into a family that uses the label “mexicano” may change to “Mexican American” to “Chicano” over their lifetimes. To Water’s observations, we add that individuals can choose their identity at any one given point in time, given both language and social variables. They might be “mexicanos” with their family, “meskins” with their friends, “norteños” with residents of Mexico City, “Hispanics” at work, and “Latinos” with those from other parts of the country. On governmental forms, they might choose the option “Caucasian” and, at border checkpoints, always use the phrase “US citizen” (Villa and Villa 1998: 508).

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In addition to this variability, the labels themselves may shift over time and with social variables. (Note: the following labels reference those found in New Mexico and may not exist in other regions of the greater West.) For example, the word pachuco, “gangsta,” common in the 1940s and 1950s, has all but disappeared, replaced by cholo. The term manito, “northern New Mexican,” may still have currency, but surumato, “southern New Mexican,” seems to have gone by the wayside. Coyote does not refer to someone who smuggles migrants across the border but rather to an individual with a Hispanic parent and an Anglo parent. Estadounidense, “US citizen,” appears in formal written contexts but is infrequently or never used in spoken Spanish. The same holds true for the latino/a > latin@ > Latinx progression discussed previously. These tend to appear in the press and academic contexts, but not in popular usage. We point out this fluidity in ethnic labels, both in- and out-group, as organizations such as the Census Bureau must determine some common terminology in order to elicit data on ethnicity. As López et al. (2021: www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2020/09/15/who-is-hispanic/) write: Behind the ofcial Census Bureau number lies a long history of changing labels, shifting categories and revised question wording on census forms – all of which reflect evolving cultural norms about what it means to be Hispanic or Latino in the U.S. today. In order to have a window into the Hispanic populations in the West, particularly in those areas in which little or no empirical research has been carried out, we depend on options such as “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” and “Mexican/Mexican American/Chicano.” They give us an indication, even if it is less than perfect, of the distribution of USMS in the regions we study. Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 4

1 What type of labels are used for Hispanics in your area? Are these in-group or out-group labels? 2 How do you self-identify, in either Spanish or English? Do you change the label you use, and if so, why? If you use an umbrella term such as “American,” what are those specific things that make you an American, or whatever identity you choose? 3 Visit the US Census website at www.census.gov. In the Search box, type in the name of your town/city, county, or state. In the resulting page, look for the link titled “U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts,” followed by the name of your search item, and click on it. On that page, look for the section titled “Race and Hispanic Origin.” What is the race/ethnic makeup of the place you searched on? Note: As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the internal links the Census currently uses may change. If so, you will need to determine what the new search path is.

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4 We mention certain labels that have recently appeared to replace “Hispanic” or “Latino,” such as “Latinx” or “Latine.” Have you heard these terms used? If so, in what context: print media (such as newspapers or magazines), web pages, electronic social media, ofcial documents, books, or some other source? 5 Search the Internet for the most recent Census short form, using a keyword phrase, such as “2020 US Census short form.” How would you respond to the question regarding race? This is not just an academic exercise. If you have not yet filled out one of these forms, you will do so in the future, as the Census is required to gather this information from all those living in the United States. Additional readings Dowling, Julie A. 2014. Mexican Americans and the question of race. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. López, Mark Hugo, Jens Manuel Krogstad, and Jefrey S. Passel. 2021. Who is Hispanic? Internet: www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/23/who-is-hispanic/. Mora, G. Cristina. 2014. Making hispanics: How activists, bureaucrats & media constructed a New American. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Nieto-Phillips, John M. 2004. The language of blood: The making of Spanish-American identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Tienda, Marta, and Faith Mitchell. 2006. Introduction. E Pluribus Plures or E Pluribus Unum? Hispanics and the future of America, Marta Tienda and Faith Mitchell (eds.), 1–15. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

References Dowling, Julie A. 2014. Mexican Americans and the question of race. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Leeman, Jennifer. 2015. Questioning the language questions: Federal policy and the evaluation of the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on language. International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 34: 1–21. Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. López, Mark Hugo, Jens Manuel Krogstad, and Jefrey S. Passel. 2021. Who is Hispanic? Internet: www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/23/who-is-hispanic/. Mora, G. Cristina. 2014. Making Hispanics: How activists, bureaucrats & media constructed a new American. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Nieto-Phillips, John M. 2004. The language of blood: The making of Spanish-American identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Parodi, Claudia. 2004. Contacto de dialectos en el español de Los Ángeles. Séptimo encuentro internacional de Lingüística del Noroeste, María del Carmen Morúa Leyva y Rosa María Ortiz Ciscomani (eds.), 23–38. Hermosillo, Sonora: Editorial UniSon. Robertson, John. 2011. Ofcial called Gov. A ‘Mexican’. Albuquerque Journal. Internet: www. abqjournal.com/75123/headline-50.html. Tienda, Marta, and Faith Mitchell. 2006. Introduction. E Pluribus Plures or E Pluribus Unum? Hispanics and the future of America, Marta Tienda and Faith Mitchell (eds.), 1–15. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Torgrimson, Britta N., and Christopher T. Minson. 2005. Sex and gender: What is the difference? Journal of Applied Physiology 99: 785–787. Villa, Daniel, and Jennifer Villa. 1998. Identity labels and self-reported language use: Implications for Spanish language programs. Foreign Language Annals 31: 505–516. Waters, Mary C. 1990. Ethnic options: Choosing identities in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Weber, David J. 2003. Foreigners in their native land: Historical roots of the Mexican Americans. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

5 US MEXICAN SPANISH SPEAKERS Race, power, and language

Cycles of conquest and power

In Chapter 3, we present a historical overview of Spanish speakers’ migrations from the Italic to the Iberian Peninsula and then to North America. We also note that these movements did not happen in a vacuum. When Vulgar Latin speakers arrived in the Iberian Peninsula, they entered as conquerors who dominated those territories, absorbing many of the pre-existing populations. They, in turn, became the conquered, as Germanic tribes moved in to hold sway. The descendants of the Hispano-Romans and Goths became the vanquished with the Moorish invasion. The Moors were then defeated after a protracted struggle, and a new political entity, Spain, emerged, with the Castilian dialect as the language of the court. The Spaniards crossed the Atlantic to become masters in the Americas. After another protracted struggle, the Spaniards were either expelled from or absorbed into their former colonial holdings. The early 19th century witnessed new American nations emerge, in particular Mexico; Spanish continued as the language of power. However, Mexico’s territorial integrity was upended by the Mexican American War, and the fledgling nation saw the loss of its northern half. Those Mexicans who remained in what were then US territories were granted US citizenship but were nonetheless a conquered people. Prior to 1848, Spanish was the language of power in the regions comprising the modern US Southwest; all legal, ecclesiastical, educational, commercial, and governmental functions were carried out in it. Then, overnight, Spanish became the language of the conquered, replaced by the new language of power, English. These cycles of conquest and defeat have historically changed the status of Spanish, which has, in turn, either been the language of power or the subjugated language for the last two millennia.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-6

US Mexican Spanish speakers

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The construct of race in the post-1848 Southwest Conquest and resistance

We turn now to the issue of race and how that construct impacted and continues to afect Hispanics in the regions we study. As noted in the previous chapter, those who wished to exclude former Mexican nationals from US citizenship in 1848 justified their position in part through race, a construct that has formed part of the social fabric of this country since its inception. Leeman (2004: 510) establishes that “[b]eginning with the first decennial survey in 1790, all US Censuses ever conducted have included inquiries on race or color . . . highlighting the salience of race as a social category in the US.” The Census was, and remains, a reflection of societal divisions in this nation since its earliest moments. Initially, the race construct was based on a White/Black vector, necessary for Southern plantation owners to justify and maintain the institution of slavery. But as noted in the previous chapter, that vector did not serve well in deciding how to incorporate former Mexican citizens into the US population. Segregationists such as Calhoun had little problem with solving the issue: anyone not of European descent was not “White.” This position was founded in part on the “one-drop rule.” Originating in the slaveholding South, the rule held that anyone with any amount of African ancestry was labeled as “Black.” As Davis (1991: 5) writes: This definition [one-drop rule] emerged from the American South to become the nation’s definition, generally accepted by whites and blacks. Blacks had no other choice. . . . [T]his American cultural definition of blacks is taken for granted as readily by judges, afrmative action ofcers, and black protesters as it is by Ku Klux Klansmen. He continues, “Not only does the one-drop rule apply to no other group than American blacks, but apparently the rule is unique in that it is found only in the United States, and not in any other nation in the world” (1991: 13, our emphasis). Note that in Calhoun’s address to Congress previously quoted, he avers, “To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes” (Weber 2003: 135). Calhoun, even in his fervor to denounce any non-Whites as unacceptable candidates for US citizenship, was unable to racially link Mexicans, be they Indians or mestizos, to African Americans. Hence, the onedrop rule could not apply. So in spite of his objections, as well as those of others of his ilk, the Mexican nationals who decided to remain in what was now US territory were granted US citizenship. In a legal sense, the Mexican “Indians and mixed tribes” were converted to Whites.

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That decision, however, was only the beginning of a debate that continues to this day. If the new citizens were legally baptized as White, their qualifications as US citizens were still suspect. This is due, at least in part, to the “Black Legend” surrounding Spain that has existed in this country since the earliest moments of its inception. In defining this legend, Weber (2003: 68) identifies William Robertson as one of its earliest purveyors, publishing a version of it in his 1777 History of America. Weber states: Writers such as Robertson led readers to believe that cruel, rapacious Spaniards came to the New World in search of treasure, mines, and to live in idleness on the toil and sweat of exploited Indian laborers. Implicitly, if not explicitly, these writers contrasted avaricious and indolent Spaniards to the English colonists, who supposedly came to the New World to build homes, farm and work with their own hands. (2003: 68) So even if the new citizens had European blood in their veins, that inheritance was tainted. Whatever role the Black Legend may have had in the perception of Mexicanorigin citizens, it is the case that citizenship de juris did not result in de facto racial equality with other US citizens. For example, in Texas’ process of entering the Union in 1845, a constitutional delegate stated, “I fear not the Castilian race, but . . . those [Mexicans] who, though they speak the Spanish language, are but the descendants of that degraded and despicable race which Cortez [sic] conquered” (Weber 2003: 145). However, despite such race-based protestations, Southern slave owners and segregationists could not prevent former Mexican citizens from legal inclusion in the US citizenry in the same way as they had African Americans. Thus, two constructs of race emerged in the mid-19th century. One was directed uniquely at African Americans, as Davis (1991) notes. It was firmly embedded in the legal structure of the pre–Civil War South and had a history that stretched back to the early moments of the European colonization of the eastern regions of today’s United States. Slavery was explicitly codified in the constitution of the short-lived Confederate States of America. Regarding the expansion of the Confederacy into new territories such as those added by Guadalupe Hidalgo, section IV, article three of that document, in part, reads: In all such [new] territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States. (Avalon Project, n.d., https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ 19th_century/csa_csa.asp)

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The Civil War ended the legal status of slavery in the United States, but new institutions such as Jim Crow arose in the former slaveholding states to reduce African Americans to second-class citizenship. Miscegenation laws emerged to prevent the intermarriage between African Americans and Whites. For example, Robinson (2004) records the case of a White woman in Texas, Katie Bell, who in 1894 was sentenced to prison for marrying across “race lines.” At that time, the Texas legislative minimum prison term for such a transgression was two years; Katie Bell served her time (Robinson 2004: 66). It was not until 1967, with the Loving v. Virginia case, that such laws were finally struck down (https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/ today-in-supreme-court-history-loving-v-virginia). Conquest and resistance in the Southwest

Regarding the other construct of race, segregationists did not have a centuriesold tradition of slavery to fall back on in the oppression of US Mexican citizens after the Civil War as they did with African Americans. Indeed, they encountered Mexican-origin families of power and wealth who, through their social position and legal and business acumen, were able to retain their social position and properties after 1848. In New Mexico, the Amadors, described in Chapter 10, were one such family. These elites were able to have their sons educated at universities, such as Santa Clara in California and Notre Dame in Indiana, and their daughters at private post-secondary church-sponsored programs. Families such as the Amadors, through educating their children in US academic systems, provided the political and financial representatives who could hold their own against the recent Anglo arrivals, as well as by forming alliances with those migrants. Such families, though, were an exception and not the norm. So in spite of the existence of an elite “mixed-race” class, the subjugation of the Mexican-origin citizens after 1848 was successfully implemented in what are now the states of California, Arizona, and Texas. This oppression was facilitated in large part by the fact that these regions were sparsely populated pre-1848. As Weber (2003: 150) writes, “Mexican Americans’ loss of political power, which accompanied their relative numerical decline in California, Texas, and Arizona, resulted in a threat to their civil liberties.” The discovery of gold in California and the vast grasslands and fertile soils in eastern Texas lured thousands of Anglo immigrants to the new territorial acquisitions. Anglos settling in Arizona seized political power there as well. These newcomers quickly swamped out the former Mexican populations, reducing them to demographically small minorities. It was only in New Mexico, where the majority of the pre-1848 Mexican population resided, that Anglos did not displace the nuevomexicanos as they had in other regions. The New Mexico territory did not have significant amounts of precious metal deposits as in California, or vast tracts of arable grazing lands as in Texas. Anglos were not able to seize political power as they had in Arizona due to their lack of demographic presence in New Mexico. The increase in English-speaking

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immigrants was much lower than in other regions to the east and west. This did not mean that New Mexicans were unafected by the post-1848 power shift; many land grants in northern New Mexico were seized either by the government or new arrivals, often due to the fact that original documents establishing ownership had disappeared or did not conform to the US legal system. However, this usurpation did not occur in all of the New Mexico territory. Resistance to the new dominant majority began almost as soon as the ink was dry on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In order to avoid the expropriation of land by the new power elites that was occurring in northern New Mexico, nuevomexicano landowners in southern New Mexico’s Mesilla Valley initiated a legal campaign to retain their properties. These had been obtained through an 1843 Mexican land grant known as the Ancón de Doña Ana, labeled in English as the Doña Ana Bend Colony. In order to preserve their holdings, nuevomexicanos engaged the US legal system, filing for land patents as established by US laws. These individuals had an advantage over their northern New Mexican counterparts in that the land grant issued by the Mexican government occurred very shortly before the Mexican–American War. This meant that the claimants had access to the entirety of the documentation that established the physical boundaries of the grant as well as detailing the legal procedure followed to secure the lands from the Mexican government. However, as was the case with other landholding in the former Mexican territories, both individuals and the federal government sought to have the Ancón residents’ property rights declared null and void. In response, the owners of the Ancón brought their claims to the United States Surveyor-General’s Ofce, headed in New Mexico by James K. Proudfit. Reviewing the documentation, Proudfit wrote an opinion in 1874 stating, in part, “I believe the title to the lands is perfect in said claimants, and respectfully recommend that the same be conferred to them, the said colonists and their legal representatives” (Congressional Series of United States Public Documents, Volume 1581. 1873–4). Given issues with how the Surveyor-General’s Office functioned, the federal government replaced it with the Court of Private Land Claims in 1891, in efect setting aside Proudfit’s findings. In 1892, Numa Reymond, John D. Barncastle, Josefa Barncastle, and Manuel Baregas filed suit in that Court against the United States in order to pursue their claims of ownership. They were ultimately successful, and in 1907, complete ownership of the Ancón was awarded to the original settlers and their heirs in a decision authorized by then-president Theodore Roosevelt. In addition to the successful defense of property rights, the Ancón case unofcially presaged an important development in the racial relationship between Anglos and US Mexicans. John Barncastle was a member of the California Column, a group of Union soldiers recruited in California during the Civil War and sent to New Mexico to halt the advance of Confederate troops into the western United States. The Column was ultimately successful in its mission, and after the conclusion of the Civil War, some 340 of its members remained in New Mexico instead of returning to their home state (Miller 1982). At that time, vanishingly few Anglo women lived in the local communities, so

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those veterans who wished to start a family married Hispanic or indigenous women. Such unions could hold financial and political benefits for the Anglo spouses as well. For example, Barncastle married Josefa Meléndrez, daughter of Pablo Meléndrez, the alcalde, or mayor, of Doña Ana, the initial settlement in the Ancón. In his position as Doña Ana’s senior administrator, it was Pablo Meléndrez who, in 1849, apportioned the land for the original townsite of Las Cruces, now the second largest city in New Mexico. With this connection into the local power structure, Barncastle was able to establish himself as a successful farmer, businessman, and ultimately, politician. Barncastle’s involvement in the lawsuit against the United States cemented his in-laws’ landholdings, which then became his as well. He brought with him a knowledge of the new legal system necessary to avoid the pitfalls of the US property laws which plagued many of the northern nuevomexicanos. But perhaps the most salient fact of the marriages of Anglos into the Hispanic community was that there were no legal race-based impediments to those unions. Race-based legislation had indeed existed in New Mexico after Guadalupe Hidalgo. As Kaubisch (2008) establishes: New Mexico at one time did have racially based legislation during its territorial period. In 1859 the Territorial Legislature enacted New Mexico Territory’s first Slave Code. The law restricted slave travel, prohibited slaves from testifying in court, and limited the owners’ right to arm slaves. . . . The Slave Code’s impact was short. In 1862 the United States Congress outlawed slavery in all U.S. territories including New Mexico. Three years later the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude through out the nation. (www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/new-mexicoterritory-slave-code-1859-1867/) The brief episode of the application of the one-drop rule in New Mexico, and its possible extension to Hispanics, ceased before the marriages of men such as those of the California Column took place. While US Mexicans held second-class citizenship, their ability to form matrimonial unions outside of their ethnic group was legally unhindered. Individuals may have faced pressure from Anglos and Hispanics alike to not marry outside their own, but there existed no formal means of preventing them from doing so. In sum, the Ancón victory represented but a very small beachhead in US Mexican citizens’ battle for property rights; it is the case that in general they lost vast tracts of land. Faced with this reality, as well as the general loss of political power, not all resistance took place within the legal system. Weber (2003: 204–209) notes that in the second half of the 19th century, there existed violent opposition to the usurpation of civil and property rights. This occurred in Texas, New Mexico, and California. He mentions “social bandits,” such as Joaquín Murrieta of California, the Gorras Blancas “White Caps” of northern New Mexico, and the 1877 Salt War in El Paso, Texas, which pitted US Mexicans against Anglos. He also observes that such violent

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conflicts were destined to fail, but that “it seems clear that Mexican Americans did not respond passively to Anglo provocations, as popular stereotypes suggest” (209). The continuing struggle Battles of the 20th century

As with the Ancón case, US Mexicans ultimately have had their greatest successes in working toward establishing themselves as full-fledged US citizens through the legal system. The first half of the 20th century saw their growing legal resistance to overt acts of discrimination. One example of this occurred in the community of Lemon Grove in San Diego County, California. In 1931, the school board there attempted to segregate Mexican-origin students from the general school population. That year, US Mexican children were met at the door of the Lemon Grove Grammar School by the principal, who informed them they could no longer attend that facility. Instead, they were told to go to a separate building for their instruction. In documenting this case, Alvarez (1986: 121) cites Moore (1970: 77), who writes that “no Southwestern state upheld legally the segregation of Mexican American children, yet the practice was widespread.” Parents rejected this blatant act of discrimination and filed a suit against the local school board in order to permit their children to attend the main school. Alvarez (1986: 129) writes that in response to the school board’s policy, “[t]he Mexican parents clarified that 95 percent of the students were American born citizens ‘entitled to all the rights and privileges common to all citizens of the United States.’” The school board, supported by the district attorney’s ofce, still refused the admission of US Mexican students to the main school. The parents then took their case to the Superior Court of California in San Diego, which struck down the efort to segregate the Lemon Grove school. Faced with this decision, the school board then allowed the US Mexican children to return to the community school (Alvarez 1986). The ruling predated the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case by 23 years but applied only in California. In 1954, the US Supreme Court, in its decision on that case, ruled that discrimination based on race in the educational system was unconstitutional on a national level, and all schools were directed to cease the practice. In that same year, 1954, Hispanics in Texas were fighting in the courts to end the Jim Crow practices of segregation and denial of civil rights that had been applied to Hispanics and African Americans. Texas was forced to end those practices for African Americans but continued the practice of discrimination against Hispanics based on the theory that the 14th Amendment applied only to African Americans and not to Hispanics and other minorities. In the case of Hernandez v. Texas, Hispanic lawyers argued before the US Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment should apply to all minorities. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that the Equal Protection Clause ensures equal protection under the 14th Amendment for all minorities.

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In spite of victories such as the Lemon Grove incident and Hernandez v. Texas, the power to discriminate was not readily relinquished by the dominant culture. US Mexicans still had to battle for recognition as full-fledged American citizens. A major event in this process was the outbreak of World War II. While African Americans were, in large part, excluded from military service at that time, the US government eagerly admitted US Mexicans into all branches of the US Armed Forces. A result of this military service was that US Mexican GIs had access to veterans’ benefits. One of these became known as the GI Bill, which allowed ex-military US Mexicans to purchase homes as well as finance degrees in higher education. This meant that those individuals had access to the American dream of homeownership as well as the benefits derived from the US educational system. With knowledge garnered from their studies, US Mexicans became better prepared to advance their rights in the post–Second World War social structure. Once again, though, these advances did not come easily. Social movements arose in order to continue the battle for equal rights. Groups such as the League for United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the American GI Forum (GIF), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), and the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) emerged in order to pursue US Mexican civil rights. LULAC was initially established in Texas as an organization dedicated to advancing the social and economic status of those Mexican-origin individuals who were US citizens. It did so at the expense of recent arrivals from Mexico, who were perceived as threats to employment opportunities for native-born US Mexicans. After World War II, the organization began to evolve in order to become more inclusive of those it sought to protect. After the Second World War, US Mexican servicemen were not always treated the same as their Anglo brothers-in-arms. The GIF strove to obtain equal levels of benefits for Hispanic GIs. The UFW emerged as an advocate for field-workers in the fertile Central Valley of California. It sought better working conditions for those who were often paid less for their labor than required by law. It chose as a vehicle the unionization process well established in US American politics. After activities such as labor organization and strikes, it began to make headway in creating better opportunities for field-workers. In a diferent arena, MEChA represents a student organization that “promotes higher education, community engagement, political participation, culture, and history” (www.mechanationals.org/p/about-us.html). This was through confronting educational power structures that often sought to exclude non-White students from access to higher education. Although difering in their various missions, organizations such as these provided a fertile environment for the emergence of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Recall that in Chapter 4 we note that activists seeking to gain increased access to and power in the US political structure needed to create a common identity for all US Hispanics, looking for power in numbers. Within that broader efort, the organizations mentioned previously specifically aimed at bettering the welfare

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of Mexican-origin peoples principally in the western United States. As we noted earlier, that may have been in part why the label “Chicano” was chosen in order to set aside a separate space for US Mexicans within the greater movement to increase Hispanic visibility in the US population. The longevity of the Chicano Movement is a matter of debate. Weber (2003: 265) writes that he began teaching “in the midst of a decade of Chicano militancy – a period . . . that began with the farmworkers strike at Delano, California in 1965 and ran out of steam in the mid-1970s.” We wonder if the phrase “ran out of steam” is an accurate portrayal of what occurred during the 1970s. Recall that activists were successful in their legal eforts to better the status of Hispanics in the United States in general and in the West in particular. It may be the case that the movement did not so much run out of steam as it accomplished the goals it had at that time. The need for marches and strikes decreased as the need increased to work within the political, economic, and social structures in order to continue the battles initiated in the 1960s and 1970s. One result, then, of 20th-century civil rights activism is that changes in the race construct may be occurring in US society; we turn to this issue in what follows. Into the 21st century The evolution of the race construct

In the previous chapter, we examine how the 2020 Census short form elicits information on how individuals perceive their ethnic identity. In the following, we examine how the Census gathers information on racial identity and the manner in which the two constructs interact. Dowling (2014: 9) notes that “[s]ociologists commonly define race as a social construction of a group based on perceived biological diference” (our emphasis). From a taxonomic perspective, all humans are classified as homo sapiens, one single race. In spite of this genetic reality, however, the obsession with establishing “us/them” categories leads to attempts at creating divisions based on such features as skin color, facial features, hair and eye color, and labeling those diferences as “racial.” But in an increasingly diverse nation, such features become increasingly irrelevant. In order to try to work around this problem, the Census uses national origin as a proxy for race (see Figure 5.1). For the category “White,” the Census suggests labels such as “Irish” and “Egyptian.” Yet some Egyptians have very dark-colored skin, closer in hue to Ethiopians (Black) than to many Irish, except for the children of Eire who are of African descent. Also, note that the labels for “American Indian or Alaska Native” include “Mayan” and “Aztec” as tribal afliations, thus expanding the category “American Indian” to include the Mexican Indians that gave Calhoun nightmares. Creating a racial group based on “perceived biological diference,” then, becomes confusing when that group contains non-homogenous members with regard to their physical appearance. In the case of “Mexicans,” the celebrated author Sandra Cisneros writes in her book Caramelo:

US Mexican Spanish speakers

FIGURE 5.1

2020 US Census short form question 7 on race.

Source: www.census.gov/.

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There are green-eyed Mexicans. The rich blonde Mexicans. The Mexicans with the faces of Arab sheiks. The Jewish Mexicans. The big-footed-as-a-German Mexicans. The leftover-French Mexicans. The chaparrito compact Mexicans. The Tarahumara tall-as-desert saguaro Mexicans. The Mediterranean Mexicans. The Mexicans with Tunisian eyebrows. The negrito Mexicans of the double coasts. The Chinese Mexicans. The curly-haired, freckle-faced, red-headed Mexicans. The Lebanese Mexicans. Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say I don’t look Mexican. I am Mexican. Even though I was born on the U.S. side of the border. (2002: 53) Her definition of “Mexicanness” encapsulates migratory movements in North America over the last five centuries that result in the fact that “Mexicans” can possess the physical characteristics of any people from around the globe. In fact, you don’t even have to be born in Mexico to be Mexican. As Cisneros observes, physical attributes and place of birth do not primordially establish how you choose to identify yourself. This leads to confusion in separating ethnic identity from race categories. Guadalupe Hidalgo legally designated all Mexican-origin individuals as “White.” However, in this context, “White” does not refer to skin color, as some Mexican/Mexican American/Chicano citizens have dark skins. In 1848, race had concrete implications for legal rights and civil liberties. Since that time, our nation has been engaged in a struggle to ensure that all its citizens are held equal under the laws of the land, a period that includes the bloodiest military confrontation in our history. That struggle is far from being resolved, but we have made progress. No longer can one group of people legally own another as they can a house, a car, or an animal. Educational institutions are prohibited from denying access to anyone because of race. Legislation such as the 1968 Fair Housing Act aims to provide equal access for all to the American dream of homeownership. Regarding the legal institution of marriage, not only has racial discrimination been eliminated, but that based on gender as well. Much remains to be done “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” as one of our treasured national documents proclaims, but our social reality is not the same as it was a century and a half ago. As a result, the evolution of our nation, brought about by war and by legislation, has had an impact on how we, as a people, perceive the notion of race. As noted earlier, the Census does not determine the constructs of race or ethnicity but rather is a reflection of them. Regarding the race issue, the 2020 Census ofers some interesting results. In their report titled “2020 Census Illuminates Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Country,” Jones et al. (2021) state, “The White population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the United States, with 204.3 million people identifying as White alone.” They then continue to observe that “[t]he Hispanic or

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Latino population, which includes people of any race, was 62.1 million in 2020. The Hispanic or Latino population grew 23%, while the population that was not of Hispanic or Latino origin grew 4.3% since 2010” (www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-populationmuch-more-multiracial.html?linkId=100000060664617). These dramatic changes over a single decade may indicate a shift in how we are redefining the race construct. With regard to the Hispanic population, we might reasonably suspect that the 23% increase in its numbers that Jones et al. (2021) report is not due principally to an increased birth rate or migration but rather to how Hispanics perceive themselves in relation to the US population in general. This remarkable shift may reflect the ambivalence of the race construct for Hispanics introduced in 1848. Jones et al. (2021) characterize the “White population” as a “race or ethnicity group” (our emphasis), blurring the distinction between the two. The authors then note that the Hispanic or Latino population can be of any race. Leeman (2004: 509) asserts that “[w]hereas the primary racial distinction in the US has been between groups constructed as White and those constructed as non-White, diferences among groups now classified as White have also been constructed as racial,” shedding light on the fading distinction between “race” and “ethnicity.” Spanish speakers and demography in the West Agency

In this chapter’s opening, we note the cycles of Spanish speakers as conquerors and the conquered over the last two millennia. The verb “conquer” as we use it means “to gain or acquire by force of arms”; we use the word in this militaristic sense. The relationship between the conqueror and the conquered is one established through the use of lethal force, at the tip of a sword or the muzzle of a gun. Conquerors employ lethal power to force their will upon the conquered, who have little choice other than to bow to that power. The term we will use in the following discussion to describe that power relationship is agency. This concept can and does have multiple meanings in diferent fields of study. Here we use it in a very narrow sense, relying on Ahearn’s (2001: 112) “provisional definition”: “Agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (see Ahearn 2001 for a detailed discussion of this construct). In this sense of agency, after the US military captured Mexico City in 1847 during the Mexican–American War, the Mexican government was forced to surrender and, subsequently, obliged to accept the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Its capacity to act to retain its northern territory was taken away. Mexico’s former citizens in the captured territory had some degree of agency in their fate in that they could decide to retain their original citizenship if they moved south of the new international boundary. If they did not, they obligatorily became US citizens. Other than forced migration, they had no other options. Of those that did remain, many

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discovered that in spite of their new citizenship status, they did not have the same civil and legal rights as other US citizens. To paraphrase Orwell, all citizens were equal, but some were more equal than others. By linking the Spanish language to race, by conceiving of it as something like skin, hair, or eye color, meant that its speakers were genetically consigned to a life of subjugation and poverty. They had no choice, no agency, in the matter. However, as time passed, the second-class Mexican-origin citizens realized that through their capacity to act by engaging the US legal system, they could begin to change that second-class status, that is, they could improve their lot. The case of the Ancón de Doña Ana described earlier is one example of that shift in agency. The Lemon Grove incident is another. The struggles of the 1960s and 1970s represent further progress in advancing Hispanics’ agency. Thus, the efectiveness of casting USMS as a genetically determined condemnation to servitude and poverty waned over the 19th and 20th centuries. The advances in the status of USMS speakers in the 21st have been achieved in no small part based on their demographic growth in the United States in general and in the West in particular. A commonly quoted statistic in many discussions of the ethnic and/or racial makeup of the United States relates to the overall Hispanic presence here. The 2020 Census ACS reports that Hispanics form 18.2% of the total US population. However, that presence is not evenly distributed across the nation, as noted in Chapter 1. In the greater West, Hispanics are now the majority in some areas and have moved into regions they did not traditionally inhabit in large numbers. Figure 5.2 presents that demographic distribution on a county-by-county basis. As you can see, the “original” Southwest, those regions inhabited by Spanish speakers immediately following the 1848 territorial transfer, continues to be home to the highest concentrations of Hispanics. In the intervening years since Guadalupe Hidalgo, though, that presence has now extended up to the Canadian border in the north. At the same time, recall that in the Introduction to this book, we establish that not all who identify with some subset of the Hispanic umbrella group speak Spanish. In order to get a clearer picture of the Spanish-speaking populations in the western states, Table 5.1 presents those individuals aged 5 years and older who were reported as speaking Spanish at home. The states are ranked by numbers of speakers. Recall that their inclusion is due to the fact that they have total Hispanic populations of more than 10%, as shown in Chapter 3. The Census ACS reports that in 2020 there were 40,537,337 Spanish speakers in the United States. Thus, the total number of Spanish speakers in the states listed in Table 5.1 represents 57.2% of the Spanish speakers in this nation, well over half. The West is the sixth largest Spanish-speaking region in the Americas after Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela. With regard to agency, certain regions of the “original” Southwest possess a linguistic landscape that strongly supports USMS speakers. For example, in New Mexico, Hispanics form the largest demographic segment of the population of any state in

US Mexican Spanish speakers

FIGURE 5.2

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Demographic distribution of Hispanics in the West as reported in the 2020 Census.

Source: Extracted from 2020 DEC Redistricting Data PL 94–171, www.data.census.gov/.

TABLE 5.1

Number of Spanish speakers in western states ranked by population, 2020 ACS

State

5+ years, speak Spanish

California Texas Arizona Washington Nevada Colorado New Mexico Oregon Utah Oklahoma Kansas Nebraska Idaho Wyoming Total

10,462,968 7,666,020 1,358,980 602,058 593,610 602,273 514,071 349,549 297,926 269,433 207,181 137,352 131,145 25,717 23,218,283

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the Union. They occupy all levels of government; the 32nd governor is Hispanic, as well as her two predecessors. Hispanic New Mexicans are represented in all levels of society: in private economic sectors; in the health, legal, and educational systems; in law enforcement, the media, the trades; and in agriculture. Spanish-language services are available in all those sectors. Spanish-speaking New Mexicans enjoy constitutional privileges not found in any other state. Article VII, Section 3 of the New Mexico Constitution, in part, reads, “The right of any citizen of the state to vote, hold ofce or sit upon juries, shall never be restricted, abridged or impaired on account of religion, race, language or color” (www.sos.state.nm.us/about-new-mexico/publications/nmconstitution/, our emphasis). You do not have to speak English in order to fully participate in New Mexico’s legal and political systems. While other states enacted Englishonly legislation, New Mexico was the first to adopt an English-plus policy (Stull 2012: 23), establishing a linguistic space not only for Spanish but for other languages as well. Hispanic agency in this state would appear to be on an equal footing with that of Anglos, creating a positive environment for New Mexican Spanish speakers. In Chapter 1, we establish that our focus is on the Spanish spoken in the western regions of the United States as the origins of Spanish speakers in eastern areas are much more heterogenous in nature. But it is also the case that the sociolinguistic landscapes within the West are not homogenous. The agency we note for Spanish speakers in New Mexico does not necessarily extend to other areas of the US West. Showstack and Colcher (2019), in their study of the Spanish-speaking population in Garden City, Kansas, find that in spite of a significant demographic representation there, Hispanics face an oppressive environment in that community. They report: This [historic discrimination] later evolved into the current situation, which is characterized by political hostility toward language programs for Spanish-speaking children, lack of funding for outreach and language services, and a severe lack of resources for speakers of languages other than English. (2019: 459) They also observe, “Overall . . . in Garden City’s linguistic landscape there is a notable lack of representation of Latinx culture outside of the restaurant signs one sees in town; this is particularly striking given the long history of Mexican immigration to Garden City” (459). Showstack and Colcher’s (2019) article is one of the very few published on USMS speakers’ linguistic and sociocultural status in the newer regions of the Spanish-speaking West. Given this dearth of research, we are presently left with no other option than to use proxies, such as Census data, to try to get a glimpse of what it is like for USMS speakers to live in such areas. For example, the Census informs us that in Sunnyside, Washington, Hispanics represent 86.6% of the total population, making them the principal driving force of the local economy. Of the “owneroccupied housing units” in that town, 71.3% belong to Hispanics, indicating a high

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degree of homeownership (www.census.gov). Those agricultural workers in Sunnyside who travel to Montana for the cherry harvest can count on educational services for their children (Villa et al. 2014). A Google tour reveals Spanish-language signage for businesses other than Mexican restaurants. All this might point to a positive linguistic environment for USMS speakers there, but only future research such as that of Showstack and Colcher (2019) will let us have a clearer view of that dynamic, one way or another. As noted elsewhere, we do not to presume to predict where the developments discussed earlier will take us. We cannot foresee the future. What we can assert is that wheels set in motion in the middle of the 19th century carry us forward today with regard to civil and legal rights, language use, and how we perceive ourselves as a diverse group of people and as a nation. Many battles remain to be fought. One is the right to vote; as we write these words, certain states are in the process of legally restricting voters’ access to the ballot box. The end of the Civil War did not end the attempts of certain groups to disenfranchise other groups from full participation in the democratic process of governing our country. You will have answers to how these struggles play out as history unfolds before us. Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 5

1 Respond to the Census question on race found in Figure 5.1 earlier. Remember that if you think none of the categories pertains to you, you have the option of writing in your race or origin on the last line. Whatever your answer may be, why did you choose it? 2 The Census now includes “Mayan” and “Aztec” as possible tribal afliations under the item “American Indian or Alaska Native” (again, see Figure 5.1 earlier). Search the Internet for a list of federally recognized tribes in the United States, using a phrase such as “list of federally recognized tribes in the United States.” Upon consulting this list, you will find that Mayan and Aztec tribes are not included. If these are not federally recognized groups, why would the Census include them as options? 3 The legal age for a US citizen to vote is 18. However, there exist groups that actively seek to exclude certain citizens from exercising this constitutional right. If you are of legal voting age, how easy (or not) is it for you to vote? 4 Due to migration patterns, some communities had, or continue to have, certain ethnic enclaves (think of Chinatown in San Francisco). Are there now or were there such enclaves in your community? If yes, how did they come to exist? 5 Does the state you reside in have an ofcial language policy? If so, what is it? Additional readings Alvarez Jr., Robert R. 1986. The Lemon Grove incident: The nation’s first successful desegregation court case. The Journal of San Diego History 32: 116–135.

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Cisneros, Sandra. 2002. Caramelo. New York: Vintage Books. Davis, F. James. 1991. Who is black?: One nation’s definition. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Leeman, Jennifer. 2004. Racializing language: A history of linguistic ideologies in the US Census. Journal of Language and Politics 3: 507–534. Miller, Darlis A. 1982. The California Column in New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press.

References Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 109–137. Alvarez Jr., Robert R. 1986. The Lemon Grove incident: The nation’s first successful desegregation court case. The Journal of San Diego History 32: 116–135. Avalon Project, The. n.d. Constitution of the Confederate States, March 11, 1861. New Haven, CT: Yale Law School. Internet: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp. Cisneros, Sandra. 2002. Caramelo. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Congressional Series of United States Public Documents, Volume 1581. 1873–4. Executive documents printed by the order of the Senate of the United States for the first session of the forty-third Congress, Doc. 43. Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofce. Davis, F. James. 1991. Who is black?: One nation’s definition. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Dowling, Julie A. 2014. Mexican Americans and the question of race. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475. 1954. U.S. Supreme Court. Internet: https://scholar. google.com/scholar_case?case=17237932649563723471&q=Hernandez+v.+Texas+195 4&hl=en&as_sdt=6,32&as_vis=1. Jones, Nicholas, Rachel Marks, Roberto Ramirez, and Merarys Ríos-Vargas. 2021. 2020 Census illuminates racial and ethnic composition of the country. Internet: www.census.gov/ library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-populationmuch-more-multiracial.html. Kaubisch, Barret. 2008. The New Mexico territory slave code (1859–1862). Internet: www. blackpast.org/african-american-history/new-mexico-territory-slave-code-1859-1867/. Leeman, Jennifer. 2004. Racializing language: A history of linguistic ideologies in the US Census. Journal of Language and Politics 3: 507–534. Miller, Darlis A. 1982. The California Column in New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press. Moore, Joan. 1970. The Mexican Americans. Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Robinson II, Charles F. 2004. Legislated love in the Lone Star State: Texas and miscegenation. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 108: 65–87. Showstack, Rachel, and Drew Colcher. 2019. Language ideologies, family language policy, and changing societal context in Kansas. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 12: 455–483. Stull, Ginger C. 2012. Language, borders, and education: Language policy and the making of New Mexico and Arizona. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 27: 19–27. Villa, Daniel J., Naomi Lapidus Shin, and Eva Robles Nagata. 2014. La nueva frontera: Spanishspeaking populations in Central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 7: 149–172. Weber, David J. 2003. Foreigners in their native land: Historical roots of the Mexican Americans. Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press.

6 LANGUAGE POLICY AND PLANNING

The concept of language planning

Language planning is commonly understood as a government or majority power group determining the role of a language, or languages, in a society. There are two principal sources of such activities. One may be formal, consisting of public decisions and laws with an express expected outcome, or it may be informal, the result of long-held stereotypes and prejudices shared by a majority group. The former type of language planning involves the use of power to impose the linguistic will of a government or elites to strengthen a majority language at the expense of the minority language, eliminating it. In the latter, a majority group will typically put conscious or unconscious pressure on minority-language speakers that does not directly target their language but attempts to indirectly devalue and restrict its use. In either case, such policies are said to be subtractive, designed to repress a certain language or languages. In other cases, the goal of language planning centers on strengthening or revitalizing a minority language. That is, a government or majority power group may perceive that a minority language ofers advantages to society in general. Such is the case in Ireland. Gaelic, the common language before English speakers arrived on the island, is spoken by a minority of the Irish people but holds a central role in Irish identity. As a result, Ireland’s Constitution establishes Gaelic as its first ofcial language, given its historic and social importance there, with English designated as the second ofcial language. On the other hand, Spanish in the United States holds no special status at the federal government level, and in the West, only New Mexico provides certain state-level constitutional protections for it. Eforts to teach and maintain it are conducted through unofcial channels, be they in the public or private sectors. In all cases, though, such planning is seen as additive. DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-7

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Formal language planning, whether additive or subtractive, typically passes through five stages: selection, codification, elaboration, implementation, and acceptance (Yule 2017: 275). Selection involves identifying which language or variety to focus on. Codification is the process of documenting the rules or structures of the language and creating grammars and other materials to describe and teach it, with the goal of propagating it. Elaboration details the creation of a plan that will lay out how the language will be introduced, taught, regulated, and ultimately, adopted. Implementation consists of the presentation of the chosen language or variety to speech communities. The last stage is acceptance, which, as its name implies, represents the point at which a community has accepted and embraces the language or variety. A non-formal approach to language planning involves such tactics as appealing to a set of beliefs held by a majority group. Regarding a subtractive approach, a “one nation, one language” ideology relies on a shared notion that good citizenship rests on adhering to only the majority national language for all communicative purposes, at the expense of all other languages (Fuller and Leeman 2020: 76–80). The “this is America, speak English” ideology in the United States represents an example of this type of planning. This is not an ofcial or legislated policy but rather an attitude embraced by those who perceive that speaking anything except English signals a lack of a core belief in the basic tenets of American society. Such a policy is enacted through such means as bumper stickers, political sloganeering, and interrupting the conversation of those guilty of speaking a “foreign” language in public. A non-formal additive approach relies on convincing the majority group that bi- or multilingualism is a desirable goal. Cultural diversity may be invoked, holding that minority-language speakers have a right to preserve a central part of their ethnic identity. Economic advantage might come into play, for example, being bilingual ofers increased employment opportunities. National security can also be referenced; the nation needs speakers of languages other than English in order to gather intelligence on other countries. Tourism presents another advantage; if you plan to vacation in Italy, wouldn’t it be nice to speak some Italian? Whatever the case, those interested in promoting bi- or multilingualism can implement language planning through the educational system, which in this country has long had a tradition of teaching non-English languages. Regarding indigenous language, various models have been created for those communities who do not wish to involve outgroup individuals in their language preservation eforts. In sum, although not part of a formal language policy, there exist in this country a variety of means to promote and implement additive language planning. USMS language planning and policy

Given the focus of this volume, we will address language planning and policy issues in the West as they principally relate to USMS; for a general discussion of US

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Spanish and language policy, see Fuller and Leeman (2020), Chapter 8. We begin with a historic view of planning and policy in the regions we study, starting with the roots for Spanish language planning. Employing the formal framework presented earlier, we can illustrate the process for Castilian in 15th-century Spain. First, the Reyes Católicos selected Castilian as the ofcial language, elevating it from the status of one variety among others to the language of the empire. Nebrija then codified it in his 1492 Gramatica. The Spanish Crown ensured that the use of the codified language was implemented throughout the newly created political entity of Spain. Eventually, the kingdom transitioned to Castilian and imposed it as the majority norm, a status that it enjoys to this day. The variety-turned-language was thus accepted and embraced by some portion of Spanish subjects. We use the phrase “some portion” given that even though Castilian was institutionalized as the national language, certain Peninsular speakers still retained other varieties or dialects. Thus it was that the first voyages to the Americas carried Spanish speakers who did not uniformly communicate in Castilian, resulting, in part, in the many varieties of Spanish found on this side of the Atlantic. Regarding the general antecedents of language policy and planning in the United States, historically speaking, this country did not inherit a formal approach, as England did not have a clearly articulated language policy it exported to the Americas as did Spain. Fuller and Leeman (2020: 179) note, “During the British colonial period there was a great deal of linguistic tolerance and a laissez-faire policy toward European languages.” One result of this lack was that, in the transition from British rule to independence, formal language planning was notably absent here at the national level. The US Constitution is silent on questions of an ofcial language. Regarding speaking Spanish in the greater West, a popular notion holds that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo establishes the right to do so. It does not, being concerned principally with property issues and the civil rights of former Mexican citizens, as previously observed. In the absence of legislated policy, US language planning is typically carried out through the social and economic pressures of the English-speaking majority. The “melting pot” metaphor serves to shed light on this informal process. Emerging in the early 20th century, it evoked the concept of the United States as a place where peoples of diferent lands, cultures, and languages came together to assimilate into a unique homogenous group that shared a new common identity and a common language. As Maddern (2013: 4) observes, “Assimilation is not, after all, about blending, but rather it is about stripping immigrants of any prior connection to the culture from which they originated.” Regarding this time period, coinciding with World War I, Gonzalez-Berry (2000: 178) writes, “The rallying cry of the nation became ‘one flag, one country, one tongue.’” This represents an ideology that persists to the present. Thus, since Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified in 1848, there has been no ofcial federal language policy regarding USMS. At the state level, the situation varies, with some states adopting an English-only policy and others ignoring the issue. However,

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such policies have to do with the relative status between English and Spanish, in this case. To date, there exists no legislated language policy that uniquely addresses USMS, again, with the exception of the state of New Mexico. From the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, this presented little problem, as USMS was simply a subordinate language that, like its speakers, existed on the outer fringes of society. However, during the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, that presence underwent a shift, due in part to the demographic growth of USMS speakers documented in Chapter 5. Part of USMS speakers’ agency discussed in that chapter derives from their increasing socioeconomic status (SES). As a reflection of this economic presence, workers in the United States “sent $40.6 billion to Mexico in cash transmissions, known as remittances, including $4 billion in March [2021] alone, a record for a single month” (www.voanews.com/). Remittances are monies not spent in local economies but rather funds sent from the United States to other countries by wage earners here. The figure quoted earlier admittedly was not generated by USMS speakers in the US West alone but by those from across the nation. However, it does give an idea of the financial clout that USMS speakers wield. The deep pockets of USMS speakers have not gone unnoticed in the greater Spanish-speaking world. Recall in Chapter 3 that a motivation for popularizing the “Hispanic” label was driven in part by Spanish-language media wishing to develop a larger market share. USMS speakers represent one of the most important Spanish-language markets on the face of the planet. To put this into perspective, Spain and the state of California have roughly the same geographic area (Spain is slightly larger). Spain’s gross domestic product (GDP) was some $1.36 trillion in 2021 (https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/gdp); California’s GDP for the same period was about $3.35 trillion (https://bulloakcapital.com/). Of course, not all of California’s residents speak Spanish, but that state does have the nation’s largest Spanish-speaking population, as we saw in Chapter 4. Adding in the USMS populations of the rest of the US West, and their buying power, results in a globally singular Spanish-speaking economic bloc. In spite of this demographic and economic presence, USMS speakers would seem to exist in a linguistic vacuum regarding normative guidance for language use. There is no coherent planning, no established language policies, for them as there are for other Spanish speakers worldwide. Nothing regulates the Spanish spoken in the workplace, in public spaces for general communication, in the media, or any other common domains found in, say, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, or Spain. Even an informal regulatory mechanism such as social class does not come into play for Spanish language use here. A Forbes 500 CEO, a university professor, a bishop, or a political leader comes from the same linguistic background as does a fieldworker, a big box store employee, a mechanic, or a bartender. Who, then, is to step into this policy and planning breach?

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USMS and the Academias

The answer to that question would seem stunningly clear. The Academia model, first established in Spain in 1713 with the Real Academia Española, would seem to ofer the perfect solution to the planning and policy vacuum in the United States in general and in the West in particular. As noted in the opening of the preceding section, the Academia system rests on a well-established approach to planning and policy, formulated and refined over the last five centuries. It continues to engage in the language planning process. Regarding the RAE, part and parcel of its mission is to create and disseminate useful resources such as a dictionary and grammar of the language (www.rae.es). It also ofers insights into Spanish usage in the Americas through such publications as the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas “Panhispanic Dictionary of [usage] Doubts” and the Diccionario de americanismos “Dictionary of Americanisms.” Its membership consists of well-known language specialists, authors, and poets. However, the RAE sufers from the political reality that it came into existence as part of a mechanism of an empire. Recall that in Chapter 5 we quote a section of the introduction to Nebrija’s Gramatica in which the Bishop of Ávila establishes that tome as necessary for the subjugation of conquered peoples, to give them the laws and language of their new masters. By its very title (the Royal Academy), it is inextricably linked to those invaders who came to plunder wealth from the Americas, leaving behind a path of death and destruction. The Spanish Empire would ultimately crumble, but the RAE remains as a reminder of its dark history. But if the empire disintegrated, the system of the Academias did not. Along with the emergence of new nations in the Americas, organizations based on the RAE model appeared as well. As a result, all countries in which Spanish is the major national language possess their own normative Academias (for a list of these, see www.asale.org/). And even though the most widely spoken language of the United States is not Spanish, we nevertheless have our own Academy, the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE), “North American Spanish Language Academy,” briefly mentioned in Chapter 4. ANLE’s mission is “the study, elaboration and implementation of the normative rules of the Spanish of United States of America” (www.anle.us/ nuestra-academia/mision/). Its use of the terms “elaboration” and “implementation” unequivocally situates ANLE as a creator of language planning for all varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. However, this Academia faces daunting challenges in such a task. In the following, we use Yule’s (2017) five-stage language planning process to illuminate these difculties, comparing and contrasting ANLE’s situation with that found in 15th-century Spain.

Selection

The selection of which variety to reify to language status was fairly straightforward in Nebrija’s time. The Reyes Católicos had the military, economic, and political

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power to dictate that decision, choosing Castilian. However, the situation in the United States is vastly diferent. There exists no power structure to simply dictate which variety of US Spanish will serve as the reified norm at the state or national level. Indeed, the reluctance of the federal government to involve itself in ANLE’s normative mission is found on its “Frequent Questions” page (www.anle.us/ nuestra-academia/preguntas-frecuentes/). In response to the question “Why ‘North American’ in ANLE’s name?” it states: Being the Academy of the United States, the correct name for our academy should have been “United States Academy of the Spanish Language”, but in 1973 the New York State authorities, where we were established as a non-profit educational organization, did not accept this title to avoid its being confused with a governmental organization. According to the State, this would be the implication in the English translation (our translation of the response). New York State ofcials wished to avoid even the slightest appearance that ANLE held some type of governmental mandate to implement any language planning or policy at a legal level. But even if ANLE were somehow able to achieve some sort of ofcial status, which variety of US Spanish would it choose for reification? Based on demographics, the choice would have to be USMS. However, we strongly suspect that such a choice would cause a tremendous uproar in the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities in the United States, not to speak of the Central and South American language groups. Given the diversity of the Spanish-speaking communities in this country, it is highly doubtful that any variety of US Spanish could ever achieve the status as “national,” a position the Castilian dialect holds in Spain. Codification

Codification presented no insurmountable task for Nebrija and would not form an impassable barrier to an organization such as ANLE for documenting US Spanish. As established in Chapters 11 and 12, the basic phonological and grammatical foundations of USMS are the same as those for any other variety of Spanish, either here or in other countries. Creating a descriptive general grammar of US Spanish, replete with appendices to account for variation in the difering varieties in this country, would be a reasonable, if lengthy, task for an academy. There currently exists a well-developed research literature to support such an efort, and as long as no variety was omitted, such a grammar would probably not cause any negative reactions among the various Spanish-speaking communities here. The same holds true for the lexicon, arguably the most diverse aspect of any variety. The Bills and Vigil (2008) Atlas provides an excellent model for documenting not only the vocabulary of a variety but, more specifically, also for dialects within that variety.

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Elaboration

The Spanish Crown of the 15th and 16th centuries faced little to hinder it in production of the necessary tools for the introduction, teaching, and regulation of Castilian. The same is true for US Spanish in general and USMS in particular. There exists a well-developed infrastructure in this county dedicated to producing instructional materials for teaching languages, producing dictionaries, and now, providing electronic resources of all types to support all the facets of the elaboration task. This area is, as they say, “big business.” Major publishing companies dedicated to producing instructional materials for language teaching vie for market share in this lucrative field. The technological resources available for this planning function would surely leave Nebrija shaking his head in awe, given the state of the art in printing in 15th century Spain. Implementation

The Spanish Crown had, in essence, no problem in implementing its language policy. Again, we turn to the Nebrija quote in Chapter 5, with the Bishop of Ávila saying, “[A]fter Your Highness had put under your yoke many barbarous peoples and nations of foreign tongues.” By the 16th century, the Spanish Empire had indeed put under its yoke the native populations of the Americas, who had no choice other than to accept the imposition of the new language of power. The current situation here could not be more diametrically opposed. If an organization such as ANLE were somehow able to legislatively institute a language policy, it would face fierce resistance from USMS speakers. The legal battles for civil rights outlined in Chapter 4 have produced well-trained warriors for combat in the legal arena who have faced down far more powerful foes than a language academy. ANLE quite explicitly establishes in its mission statement that one of its principal goals is the “implementation of normative rules.” We can only wonder how it is they propose to achieve that. Acceptance

Once again, the Spanish Crown had little issue with the acceptance of its language planning and policies. These were implemented at the tip of a sword. Those they conquered had no other choice than to accept the conquerors’ mandates. One result of that forced acceptance is the presence of Spanish in the Americas from Alaska in the north to the Tierra del Fuego in the south. However, the question of acceptance now loops back to the selection and implementation stages. ANLE, and by extension the RAE, does not possess the legislative, military, or economic power to ensure the acceptance of any language planning or policy they might produce. In addition to the lack of any sort of leverage to enforce a standard, ANLE’s approach to language policy is questionable. For example, in 2010 the then-director of ANLE, Gerardo Piña-Rosales, and Joaquín Badajoz authored Hablando bien se entiende la gente, “Speaking well, people understand each other.” This book was

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followed by a second volume, titled Hablando bien se entiende la gente 2 (Piña-Rosales et al. 2014). The ANLE claims that the purposes of the books are to serve as a guide for Spanish speakers in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, or any speaker who feels a “disproportionate English influence” (Piña-Rosales and Badajoz 2010: 29). The two “guides” are filled with examples of words and phrases that have been deemed “incorrect” uses by ANLE, paired with the “correct” usage. For example, the words instruir “to instruct” and educar “to educate” are listed together (PiñaRosales and Badajoz 2010: 754–755). The text of the entry asks: Can you find a diference between the two verbs? Although they are frequently confused, especially because of English influence, in Spanish there has always been a subtle diference between the two: instruct is to teach something to a child or someone older; educate is a question of formation, manners, and conduct. Because of this it is common to say that many instructed people are poorly educated (our translation). The authors’ reliance on the simplistic correct/incorrect distinction is an indication of their adherence to a standard language ideology. That is, their notions of “correctness” reflect their attitudes toward the speakers of US Spanish, as opposed to a careful analysis of the semantic content of one word or another. Further confirmation of those attitudes can be found in the introduction and front matter of the book. The authors state, “But wouldn’t it be better to speak two languages well, without mixing, than to speak both badly?” (Piña-Rosales and Badajoz 2010: 12) (our translation). Such negative stereotypes pervade the book and are reflected numerous times in its entries. Following is a list of examples illustrating these attitudes. All are drawn from Piña-Rosales and Badajoz (2010): 1 Under the entry condición médica “medical condition”: Muy grave, por cierto, es el pronóstico para el español si no estamos en condiciones de protegerlo contra el virus anglicista (285). Very grave, certainly, is the prognosis for Spanish if we are not willing to protect it from the English virus. 2 Under the entry deterioro “deterioration”: .  .  . empleemos las palabras adecuadamente y evitemos el deterioro de nuestro idioma (437). .  .  . let us employ the words adequately and avoid the deterioration of our language. 3 Referring to the phrase estoy supuesto “I am supposed to”: . . . anglicándola, es decir deformándola (567).

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. . . anglicizing it, or in other words deforming it. 4 Under the entry lisiado “injured”: La trampa del espanglish o espanglés daña el idioma, pero sobre todo le hace daño a usted (549). The Spanglish trap harms the language, but above all it harms you. 5 Under the entry tóxico “toxic”: Cuidado con esos anglicismos, verdaderos tóxicos que dañan la salud de nuestro idioma (12). Be careful with those anglicisms, truly toxic that harm the health of our language. Given the lack of any real means to change Spanish language usage in the United States, ANLE appears to draw upon the moral capital of centuries of language regularization to justify its policing eforts. However, norms for even English language usage in this nation are not established by prescriptive organizations such as the Academias. Even if ANLE were to adopt a more polished approach toward language prescription, there exists no evidence it would be able to overcome the cultural resistance here to a Eurocentric, colonialist approach to language planning and policy. With these comments we do not wish to imply that the Academias are of no use in planning and policy issues. The RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española, for example, contains a wealth of information that extends beyond word definitions. It includes etymologies for many of the lexical items that appear in it, helping to document the migrations we present in Chapter 3. Those etymologies also aid in debunking the myth of a “pure” Spanish, serving not only for research purposes but for pedagogical ends as well. As an instance of the latter, many of our USMS students criticize the verb parquear “to park a car” as “incorrect” Spanish, insisting that estacionar is the “correct” word. In order to engage them in a critical examination of language attitudes, we enter parquear in the RAE’s online Diccionario, which promptly produces the verb, glossing it as aparcar, not the estacionar they were expecting. In sum, the planning and policy process that served to establish Castilian as a national language in Spain over five centuries ago cannot be reproduced in 21stcentury United States. Given our country’s hands-of approach to language policy, not even English, the most widely spoken language here, enjoys ofcial status, leaving individual states to put together a hodgepodge of English-only legislation. The hegemony of English is principally established de facto and not de juris through political posturing, through reliance on the “one country, one language” ideology, and yes, through bumper stickers. Its dominance in the educational system here, in part, guarantees its position as the principal national language. All other languages, including Spanish, are left in a planning-and-policy vacuum. In attempting to fill that void, the Academias have set for themselves an impossible task. The philosopher and writer George Santayana is reputed to have said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Regarding the exportation

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of Castilian to the Americas, and in particular Mexico, Hidalgo (2018) ofers a highly detailed sociolinguistic analysis of the Spanish Crown’s failure to do so. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spain was arguably the pre-eminent Western world power, with formidable military and economic resources to draw upon. Today’s Spain is a shadow of its former imperial self; as noted earlier, California’s economy alone is well over double that of the once-powerful empire’s. History clearly shows us that, if the Academias were ever an efective tool for colonial expansion and its concomitant language policy, they ceased to be so centuries ago. However, there is another mechanism for language planning and policy: the educational system. We turn to that possibility in the next section. USMS and the US educational system

In the countries identified as principally Spanish-speaking, public education systems represent an important mechanism for propagating language planning and policy. These systems are much better suited for this in that they reach a far wider audience than do the Academias. Through texts, instructional materials, teacher training, and instructional goals, schools form a fundamental element in establishing a national identity, in part through language. The United States, however, achieves those ends through the English language, not Spanish. If planning and policy for non-English languages are largely ignored at the legislative level in United States, they are even more so in the educational system. The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) (www.cal.org/areas-of-impact/language-planning-policy/u.s.-educationallanguage-policy) asserts that “[e]ducational language policy in the country is largely the result of widely held beliefs and values about immigrants and patriotism.” It continues, “Traditionally, the discourse on language policy in the United States has been framed as an either-or choice between English and other languages.” Once again, the concern lies not in the role of non-English languages in schools but rather if they interfere with English language hegemony. Earlier in our nation’s history, there were conscious eforts made to eradicate non-English languages in the educational system. As the CAL establishes: In schools, the result was an imposition of English language and Anglo culture on minorities, which goes back to the deculturation of American Indians through the system of English-only boarding schools. During World War 1 and the early 1920s, imposition of English-only policies went along with persecution of German speakers. (www.cal.org/areas-of-impact/language-planning-policy/ u.s.-educational-language-policy) Later in the 20th century, educational reformers labored to ameliorate this situation, introducing the concept of bilingual education. At first, this consisted of what is sometimes called mainstreaming. Children who are monolingual in a non-English language are provided with instruction in their home language while developing

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English-language fluency. Once they achieve that fluency, all further instruction is given only in English. More recently, dual-language programs have emerged in which instruction is provided in both English and another language throughout students’ schooling (for a detailed history of bilingual education, see Bybee et al. 2014). However, as with general language planning and policy here, there appears to be no uniformity in the kindergarten through high school (K–12) curricula at the local, state, or national levels for bilingual education. School districts, individual schools, or even individual teachers may formulate how they wish to implement it. Anecdotally, dual-language teachers in our university classes consistently have reported they receive little or no support regarding books and materials for bilingual education and must invent or procure those resources on their own. While impressive advances have been made in K–12 bilingual education in the United States, much remains to be done. This lack of coherency holds true in the post-secondary system. However, due to non-English languages being deemed worthy of academic study, colleges and universities have traditionally ofered instruction in languages such as German, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, among others, as part of their curricula. Regarding Spanish, García (1993) ofers a historical perspective on its presence in the educational system here from the colonial period up through the end of the 20th century. She identifies “the unwritten Spanish language policy in the United States,” noting that “Spanish has been used as a resource for their own benefit by Anglos, Spaniards, Latin Americans and even Latinos during all historical periods” (1993: 72). García continues, “In the United States, there has always been more attention paid to an elite Spanish foreign tradition than to a popular Spanish U.S. tradition” (1993: 72). This tendency began to change in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Due in part to the demographic shifts presented in Chapter 3, an increasing number of students began to appear in Spanish-language classrooms already speaking Spanish. Traditional language instruction viewed Spanish as a “foreign” language, and teaching methodologies and materials centered on training monolingual English-language students to speak it. Instructors and researchers realized that those methodologies did not meet the instructional needs of students already fluent in Spanish, and so a new field of study emerged to address those issues, initially labeled as “Spanish for Native Speakers” (SNS). The emerging professional literature in this field sought to reconceptualize methodologies and materials dedicated to SNS instruction. However, old traditions die hard, and not all those involved in SNS education shared a common view of what the goals for SNS programs might be. Leeman (2005) was perhaps the first researcher to identify this philosophical split, writing that: [I]t is possible to identify two emerging strands in SNS pedagogy: (a) a more normative approach that emphasizes the expansion of heritage speakers’ linguistic repertoires to include prestige varieties and formal registers, and (b) a more

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critical approach that attempts to make heritage speakers’ own linguistic experience a more central part of the classroom and to foster awareness of linguistic and sociolinguistic principles related to Spanish in the United States. (2005: 37) The tendency Leeman notes in strand (a) rests upon the standard language ideology discussed in Fuller and Leeman (2020: 73–76). In spite of the fact that researchers consistently have pointed out such a standard variety is a construct and not a linguistic reality, the notion that teaching it as a desired goal remains firmly embedded in the writing of certain pedagogues. Porras (2016: 68) represents an example of this tendency. He asserts, “According to this position [a bidialectal approach], HS [heritage Spanish] speakers . . . get to acquire the standard dialect while retaining their vernacular variety.” He continues, “Standard Spanish has been vested for centuries with power and prestige, as the main vehicle of the literary, cultural, and educational traditions of the Hispanic World.” It is not clear what variety of Spanish he refers to, as literature, for example, is closely linked to the place and time from where and when it emerged. The language of the Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes in his Don Quixote, for example, difers noticeably from that of the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz, the Colombian Gabriel García Marquez in Cien años de soledad, or the Argentinian Ana María Shua in El libro de los recuerdos. Indeed, it is the individual mastery of the language that sets such writers apart, not their use of some undefined “standard” in their writing. A fundamental tenet in linguistics, well established in the literature, holds that no language, variety, or dialect is inherently better or worse for human communication than another. The label prescriptivist refers to those, usually non-specialists with little or no scientific training, who seek to replace some language feature with some other deemed to be superior. To prescribe language use is, in theory, a cardinal sin in the scientific study of language. But as Villa (2002: 224) notes, “linguists can and do prescribe language usage, despite prescriptivism’s status as an unacceptable academic practice,” here referring to scholars involved in the researching of US Spanish and developing pedagogical theory and praxis. We find this prescriptivistic tendency in Beaudrie et al.’s (2014) Heritage language teaching: Research and practice (“heritage language” refers to “non-English language” in much of the current literature). In the section labeled “Goal 2: Developing a prestige variety,” they write, “Many HL [heritage language] learners acquire a stigmatized variety of their heritage language” (2014: 143). The authors do not specifically mention US Spanish speakers, but we posit that the latter are included in this group, as such individuals are commonly labeled “heritage language speakers.” Regarding this ideology, Leeman (2012: 50) notes that “[heritage language] instruction was, and in many cases still is, oriented toward the acquisition of an idealized invariant prestige variety – alternately referred to as ‘standard Spanish,’ ‘academic Spanish,’ ‘la norma culta,’ or ‘universal Spanish.’” Beaudrie et al.’s assertion falls into this category.

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In short, certain researchers dedicated to Spanish language instruction in the United States engage in a process of creating a de facto language policy for shaping students’ language use. Particularly with regard to US Spanish, a basic tenet of their educational philosophy holds that varieties such as USMS are fine for talking with grandma at home but are inadequate for academic settings. The literature they produce often focuses on the variants we present in Chapters 9, 10, and 11. Pronouncing [v] instead of [b], saying or writing haiga instead of haya, comistes instead of comiste, or brecas instead of frenos, are all indicators of what Valdés and GeofrionVinci (1998: 477) label “mid to low registers of Spanish.” The word “low” in that quote can be interpreted as “popular,” the diference being that the former is a clear indicator of those researchers’ attitudes toward US Spanish speakers in general and USMS speakers in particular. We again refer to Santayana’s purported observation that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. History clearly documents that eforts such as the imposition of an elite norm, Castilian, on the peoples of the Americas soundly failed. In spite of the best eforts of the Spanish Crown and the Real Academia Española, new varieties of Spanish emerged here to take their place alongside the Castilian dialect. Despite the earnest attempts of the ANLE and prescriptivist researchers and pedagogues, USMS speakers continue to use their language as they will. Those two groups combined have only vanishingly little impact on USMS speakers due to the latter’s demographic, economic, social, and cultural presence in the West and, indeed, in the nation. History unequivocally teaches us that language planning and policy eforts to change the course of USMS in its restless flow across the linguistic landscape of the West are ultimately doomed to failure. There is, however, one exception to the rule that we address in the following section. Spanish language planning and policy in New Mexico

In Chapter 3, we briefly quote a section of the New Mexico State Constitution that explicitly addresses the legal and political rights of Spanish-speaking New Mexicans. These constitutional mandates tend to be given short shrift in the literature. For example, Fuller and Leeman (2020: 183) write that “[i]n New Mexico the state constitution ofered only temporary protections for Spanish, including a plan to hire bilingual teachers in order to help Spanish-speaking children learn English, and a requirement that laws be printed in Spanish for 20 years.” Bills and Vigil (2008: 17) assert that “[m]any, many people, both Hispanics and Anglos, believe that the state constitution gives Spanish special legal status in perpetuity. This belief, too, is a myth.” To avoid a “we said, they said” situation, we invite you to consult the New Mexico State Constitution directly. Type that four-word phrase into a search engine, which will point you to the ofcial New Mexico website that houses it (www.sos. state.nm.us/about-new-mexico/publications/nm-constitution/) (you may have to disable your pop-up blocker to gain access). You can then download a .pdf file of

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the entire text. Open it with your favorite .pdf reader and type the word “Spanish” into its search function. Doing so will take you directly to those sections that address Spanish-language rights. If you start your search at the beginning of the document, the first item you will come to is Article VII, Section 3 that we cited in Chapter 3. We cite it here again for your convenience: The right of any citizen of the state to vote, hold ofce or sit upon juries, shall never be restricted, abridged or impaired on account of religion, race, language or color, or inability to speak, read or write the English or Spanish languages except as may be otherwise provided in this constitution. This section guarantees those who only speak Spanish the right to fully participate in the state’s legal and political systems. Regarding the longevity of this right, Section 3 continues: [A]nd the provisions of this section and of Section One of this article shall never be amended except upon a vote of the people of this state in an election at which at least three-fourths of the electors voting in the whole state, and at least twothirds of those voting in each county of the state, shall vote for such amendment. Certain commentators have waggishly noted that getting even a few New Mexicans to head in one direction would be more difcult than herding the proverbial cats. This provision establishes that the Spanish-language rights detailed in the Constitution are, in efect, guaranteed in perpetuity. While it is not impossible that these rights will be stripped away at some point in the future, the chances of that happening are quite slim. The widespread Spanish/English bilingualism that exists in New Mexico means that virtually all candidates for political ofce can address the public in English. However, there are those individuals who are dominant, or even monolingual, in Spanish and who are eligible to serve on juries, that is, they are age 18 or older. Anecdotally, Villa has had a number of such citizens in his classes over the years. They are those who were born in this country but raised in Mexico. That is, they are not naturalized citizens but those who hold citizenship status under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. In Villa’s experience, these individuals were in the process of learning English as a second language while pursuing a degree in higher education. In the case that such New Mexicans were selected for jury duty, an interpreter would be provided for them. That interpreter would be present in the courtroom and in the jury room during deliberations. According to Virginia Villa (personal communication), an experienced constitutional lawyer, in most jurisdictions except New Mexico, the jury room is a sanctum sanctorum which only jury members can enter. All external communication is normally conducted through a bailif stationed outside the jury room. The presence of a non-jury individual in the jury room represents a significant, language-based variation from that norm.

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As you continue your search in the document, you will come to Article XII, Section 8. This establishes that the state is responsible for training teachers in the English and Spanish languages to work with Spanish-speaking students so that the latter can participate in English-language instruction. We suspect that the phrase “mainstreaming bilingual education” was not in the educational system’s vocabulary in 1911, but that approach is what the Constitution mandates. And indeed, postsecondary institutions in New Mexico today provide that training “in English and in Spanish.” Regarding participation in the public educational system, Section 10 of the same article establishes that: Children of Spanish descent in the state of New Mexico shall never be denied the right and privilege of admission and attendance in the public schools or other public educational institutions of the state, and they shall never be classed in separate schools, but shall forever enjoy perfect equality with other children in all public schools and educational institutions of the state. In Chapter 5, we discuss the Lemon Grove incident that occurred 20 years later in California, in which a school board did indeed attempt to segregate students in a separate school. We have yet to find a similar incident here in New Mexico, but if one were to have occurred, parents would have had a constitutional mandate to strike down such a policy. Finally, there was a provision to publish legal documents in both English and Spanish; this is the one mandate that did expire. Its original “life” was 20 years, but as Bills and Vigil (2008: 17) write, “the regulation was extended in 1931for another ten years, and in 1943 for an additional ten years.” They continue: There is now no New Mexico requirement that laws (or anything else) be published in Spanish (although a federal law, the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1975, now requires that voting materials be available in Spanish and other minority languages under certain conditions). (17) Villa can confirm that during all the years he has participated in the democratic exercise of participatory government in New Mexico, voting materials have indeed been published both in Spanish and in English. In concluding this section, recall that when the Constitution was adopted in 1911, Jim Crow laws were in full force in many states in general and in Texas, New Mexico’s immediate neighbor, in particular. The Constitution’s framers, in establishing New Mexican Spanish speakers’ rights and protecting those rights at the state constitutional level, ensured New Mexico’s linguistic heritage would be guaranteed in perpetuity. This process did not happen without battles. Gonzales-Berry (2000) documents the struggles faced by lawmakers in including Spanish-language policy in the Constitution and the fact that such legislation did not prevent the hegemonic

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dominance of English-language instruction in the state. Despite that fact, we submit that such legislation still “has teeth,” particularly with regard to the state’s legal system. And on a diferent level, New Mexico’s Constitution stands as a symbolic refusal to adhere to the “one nation, one language” ideology, the only state in the Union to do so for Spanish. In sum, we assert that eforts such as the RAE’s and ANLE’s have little impact of how speakers employ USMS. We may be witnessing one of the largest language experiments in the world, one in which a major world language is developing almost completely unhindered by governmental policies and groups such as the Academias. Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 6

1 France, Germany, and Spain all have academies to regulate and promote their respective languages. Should the United States have one for English? Why or why not? 2 Should English be the constitutionally ofcial language of the United States? Why or why not? 3 Discuss the impact that the Real Academia Española or the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española has on the Spanish spoken in your area. This would include language policies in the public education system, the style of language used in newspapers, magazines, or other print venues, the Spanish spoken in television and radio broadcasts, the language used for voter information literature and on ballots, to name a few examples. 4 Should the forms vosotros and/or vos be taught in Spanish language programs in the United States? (This would include the corresponding verb conjugations.) Why or why not? 5 On its website, US English (www.usenglish.org/) states, “[We are] the nation’s oldest and largest non-partisan citizens’ action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States.” Discuss the concept of “the unifying role of the English language in the United States.” Consider the divisions between political parties, religions, ethnic groups, generations, etc. In spite of these divisions, what is it that unifies this country? Is it English, or some other factors? Additional readings Cashman, Holly R. 2010. Research, responsibility and repression: Anti-bilingualism in Arizona. Spanish of the U.S. Southwest: A language in transition, Susana V. Rivera-Mills and Daniel J. Villa (eds.), 319–336. Madrid: Iberoamericana. García, Ofelia. 1993. From Goya portraits to Goya beans: Elite traditions and popular streams in U.S. Spanish language policy. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 12: 69–86. Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda. 2000. Which language will our children speak? The Spanish language and public education policy in New Mexico, 1890–1930. The contested homeland: A Chicano history of New Mexico, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel (eds.), 169–189. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

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Leeman, Jennifer. 2005. Engaging critical pedagogy: Spanish for Native Speakers. Foreign Language Annals 38: 35–45. Yule, George. 2017. The study of language, 6th ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 18, “Language Planning,” is the relevant section for this discussion.)

References Beaudrie, Sara M., Cynthia Ducar, and Kim Potowski. 2014. Heritage language teaching: Research and practice. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education Create. Bills, Garland, and Neddy Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Bybee, Eric Ruiz, Kathryn I. Henderson, and Roel V. Hinojosa. 2014. An overview of U.S. bilingual education: Historical roots, legal battles, and recent trends. Faculty Publications, 1615. Internet: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/1615. Constitution as adopted January 21, 1911, and as subsequently amended by the people in general and special elections 1911 through 2021. 2021. New Mexico compilation commission. Internet: www.sos.state.nm.us/about-new-mexico/publications/nm-constitution/. Fuller, Janet M., and Jennifer Leeman. 2020. Speaking Spanish in the US: The sociopolitics of language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. García, Ofelia. 1993. From Goya portraits to Goya beans: Elite traditions and popular streams in U.S. Spanish language policy. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 12: 69–86. Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda. 2000. Which language will our children speak? The Spanish language and public education policy in New Mexico, 1890–1930. The contested homeland: A Chicano history of New Mexico, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel (eds.), 169–189. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Hidalgo, Margarita. 2018. Diversification of Mexican Spanish: A tridimensional study in New Worlds sociolinguistics. Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter. Leeman, Jennifer. 2005. Engaging critical pedagogy: Spanish for Native Speakers. Foreign Language Annals 38: 35–45. Leeman, Jennifer. 2012. Investigating language ideologies in Spanish as a Heritage language. Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: The state of the field, Sara M. Beaudrie and Marta Fairclough (eds.), 43–60. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Maddern, Stacy Warner. 2013. Melting pot theory. The Encyclopedia of global human migration, Immanuel Ness (ed.), 1–4. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Piña-Rosales, Gerardo, and Joaquín Badajoz. 2010. Hablando bien se entiende la gente: Consejos idiomáticos de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. New York, NY: Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Piña-Rosales, Gerardo, Jorge I. Covarrubias, and Domnita Dumitrescu. 2014. Hablando bien se entiende la gente 2: Recomendaciones idiomáticas de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. New York: Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Porras, Jorge E. 2016. A proposal for teaching Spanish to heritage students in the US. Academic Exchange Quarterly 20: 68–75. Valdés, Guadalupe, and Michelle Geofrion-Vinci. 1998. Chicano Spanish: The problem of “underdeveloped” code in bilingual repertoires. The Modern Language Journal 82: 473–501. Villa, Daniel. 2002. The sanitizing of U.S. Spanish in academia. Foreign Language Annals 35: 222–230. Yule, George. 2017. The study of language, 6h ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.

7 BILINGUAL DYNAMICS Spanish and English in contact in the West

Borders between languages

In Chapter 1, we establish that the focus of this book is on the Spanish we speak in the western regions of the United States. At the same time, as noted in Chapter 4, we recognize that we cannot ignore the presence of English in Spanish-language speech communities here. All Spanish speakers in the West, and indeed across the nation, are, to one degree or another, in continuous contact with English speakers. The topic of languages in contact is an important one in the study of human communication. However, the phrase “languages in contact” might seem to imply that languages come into contact by themselves, outside of their respective communities of speakers. This is, of course, not the case. It is the speakers that come into contact, and through them the way they use their language, or languages, may be modified in one way or another. In what follows, in referring to “language contact”, we specifically mean “groups of speakers coming into contact.” In addition, we note that there exists a vast amount of research literature on the subject of bilingualism. Trying to present even an extremely general overview of that body of literature falls well outside the scope of this volume. We will focus on those bilingual dynamics that relate to USMS; we specify those topics in what follows. In Chapter 2, we discuss the concept of borders. Metaphorically speaking, boundaries exist between languages as well, serving to delimit one from the other. As is the case in geography, some are more easily crossed than others. For example, borders, such as oceans, serve as true physical obstacles limiting human migration. The Atlantic Ocean, as a boundary, efectively isolated Europe and the Americas for many millennia. Between languages, grammars are separated by that type of border. Even though speakers of diferent languages may be in daily contact, the “ocean” between their respective grammars keeps their language structures largely intact. For DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-8

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example, the Vulgar Latin grammar, today’s Spanish, shows vanishingly little influence from Arabic grammar, even though the two languages were in intimate contact for almost eight centuries. On the other hand, some borders are relatively porous. Vocabulary items, for example, often freely pass from one language to another, to the point that speakers may not realize they are borrowed words. We wonder how many people who speak US English realize that “barbecue,” “chocolate,” “tomato,” and “canoe” are Spanishorigin words. What could be more American than backyard BBQs, Hershey chocolate bars, fresh tomatoes from the garden, and canoeing on the lake? And in turn, Spanish speakers might not suspect that those same words, “barbacoa,” “chocolate,” “tomate,” and “canoa,” originated in indigenous languages. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no major concern in the United States that Spanish is contaminating English. Indeed, English has borrowed any number of words from a variety of languages that now are common in this country: sushi, latte, cofee, biscotti, hamburgers, jelly, fritters, okra, sausage, biscuits, and gravy, just to name some common foods that make up part of the American diet. The same hold true for Spanish speakers. Words such as arroz “rice,” albondiga “meatball,” naranja “(the citrus fruit) orange,” aceituna “olive,” papa “potato,” camote “sweet potato,” tamal “tamale,” bistec “steak,” flan “flan,” and maíz “corn” entered Spanish from other languages but cause little debate in Spanish-speaking communities. However, one linguistic phenomenon catches just about everybody’s attention, be they English or Spanish speakers: the use of Spanish and English in the same conversation. The use of two (or more) languages at the same time is common in bi- or multilingual communities around the world. Yet for reasons we discuss in the following, the Spanish/English alternation in the United States has drawn worldwide attention. The use of English loanwords here, along with the fluid use of two languages in a conversation, has resulted in a new vocabulary item both in the professional literature and in popular discourse: “Spanglish.” The introduction of this term in the late 1940s, initially “espanglish,” is commonly attributed to Salvador Tió, a Puerto Rican journalist and poet. Its appearance signaled a growing concern in some Spanish-speaking circles that English was (and is) “contaminating” the Spanish language. In the following, we address this issue. The Spanglish controversy

In the initial stages of this project, one of the authors was describing it to a colleague, a computational linguist, who does not share a background in USMS research. Upon mentioning “US Mexican Spanish,” the colleague said, “Wait a minute, do you mean Spanish or Spanglish?” Regarding the confusion surrounding this label, Zentella writes: “Spanglish” is a hotly debated and widely misunderstood term, even after 60 years of research and polemics. What does it refer to – a mish-mash of two

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languages, or a third language, or a style of speaking? Who uses it – proficient or deficient bilinguals? Is it a positive or negative label – are we harming speakers by using the term? (2016: 11) Montes-Alcalá observes that “few other languages in contact appear to have caused so much debate as Spanish and English in the U.S. have done all over the world” (2009: 97). She continues: The average person has heard the word “Spanglish” although he/she does not precisely know what it is. In the best of scenarios, they will smile condescendingly when they hear it. In the worst, they will claim that it is the bastardized language of Hispanics in the U.S. (2009: 98) The research Zentella (2016) refers to has gone far in demystifying the phenomena that make up what many call “Spanglish.” However, Montes-Alcalá’s (2009) comments present an unfortunate reality, that the linguistics community has had lessthan-complete success in making its findings known to a wider audience, to say the least. For that reason, in the following we briefly sum up the research in Spanish/ English contact that relates to our study, starting with the concept of bilingualism. The bilingual continuum

A common idea about bilinguals is that they speak two languages equally well. In reality, bilinguals exist along a continuum; in this case, the end points are English and Spanish monolingualism. Even monolingualism is not an absolute case, as English and Spanish speakers have absorbed words from the other language into their vocabulary. As noted earlier, many English speakers may not be aware that “barbecue,” “chocolate,” “tomato,” and “canoe” were drawn from Spanish. In any case, we define monolinguals as those who have had little or no contact with a language besides the one they grew up with. Examples of individuals at one end of the spectrum are those who arrive here as adults speaking only Spanish (and not an indigenous language as well). At the other end are those who speak only English. Spanish has become so widely spoken that is has achieved the status of a global language; as a result, there are those who have no ancestral connection to it and learn it as an “L2,” a second or foreign language. As such individuals, whether English or Spanish speakers, move away from monolingualism into bilingualism, they depend on their first language as a sort of crutch when they lack the grammar or vocabulary to express what they want to say. Their entry into a bilingual world difers from that of those who grow up with both languages. These individuals come into contact with Spanish and English at an early age and essentially learn both as a native language. These speakers fall into

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the middle range of the spectrum and represent the common notion of bilinguality. Their pronunciation in both languages mirrors that of the monolinguals that surround them. If they grow up in Midland, Texas, their English may demonstrate a west Texas accent; if their family or caregivers come from Chihuahua, then their Spanish sounds like that of northern Mexico. These speakers are sometimes labeled “balanced bilinguals,” although the vast majority do not possess the exact same vocabulary in both languages. Indeed, their use of each language may not correspond precisely to a monolingual’s in either language in a variety of ways. Regarding this reality, the eminent scholar on bilingualism François Grosjean authored a study titled “Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person” (1989). In it he notes, “Monolinguals have been the models of the ‘normal’ speaker-hearer, and the methods of investigation developed to study monolingual speech and language have been used with little, if any, modification to study bilinguals” (1989: 4). He continues: The “real” bilingual is seen as the person who is equally and fully fluent in two languages; he or she is the “ideal,” the “true,” the “balanced,” the “perfect” bilingual. . . . All the others, who in fact represent the vast majority of people who use two languages in their everyday lives, are “not really” bilingual or are “special types” of bilinguals; hence the numerous qualifiers found in the literature: “dominant,” “un-balanced,” “semilingual,” “alingual,” etc. (1989: 4, our emphasis) As an example of the “un-balanced” bilingual, many Spanish/English speakers in the United States receive their schooling in English, with short shrift given to Spanish. Thus, they are exposed to the vocabulary of math, chemistry, accounting, business, etcetera in the former language, but not the latter. In linguistics, we call these difering vocabularies semantic domains. Bilinguals may be highly proficient in Spanish in one semantic domain, for example, art and literature, but have minimal proficiency in another, like banking and finance, which they have studied in English. Thus, upon being asked something like, “How do you say (square root, thermocouple, balance sheet, capital gains) in Spanish?” bilinguals may not have those words at the tip of their tongue. The person asking the question might then think, “Well, they say they’re bilingual, but not so much, I guess.” It is for this reason that we emphasize Grosjean’s observations that “real-world” bilinguals often do not use both languages for the exact same purposes in their day-to-day lives. They employ one for certain functions and the other for a diferent set of communicative needs, again, the semantic domains mentioned earlier. Observations such as Grosjean’s are key for our work, as both linguists and non-specialists alike will commonly refer to Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States as somehow being deficient in one or both languages. We return to this particular ideology in what follows.

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Language switching

There are at least two linguistic phenomena that people commonly think of when they say “Spanglish,” as our colleague did. Perhaps the most common one involves using two languages in the same conversation. The other is lexical borrowing, which we return to later. Regarding using two languages in a conversation, linguists use several diferent terms to describe this dynamic: code-switching, code mixing, language switching, or more recently, interlanguaging. This phenomenon has been the subject of many studies in all US Spanish varieties and, in general, forms an important subfield in linguistic research as it occurs wherever two or more languages coexist in the same area. Of the various labels, we choose “language switching” as we deem it the most transparent of the various options. The phrase “code-switching” is perhaps more common, but Bill Santiago, a standup comedian, ofers a humorous approach to pointing out the problematic use of the word “code”: [P]lease don’t say “code-switching.” ¿Cómo que code ni qué code? . . . First of all, cuando escucho la palabra “code”, I think of top-secret military messages, not Spanglish. Suena medio silly, like lingo from a bad submarine movie. “Commander, we’ve intercepted a highly encrypted transmission from the enemy, but we were able to de-scramble it with an English-Spanish dictionary.” “Good code-switching, Lieutenant.” “Gracias, sir.” “Excuse me?” “I mean, thank you.” “De nada.” (2008: 17) The word “language” is problematic, as discussed in Chapter 2, but we have some notion of what it is, unlike some encrypted military code. The same for “switch,” as in a light switch. When it is switched one way, you get English, and the other way, Spanish. When the switch is in one position, Spanish, that portion of the conversation follows all the pronunciation and grammar rules of the Spanish language, with no mixing or interference from English. When the switch moves to the other position, English, that segment follows all the pronunciation and grammar rules of the English language, with no interference from Spanish. The switch metaphor is, of course, flawed, due to its binary nature. In Chapter 8, we examine the question of binary classifications in detail; here we only note that the bilingual continuum suggested earlier is not binary in nature. Lipski refers to those individuals who fall in the middle of that continuum as “fluent bilinguals”; he observes, “[F]luent bilinguals codeswitch because they can, and not because they cannot speak any other way” (2016: 140, emphasis in original). However, as bilinguals move away from this central area of the continuum toward either pole, Spanish or English, their fluency in one language or the other decreases. Lipski identifies these

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speakers as “low-fluency bilinguals” (2016: 140). He notes that “[l]anguage switching of a diferent sort is found in the speech of low-fluency bilinguals – typified by second language (L2) learners – using their weaker language” (2016: 140). The casual monolingual observer, upon hearing Spanish and English switched in a sentence, will probably not be able to discern the diference between the two types of language shifting Lipski describes. For example, in order to illustrate his arguments, he ofers instances of language switching by fluent bilinguals (in citing these materials, we follow the numbering in the original text; the glosses are ours): (1) a I imagine that he is very happy porque Austin es una buena ciudad I imagine that he is very happy because Austin is a good city b They’re a type of band que hace que te sientes orgulloso or happy you know They’re a type of band that makes you feel proud or happy you know c Si no fuera por ellos I don’t think we would have had that very successful fund-raiser If it weren’t for them I don’t think we would have had that very successful fund-raiser d You’re never going to do it de expensa de nuestra raza You’re never going to do it at the expense of our people e Dice que she hasn’t got no phone She says she hasn’t got no phone f She used to baby-sit en la noche She used to baby-sit at night (Lipski 2016: 149) Regarding low-fluency bilinguals, or L2 speakers, he presents the following instances: (6) a la oportunidad as far de las personas the opportunity as far of the persons b un lugar para los niños take care y no tienen tiempo a place for the children take care and they don’t have time c yo cried mucho especially with muchos de mis amigos I cried much especially with much of my friends d toda la familia tiene the togetherness or la solidarity del matrimonio the whole family has the togetherness or the solidarity of the matrimony

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e su propia iglesia cast él afuera his own church cast he out f no judea persona gets ocho días no trabajar no Judea person gets eight days no work (Lipski 2016: 151) Again, those who speak only English or Spanish may just hear the use of the two languages in sentences such as those earlier and not realize that the former set follows a set of patterns, or rules, while the latter examples tend not to. Linguists such as Lipski ofer detailed structural analyses of the diferences between the two (see Lipski 2016). Fluent bilinguals with no special training in language studies may not possess the technical vocabulary that linguists use but can determine that one kind of language-switching seems okay, while the other sounds “funny.” They are like most language speakers: we know the rules of our language(s) and how things should sound; we just do not know how to verbalize that knowledge. The exceptions are those who have sufered an aphasia, a language disorder resulting from a stroke or an accident that damages the areas of the brain that control language usage. Apart from these individuals, we all have our language’s grammar embedded in our brain. Fluent bilinguals have a grammar for each language (here, for Spanish and English), as well as a grammar for switching between the two. Another language dynamic comes into play in the bilingual continuum: vocabulary gaps. Even monolinguals do not completely control the vocabulary of their native language. Our world has grown so complex that those who specialize in the study of, say, astrophysics may find themselves at a loss for words when at the hardware store buying parts to repair the kitchen faucet. When confronted with this lack of vocabulary, monolingual English speakers fill these lexical gaps with words such as “thingamajig,” “doohickey,” “thingy,” “gadget,” or “whatsit.” Thus, a chemistry professor who speaks only English has a very sophisticated knowledge of the specialized words in that field but may be reduced to near incoherence when purchasing auto parts: “I need this thingy that goes on the gizmo here.” It turns out there are a lot of “thingies” in a car. Monolingual Spanish speakers use “cosa,” “cosita,” “máquina,” “comosellame,” or in USMS, the ever-popular “chingadera.” Upon entering the same car parts store, the monolingual Spanish speaker might say, “Necesito una de estas chingaderas para esta cosita.” Bilinguals have an extra resource at hand for such occasions: access to another language. For example, in going to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make tamales, a monolingual English speaker might ask the clerk, “Where do you keep those wrapper thingies you use to make tamales?” A bilingual might say, “Where do you keep the hojas for tamales?” In our experience, even fluent bilinguals themselves will consider their Spanish deficient because they do not possess all the lexical items they do in English. As observed earlier, this is due to difering communicative needs in each language, rather than to the loss, or incomplete knowledge, of Spanish.

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Lexical borrowing

Regarding the confusion caused by the label “Spanglish,” people often think of another phenomenon we mention earlier, borrowing or the use of loanwords, and in particular words that come from English. Torres Cacoullos and Aaron (2003: 289) note: It is uncontroversial that borrowing and code-switching are two diferent manifestations of language contact.  .  . . Lexical borrowing is the incorporation of individual words originating in a donor, or lexifier, language into the discourse of a recipient, or host, language. For this reason, we present the following section as related to but diferent from the language-switching previously described. Languages commonly incorporate terms from other languages into their vocabulary. In Chapters 9 and 10, we examine in greater detail the lexical borrowing that has occurred in Spanish over the millennia. At this point, we will address a specific dimension of the borrowing process, what speakers’ motivations are for looking to other languages for new words. We focus on these motivations as those attempting to defend Spanish from English contamination commonly complain that English words appearing in the Spanish vocabulary are superfluous. They argue that borrowing certain words from English is unnecessary, given that those words already exist in Spanish or can be created from within the language. In reality, there exist a number of reasons for adopting terms from one language into another which we examine in the following. Motivations for borrowing words from English into Spanish

To begin, as noted earlier, a common idea among certain language pundits about USMS is that it destroys the integrity of the Spanish language in general due to the words from English it incorporates. Lipski (2007) addresses this ideology in observing that “the Nobel Laureate Camilo José Cela claimed to have seen in supermarkets in the U.S. Northeast signs that proclaimed deliberamos groserías . . . from the English we deliver groceries” (2007: 331, our translation, italics in the original). In Cela’s Spanish, deliberamos groserías would translate into something like “we deliberate on foul language.” Lipski (2007) ascribes such observations more to urban legends than to documented language use. Some observers will invent “Spanglish” words or phrases to make a point, ones that are not actually produced by speakers. This is the case, for example, with the “Lexicon: Spanglish English” Stavans (2003) cobbles together (in Chapter 9 we ofer an analysis of the distortions his glossary contains). Thus, given the tendency on the part of some commentators to fabricate words that speakers do not use, in the following we cite only documented borrowings from English.

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Over the years, linguists have proposed varied reasons as to why speakers borrow words from other languages. Weinreich (1964: 56) claims, “The need to designate new things, persons, places, and concepts is, obviously, a universal cause of lexical innovation.” Earlier, Espinosa (1914: 246) proposed, in essence, the same reasons for the borrowings from English into New Mexican and Southern Colorado Spanish: As a rule, the English words adopted have no exact Spanish equivalent; in fact, a large percentage of them had no equivalents at all. In most cases the adoption of the English word has not been a case of fashion, luxury in speech, neglect of Spanish or mere desire of imitating the language of the invaders, but an actual convenience and necessity. These statements would make it seem as though words are principally borrowed out of necessity. However, in looking at the lists of borrowings collected by researchers for USMS, it is clear that some words are borrowed even when there are existing language equivalents. A classic example is the word lonche, from “lunch.” Spanish has the word almuerzo “lunch” for the midday meal. So you might wonder, why the borrowing if there is an existing term? Weinreich (1964) cites word frequency as a factor. Frequent words are accessed quickly and are retained, whereas low-frequency words are less easily recalled and are thus susceptible to replacement. However, the word almuerzo is quite common and found throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Frequency, or lack thereof, cannot be the reason for the borrowing in this case. Some researchers (Higa 1979; Poplack et al. 1988; Smead 1998) propose that one factor in borrowing is the length of the words. If the Spanish-language term is longer than the new English-language term, the shorter, simpler term will be borrowed. In this case, lonche is slightly shorter than almuerzo and is thus borrowed. The complication with this theory is that it does not always explain certain borrowings. For example, the word internet from “Internet” is longer than the native Spanish term red “Internet,” yet internet is often preferred over red. This theory can explain the motivation for some borrowings, but not the majority of them. Another theory addresses social values (Hope 1963; Pratt 1980; Weinreich 1964), proposing that borrowings are the result of speakers using words from the dominant language as a way of achieving or demonstrating social status. Hope (1963: 34), in discussing the motivations for borrowing, states that: A desire for novelty, an urge to be up-to-date, to live in the present (and aspire to the future), and also the popular tendency to slough of conventions which have been established too long, doubtless all add impetus to the landslide [of borrowings]. In USMS, there is certainly some degree of this motivation for borrowing terms. A companion to the social motivation for borrowing is the efect of being immersed in the dominant language. USMS speakers exist, to one degree or another, deep in the

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heart of a fiercely monolingual English-speaking society. This near-total immersion in English will necessarily influence their lexicon. The constant contact with new things, ideas, and peoples gives USMS speakers many opportunities to add to their language in order to express the realities of their bilingual world. This leads us to an important factor in borrowing, insufcient diferentiation. This factor was first introduced by Weinreich (1964: 59) and expanded on in Clegg (2010). Insufcient diferentiation is the idea that the USMS speaker may borrow a new English word because the existing Spanish-language term does not convey exactly the same concept and subtleties as the English-origin word. Let us return to the example of lonche. For USMS speakers, the concept of an almuerzo may signify a large sit-down meal with the family that takes a couple of hours and has multiple courses, whereas the new English-origin lonche describes a small quick meal in the middle of a workday. These two concepts are sufciently diferent to USMS speakers that they have decided to use both for the diferent concepts. Frequently, USMS speakers do not simply borrow an English-origin word to replace a Spanish one; they borrow to add to their existing lexicon and broaden their ability to communicate the complex linguistic realities of bilingual Spanish/English speakers. In fact, in his data for New Mexico Spanish, Clegg (2010) found examples of the use of both terms almuerzo and lonche by the same speakers. He proposes that bilingual speakers can make finer distinctions between subtle synonyms than prescriptivists give them credit for. Clegg (2010: 229) uses the example of the word daddy from “daddy” from his data. He finds there were a number of family terms that were borrowed and used interchangeably with the native Spanish terms. There is an abundance of Spanish-language items that can be used for the semantic concept of “father”: padre, papi, papá, jefe, etc. These Spanish terms can express formality, informality, or afection. Surely, there would be no need to borrow the English form. Yet the term daddy has been borrowed and appears frequently in Clegg’s data. As need is not a factor, clearly, bilingual speakers feel that there is something diferent expressed by the English-origin word not found in the existing Spanishlanguage words. There are many diferent motivations that USMS speakers have for borrowing English words. It may be lexical need, it may be for prestige or social reasons, it may be because the new term is shorter, it may be the frequency in which they hear the new word, it may be because of insufcient diferentiation, or it may be a mixture of several or all of these reasons. Whatever the reason, communities of speakers in contact with another language or languages have always borrowed and shared, and will continue to borrow and share, words with each other. It is a natural process that contributes to the vitality of all languages in contact with others. We conclude here by noting that the question of which loanwords pertain mainly to USMS or to other varieties as well is a complex one. For example, checar and parquear are now so common they appear in the Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE) of the Real Academia Española. The Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary is perhaps one of the most conservative in the Spanish-speaking world, and the appearance

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of these US Spanish loanwords in it indicates their international status. Thus, there can be no doubt that the United States is now recognized as a source of new global Spanish vocabulary. As a small note, as we wrote this section of the book, we consulted the RAE’s online dictionary (www.rae.es/) to make sure our citations were accurate. We noticed they have a “word of the day” feature, palabra del día, and for that day, it was “estadounidismo,” a “United Statesism”! They define that word as “Palabra o uso propios del español hablado en los Estados Unidos de América” (word or usage coming from the Spanish spoken in the United States of America) (our emphasis). We ofer this anecdote to underscore the fact that while some normative groups, be they professional or popular, may decry the appearance of English-origin words in USMS as well as in global Spanish, there is no turning the tide. Spanish has absorbed vocabulary from many languages over the last 2,000 years yet remains intact and in no way deformed. Other factors identified as “Spanglish”

This brings us to another language dynamic that impacts Spanish/English bilingualism: language loss or language shift. The previous discussion considers in part those who are moving from monolingualism into bilingualism. However, there are those who may have grown up in a bilingual environment but who have moved away from it. Joshua Fishman (1964) pioneered the study of language loss and language maintenance, a field of inquiry that looks at how individuals or groups can keep or lose a language. As a result of language loss or shift, you may know someone whose last name is Schmidt, Kowalski, Ventimiglia, Tanaka, Ng, Dubois, or Larrañaga who does not speak German, Polish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, French, or Basque, respectively. Regarding this dynamic in the United States, the general pattern is that many immigrants arrive here as monolinguals in a non-English language and immediately realize they need English to advance, minimally, in the work environment. While they learn English with some degree of fluency, they remain dominant in their native language, speaking it at home and in the community. Their children grow up bilingual, learning their parents’ native language at home and English at school and in the community. They speak their native language principally with their parents’ generation, and English with everyone else. When they establish their own domicile, their home language tends to be English, not their parents’ language. Their children, the grandchildren of the immigrants, speak English at home and everywhere else; in essence, they are monolingual in English. If they know any of their grandparents’ native language, it consists of the names of ethnic dishes and the bad words Grandpa uses sometimes. This is the language loss model we briefly mention in Chapter 1. Thus, regarding the shift from Spanish to English, you may know someone whose last name is Álvarez, García, Gómez, Rodríguez, Valenzuela, Villa, or

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Zárate who does not understand, much less speak, Spanish. Perhaps their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents did; Spanish is in their background somewhere, yet they only speak English. Such individuals may self-identify as Hispanic or Latino, as language is not a primordial requisite for membership in that ethnic group, as pointed out in Chapter 4. Therefore, all researchers using Census data to study US Spanish in general and USMS in particular must establish that if some geographic area contains X number of Hispanics, not all members of that populations are bilingual, that is, they speak only English. As a result, those who claim that US Hispanics do not speak “good Spanish” are not mistaken insofar as some do not speak any Spanish. Their mistake, of course, is to apply this idea to all Hispanics, even those who are fluent bilinguals. We now turn to this ideology. Spanglish, ideology, and power

Regarding the research that underlies the analyses of language-switching, Zentella (2016: 14) writes, “[D]ecades of rigorous linguistic research have proven the rulegoverned nature of Spanglish and demonstrated the linguistic dexterity of speakers who juggle two grammars while honoring the rules of both.” Again, the average monolingual English speakers who disparage “Spanglish” are most probably unfamiliar with that research and confuse a number of the distinct linguistic phenomena previously discussed. However, there are those who are, or should be, aware of those research findings yet choose to ignore them. A notorious example of this is the Real Academia Española’s early definition of “Spanglish,” which appeared in its online dictionary in 2012 (Betti 2015: 6): Espanglish.

Del ingl. Spanglish, fusión de Spanish “español” y English “inglés”). 1. m. Modalidad del habla de algunos grupos hispanos de los Estados Unidos, en la que se mezclan, deformándolos, elementos léxicos y gramaticales del español y del inglés. Spanglish

From the Eng. Spanglish, fusion of Spanish “Spanish” and English “English”). 1. m. Way of speaking of some Hispanic groups of the United States, in which are mixed, deforming them, lexical and grammatical elements of Spanish and English (our emphasis). As seen here, Spanish/English bilinguals who switch languages “deform” neither one. This definition caused a huge outcry from a broad group of linguists, and the Academia ultimately dropped deformando, “deforming,” from its definition (Betti 2015). Another example of the tendency to ignore extant research is found in MarcosMarín (2001: 76), who writes:

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Quien habla espanglish lo que quiere es hablar inglés, se ha dedicado ya por una evolución hacia el inglés y trata de abandonar el español para expresarse en una nueva lengua que todavía no domina. No intenta conservar las estructuras lingüísticas del español, sino ir sustituyéndolas por las inglesas, empezando por la más simple, el inventario léxico. Whoever speaks Spanglish, what they want is to speak English, they have already dedicated themselves to an evolution toward English and try to abandon Spanish to express themselves in a new language that they do not yet control. They do not try to preserve the linguistic structures of Spanish, but rather substitute them with English ones, starting with the simplest, the lexical inventory. Marcos-Marín would appear to describe Spanish monolinguals who are in the process of learning English. Again, fluent bilinguals conserve the linguistic structures of Spanish, as well as control those of English, and do not substitute one for the other. Yet another example of this stance is found in Ardila (2005: 62), who proclaims that “[f]rom the Spanish language perspective, Spanglish represents a dialect barely recognized in the Spanish speaking world” (2005: 66). Regarding this assertion, Lope Blanch’s corpus Español hablado en el suroeste de los Estados Unidos, “Spanish spoken in the US Southwest,” clearly documents USMS speakers conversing with Mexican Spanish speakers. The interviews for the corpus are conducted with USMS speakers from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, establishing the fact that their communicative abilities in Spanish are not restricted to just one specific area but include the greater Southwest. This is further documented by Villa et al. (2014) in a study based on a corpus of Washington Spanish. The USMS speakers were interviewed by a researcher originally from Zacatecas, Mexico. Once more, no communicative difculties between the interviewer and interviewees were noted due to the USMS speakers’ dialect. The question arises, then, as to why certain language specialists would take a position that contravenes well-established research findings. Here the question of power arises. We once again quote Montes-Alcalá, who asserts that “few other languages in contact appear to have caused so much debate as Spanish and English in the United States have done all over the world” (2009: 97). Spanish is in contact with Guaraní in Paraguay, Quechua in Peru, Basque in Spain, Portuguese in the Uruguay/Brazil border area, and French in the France/Spain border region. But as Montes-Alcalá observes, the results of contact between Spanish and these languages have not generated anywhere near the amount of controversy that the Spanish/ English contact in the United States has. We ascribe this to the role English plays at a global level, particularly US English. In discussing the impact of English on Mexican Spanish, Franco Trujillo and Lara (2016) note that during the 19th and 20th centuries, from a lexical point of view, British speakers have had the greatest influence in general on the Spanishspeaking world. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, England provided

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the majority of anglicismos, “anglicisms”; after World War II to the present, the United States has assumed that role (Franco Trujillo and Lara 2016: 1–2). In Chapters 9 and 10, we examine in detail the various sources of non-Latinate words in Spanish, demonstrating the enriching efect that contact with other languages has caused in the past. However, it may be the case that English is having an impact on Spanish that historically no other language has. Regarding this possibility, Franco Trujillo and Lara (2016: 2), quoting Moreno de Alba (2003: 36), assert about English that: What sets apart the contact between the Spanish language and English from all the other cultural and linguistic exchanges that have left a mark in the Spanish vocabulary is that “never before in history has there been any spoken or semispoken language with such a vast geographic distribution and such a large number of people [speakers]” (Moreno de Alba 2003: 36). (our translation) As part of its mission, the Real Academia Española states that “the motivation coming from the new responsibilities that the RAE has assumed is no less strong given its central position in the Spanish culture of our times and in the expansion of Spanish in the world” (www.rae.es: Reglamento de la Real Academia Española 47, our translation). With this proclamation, the RAE anoints itself as a principal arbiter of Spanish culture and a leader in the expansion of global Spanish. This status is encapsulated in its motto to “clean, set and give splendor” to the Spanish language (www.rae.es/la-institucion/historia, our translation). United to this latter efort are the language specialists who dedicate themselves in one way or another to protecting the “purity” of the Spanish language, defending it against contamination from English. Thus, fluent US Spanish/English bilinguals, especially those in the West, due to their demographic presence pose a threat for the self-appointed defenders of Spanish. On a linguistic level, these bilinguals have a native speaker’s access to US English, a global power language. This renders them suspect, as English represents a potent force for inhibiting the global expansion of Spanish. As native Spanish speakers, they can navigate monolingual environments in that language. Further, through language-switching, they have access to a communicative medium not available to either monolingual Spanish or English speakers. Additionally, as noted in Chapter 6, they live in a nation that does not constitutionally establish any particular language as ofcial, which puts them beyond any hegemonic prescriptivist normativity that organizations such as the RAE might wish to impose. Given these realities, those researchers who view US Spanish/English bilinguals as one type of threat or another to the imagined purity of Spanish or its status as a global language have little other recourse than to create a false narrative that demonizes USMS bilinguals in particular and US Spanish/English bilinguals in general, setting aside extant research in order to do so.

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Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 7

1 Do you use, or have you heard, the term “Spanglish”? What does it mean to you? 2 Are you, to any degree, bilingual? (Remember, you do not necessarily need to be fluent in another language to be considered bilingual.) If so, which language(s)? How did you come to be bi- or multilingual, through taking classes, living abroad, or exposure to a non-English language in your family or community? 3 Search the Internet using the keyword “Spanglish.” What kinds of videos do you find? How is “Spanglish” portrayed in them? 4 What are the loanwords that you use, either in Spanish or in English? To help identify these in Spanish, consult the online Diccionario de la lengua española (www. rae.es). For English, find an online etymological dictionary, using a search phrase such as “online English etymology dictionary.” A good place to start is names for food: maíz, tuna, tamal, nopal, bratwurst, sushi, hamburger, orange, etc. 5 To identify the degree of bilingualism in your area, consult the US Census at www.census.gov. Search for your city, county, or state, for example, Salem, Oregon; Marion County, Oregon; or Oregon. What portion of the population is bilingual, and in what languages? Remember, the Census changes its internal links on a regular basis; searching on your place name and “languages,” that is, “Marion County Oregon languages,” will help find the information you are looking for. Additional readings Lipski, John. 2004. Is “Spanglish” the third language of the South?: Truth and fantasy about U.S. Spanish. Full version of the paper delivered at LAVIS-III, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, April 16, 2004. www.personal.psu.edu/jml34/spanglsh.pdf. Montes-Alcalá, Cecilia. 2009. Hispanics in the United States: More than Spanglish. Camino Real: Estudios de Hispanidades Norteamericanas 1: 97–115. Otheguy, Ricardo, and Nancy Stern. 2011. On so called Spanglish. International Journal of Bilingualism 15(1): 85–100. Poplack, Shana. 1980. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18(7/8): 581–618. Smead, Robert N. 1998. English loanwords in Chicano Spanish: Characterization and rationale. Bilingual Review 23: 113–123.

References Ardila, Alfredo. 2005. Spanglish: An anglicized Spanish dialect. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 27(1): 60–81. Betti, Silvia. 2015. La definición del spanglish en la última edición del Diccionario de la Real Academia (2014). Glosas 8: 5–14. Clegg, Jens. 2010. An analysis of the motivations for borrowing in the Spanish of New Mexico. Spanish of the Southwest: A language in transition, Susana V. Rivera-Mills and Daniel J. Villa (eds.), 223–237. Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Espinosa, Aurelio M. 1914. Studies in New Mexican Spanish, part III: The English elements. Revue de Dialectologie Romane 6: 241–317.

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Fishman, Joshua A. 1964. Language maintenance and language shift as a field of inquiry: A definition of the field and suggestions for its further development. Linguistics 2: 32–70. Franco Trujillo, Erik Daniel, and Luis Fernando Lara. 2016. El anglicismo en el español nacional de México. México, DF: El Colegio de México. Thesis. Grosjean, François. 1989. Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language 36: 3–15. Higa, Masanori. 1979. Sociolinguistic aspects of word borrowing. Sociolinguistic studies in language contact: Methods and cases, William Mackey and Jacob Ornstein (eds.), 277–292. New York: Mouton. Hope, T.E. 1963. Loan-words as cultural and lexical symbols (continued). Archivum Linguisticum 15: 29–42. Lipski, John M. 2007. El español de América en contacto con otras lenguas. Lingüística aplicada del español, Manel Lacorte (ed.), 309–345. Madrid: Arco Libros. Lipski, John M. 2016. The role of unintentional/involuntary codeswitching: Did I really say that? Spanish-English codeswitching in the Caribbean and the US, Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo, Catherine M. Mazak, and M. Carmen Parafita Couto (eds.), 139–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marcos-Marín, Francisco. 2001. De lenguas y fronteras: el espanglish y el portuñol. Nueva Revista de Política, Cultura y Arte 74: 70–79. Montes-Alcalá, Cecilia. 2009. Hispanics in the United States: More than Spanglish. Camino Real: Estudios de Hispanidades Norteamericanas 1: 97–115. Moreno de Alba, José G. 2003. El español y el inglés en México y en el mundo. La lengua española en México, por José G. Moreno de Alba (ed.), 36–40. México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Poplack, Shana, David Sankof, and Christopher Miller. 1988. The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation. Linguistics 26: 47–104. Pratt, Chris. 1980. El anglicismo en el español peninsular contemporáneo. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Santiago, Bill. 2008. Pardon my Spanglish. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books. Smead, Robert N. 1998. English loanwords in Chicano Spanish: Characterization and rationale. Bilingual Review 23: 113–123. Stavans, Ilán. 2003. Spanglish: The making of a new American language. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers. Torres Cacoullos, Rena, and Jessi Elena Aaron. 2003. Bare English-origin nouns in Spanish: Rates, constraints, and discourse functions. Language Variation and Change 15: 289–328. Villa, Daniel J., Naomi Lapidus Shin, and Eva Robles Nagata. 2014. La nueva frontera: Spanish-speaking populations in Central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: 149–172. Weinreich, Uriel. 1964. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton. Zentella, Ana Celia. 2016. Spanglish: Language politics versus el habla del pueblo. SpanishEnglish codeswitching in the Caribbean and the US, Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo, Catherine M. Mazak, and M. Carmen Parafita Couto (eds.), 11–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

PART 2

Linguistic perspectives  

8 THINKING ABOUT HOW WE THINK The relationship between theory and practice

Language categorization

In Chapter 2, we briefly mention the use of categories to classify language; in the following we examine that process in greater detail. Regarding categorization, Bills and Vigil (2008: 3) note, “A principal characteristic of human language is labeling. We determine that a collection of things in the real world (or in our imaginations) seems to form a class, and we impose on that class a convenient label.” However, since this type of categorization is a human invention, there is more than one way of determining if something belongs to a certain class or not. One method deeply embedded in Western culture is based on the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s work. Smith (2020) provides an exhaustive review of Aristotle’s logic system; for our purposes, the salient point is that “[e]ach [category] falls under no other genus, and each is completely separate from the others” (7.3, “The Categories”). In other words, categories are preordained, and it is up to humans to discover those pre-existing categories in order to make sense of the world. Taylor (1991) discusses the importance of this concept for a classical approach to linguistic categorization, particularly as it pertains to the Aristotelian law of contradiction. He writes, “The law of contradiction states that a thing cannot both be and not be, it cannot both possess a feature and not possess it, it cannot both belong to a category and not belong to it” (23). Many grammars are good examples of this precept. They often divide verb conjugations into three categories according to tense: past, present, and future. A Spanish 101 textbook might present the verb hablar “to speak” following this model: present-tense habla, “you (formal) speak”; past-tense habló, “you (formal) spoke”; and future-tense hablará, “you (formal) will speak.” Each form belongs to only one category of tense and cannot belong to the other categories of tenses. DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-10

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Students learning Spanish as a foreign language are given this information and then asked to write it back down on a test, which might have a section something like this: 1. In the following, write the correct conjugation of the verb hablar, “Usted” form, in the appropriate spaces: a Present: _____________ b Past: ________________ c Future: ______________ If the students write down the following: a Present: hablará b Past: habló c Future: habla upon grading the test, the instructor takes out a red pen, draws a line through the answers (a) and (c), and assigns a low grade for that portion of the exercise. If the students are unhappy with the grade, the instructor, employing Aristotelian logic, explains that there is only one correct answer to each question (it’s in the textbook) and that the students will just have to study harder next time. Language, however, does not fit into clearly delimited categories, such as the tripartite tense system. If two Spanish-speaking friends are out shopping for a gift and want to know more about an item, one might ask the other about the salesclerk, “¿Ese tipo habla español?” (Does that guy speak Spanish?), to which the friend can reasonably reply, “No sé si lo hablará” (I don’t know if he speaks it). This all occurs in the present; the question is not if the clerk will speak Spanish in the future but if he speaks it now. Yet in the reply the verb hablar is conjugated in the future tense but used in the present. Similarly, the same friend might ask, ¿Cuándo habla el presidente? “When does the president speak?” to which might come the reply, “Habla mañana,” “He’ll speak tomorrow.” In this case, hablar is conjugated in the present tense but used for the future. Following an Aristotelian model, this should not be possible, but there it is. The issue, then, is not with a malfunction of language but rather with the method used to categorize it. An Aristotelian logic assumes the world is binary: something either is or is not. This works extremely well for some applications. Computer technology, for example, depends centrally on binary distinctions; in essence, an electronic switch is either on or of. If a switch malfunctions and is on AND of at the same time, your screen goes blank, and you either have to have your machine repaired or buy a new one. But languages are not binary, as seen in the earlier examples. A verb conjugated in the “future” tense can be both used for the future AND the present, and the language continues to function perfectly well. In order to get around the limitations of a binary system for language study, Taylor (1991) discusses an alternative way of classifying things: the prototypical category. This approach recognizes the fact that an item can belong to one category AND another at the same time and takes into account that it is humans inventing

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categories, not discovering them. Categories are human creations, like bowls or cups. Since we invented the categories, we can decide how well something fits into them. For example, someone just learning English might run across the words “bowl” and “cup” and wonder what the diference between the two is. In consulting a dictionary, the learner finds the definition for “bowl”: “a concave usually nearly hemispherical vessel: a rounded container that is usually larger than a cup.” The search for “cup” yields: “an open usually bowl-shaped drinking vessel.” The learner might be understandably confused, as “bowl” and “cup” define each other in a circular way. So when is a cup a cup and a bowl a bowl? If the learner consults a group of English-speaking friends, they might reply, “Well, cups have a handle and bowls don’t.” The learner asks for clarification, “So if I drop the cup and the handle breaks of, then it becomes a bowl?” to which comes the reply, “No, it’s a broken cup.” A missing handle does not change the cup’s “cupness.” While this might seem like a trivial example, the pioneering sociolinguist William Labov (1973) used “bowlness” and “cupness” in an experiment to better understand how speakers go about creating linguistic categories. A series of simple line drawings was shown to participants who were asked to decide if the pictures were more like a cup or a bowl. Taylor reports, “Contrary to the expectations of classical theory, there was no clear dividing line between CUP and BOWL; rather, the one category merged gradually into the other” (see Taylor 1991: 40–42 for a description of this experiment and its implications for linguistic categorization). In essence, using our world knowledge, we know a cup or a bowl when we see one, even if there is not much diference between the two. Examining again the present/future example, prototypical categories help us understand how language use varies. To do this, we can record a number of USMS speakers and then listen to how they use a form like hablará “(someone) will speak,” technically the synthetic future, in their conversations. We set up two categories, “present” and “future,” and then classify each occurrence of a verb that falls into one or the other. After this classification, we count everything up and find that, of the total of such verb forms, speakers use 7% for a future reference and 70% for the present (Villa Cresap 1997: 61). That is, while speakers do use forms like hablará for the future (like the Spanish textbook says it should be), they are more likely to use it for the present (a fact that the textbook studiously ignores). We return now to the use of terms such as “idiolect,” “dialect,” “variety,” and “language.” If each is used to label a prototypical category, instead of an Aristotelian one, there is no need for clearly delimited divisions. A metaphor from the physical world for this is the light spectrum visible to the human eye. The electromagnetic waves that make up color are continuous in nature. We label certain focal points as, say, “green” and “yellow,” but green does not stop being green at a clearly defined wavelength. Rather, one blends into the other, with green becoming less green and yellow getting yellower as the wavelength frequency changes. To illustrate this, consider the following words and decide if they are French or English: attention constitution

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location vacation aviation solution administration table Consulting French and English dictionaries will not help you, as these words appear in both exactly as they are written previously. Without any context, you cannot tell the diference between the two, and in an Aristotelian world, that means French cannot be distinguished from English; a word from one language cannot be part of another. Thus, they could not be counted as two languages. However, if we think of “languages” as prototypical categories, there can exist overlap between the two without destroying those categories. As with the light spectrum metaphor, there is no precise point at which one language ends and another starts. Rather, the two categories merge into one another. Makoni and Pennycook (2006) suggest re-thinking how it is that we go about referring to the notion of “language.” They assert that, in reconsidering how we approach language study, an important point of departure “starts with the premise that languages, conceptions of languageness and the metalanguages used to describe them are inventions” (2006: 1, italics in original). We suspect that a prototypical categorization construct can support that re-thinking. Going back to the French/English example, we can have overlap between the two in vocabulary. Prototypical focal points that serve to differentiate between the two are their vowel systems, among other features. As with cups and bowls, we can tell the diference between the two, relying on those focal points. The same holds true for a construct such as “variety.” Northern Mexican Spanish and USMS have quite a bit of overlap, but the fact that the latter exists in intense contact with English sets it apart from the former. Monoglossic ideology The case of Spanish

If employing a system of prototypical categorization helps to better understand a phenomenon such as language, the fact remains that discrete categories such as “Spanish,” “English,” “French,” and the like are deeply ingrained in both popular and academic thought. Regarding language scholars, Lippi-Green (1997: 61) observes: One very thorny problem that is not raised very often by sociolinguists is the fact that we are, as individuals and as a group, just as hampered by language ideology as the rest of the population. . . . This is best illustrated by the fact that most sociolinguists continue to use terms like standard and (worse still) non-standard even while they are arguing that these terms are ideological and inaccurate (emphasis in original).

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Note the binary distinction “standard/non-standard.” The persistence of this tendency stems in part from the fact that at some point in time, someone decided human verbal and/or written communication could be neatly divided into languages, varieties, dialects, and idiolects, each forming the distinct and inviolable Aristotelian categories we discuss previously. Further, these categories could be studied apart from those who speak it, as if what we call “language” or “variety” were some sort of a geologic formation. However, words like “language,” “variety,” “dialect,” and “ideolect” are not natural things like a mountain or a valley, but rather a certain way of thinking about human communication that people have developed over the centuries. Some of these terms, like “noun” or “verb,” have been around for such a long time that we might think they ARE like a mountain or a valley, something in existence long before humans showed up. But someone invented those grammatical terms. In classifying the ways that humans communicate with one another, grammarians took the Latin “nomen,” “name,” and “verbum,” “word,” and used them to classify words as nouns and verbs. If mountains and valleys existed before humans did, nouns and verbs did not. So who was the very first “someone” that started to carve up languages into neat categories and put them into grammars? We do not have the answer to that question. But with regard to Spanish, we can point to a documented event in the emergence of a monoglossic ideology grounded in Aristotelian philosophy. The date is 1492, the year Nebrija’s Gramatica de la lengua castellana appeared. That grammar served to codify the language variety spoken in Castile so that it could function as the ofcial means of communication in the newly formed political entity labeled Spain. That way of speaking needed to be set apart from the other kinds of language found in the Iberian Peninsula. Nebrija needed to divide castellano into clearly defined categories that could be used to establish it as the preferred way of talking and writing about the business of administering the nascent empire and extending it as well. With the Moors vanquished as rivals, the Reyes Católicos could turn their attention to expanding their dominion. To undertake the enterprise of empire-building, a list of the necessary implements would include spears, swords, muskets, cannons, and ships, as well as the combatants to use those tools to subjugate hostile opponents. You might think that an odd addition to said list would be a grammar. Yet it would be a crucial tool for the Spaniards in their invasion of new territories. Whether or not Nebrija perceived of his Gramatica as an implement for conquest and oppression is a matter of debate. In the Foreword to his work, he remarks: [C]uando en Salamanca di la muestra de aquesta obra a Vuestra Real Majestad, i me pregunto que para que podia aprovechar, el mui reverendo padre Obispo de Avila me arrebato la respuesta, i respondiente por mi dixo: que, despues que Vuestra Alteza metiesse debaxo de su iugo muchos pueblos barbaros i naciones de peregrinas lenguas, i conel vencimiento aquellos ternian necesidad de recebir las leies quel vencedor pone al vencido i con ellas nuestra lengua. (1946: 10–11)

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[W]hen in Salamanca I gave a sample of this work to Your Royal Majesty, and you asked me what it might be good for, the very reverend father Bishop of Avila interrupted me, and replying for me said: that, after Your Highness had put under your yoke many barbarous peoples and nations of foreign tongues, with that conquest they would need to receive the laws that the victor imposes on the vanquished and with them our language. (our translation) Whether it was the Bishop of Ávila or Nebrija himself who perceived of the Gramatica as a necessary tool in the arsenal of conquest is not of concern here; rather, it is the fact that, in the business of empire-building, Spanish was weaponized. That weapon required a finely honed cutting edge. Some amorphous representation of language could not be wielded with precision. Hence the need for the “clearly defined object” that Fuller and Leeman (2020: 18) refer to. In delimiting Castilian, by creating distinct boundaries that set it apart from, say, Aragonese or Galician, the Spanish Crown could provide its military and religious forces with the means for training the subjugated “barbarous peoples” to understand and speak Spanish, facilitating the imposition of Spanish administration, laws, and religion. As noted in Chapter 3, the imposition of the Queen Isabella’s Vulgar Latin variety, castellano, was ultimately unsuccessful in the Americas, but the monoglossic ideology Nebrija relied on to record her form of the language very much remains with us. Human-made artifacts such as grammars and dictionaries are useful tools in attempting to better understand the complexities of the human communication system we call “language.” However, it becomes easy to slip into an ideology that transforms those tools into preternatural truths that define what language is or is not, especially if we have had those tools around for centuries. Going back to the example of the verb conjugations in Spanish 101, if students challenge the answers on an exam, all the instructor has to do is invoke the textbook to justify a grading decision. Both students and instructors alike have been socialized to believe that the contents of grammars and dictionaries are infallible and impartial measures of what is true about language and what is not. To illustrate this socialization, consider the measurement called a “meter.” The length of a meter is currently defined as the length of the path of light as it travels in a vacuum over a fraction of a second. Since this does not change anywhere in the world, a meter is a meter no matter where you go. We tend to accept such determinations without question, as they are scientific. As with Nebrija’s Gramatica, in Western society we can point to a specific time when a particular tradition emerges as a force in shaping human thought, in this case, about science. In western Europe, the year is 1663 when a group of “natural philosophers and physicians” received royal approval to form the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Its motto, Nullius in verba, “is taken to mean ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment” (https://royalsociety.

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org/about-us/history/). We expect meters, minutes, liters, grams, and so on to be unerringly accurate as science has been used to quantify them. This inculcation can apply to language as well. The creation of the Royal Society as an arbiter of knowledge was not a unique event in western Europe during that era. If Nebrija’s Gramatica provided a starting point for forging Castilian into an efective weapon for conquest and subjugation, the Spanish Empire needed a way to keep it well-honed and oiled. Thus, the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) came into being in 1713; its motto was “limpia, fija y da esplandor” (cleans, sets, and gives splendor). Article II of its Statutes establishes that one of its principal tasks is the creation and maintenance of a dictionary and Article IV that another is the elaboration of a grammar (www.rae.es). These language tools provide valuable support for analyzing many intricacies of the Spanish language, but their centuries of existence have resulted in the common belief that they determine what Spanish is and what it is not. They provide the “standard” with which to measure all Spanish varieties. In the following, we address this standard language ideology. Standard language ideology

A monoglossic ideology that posits the existence of a single named language with well-defined internal and external boundaries feeds directly into a standard language ideology. In discussing the latter construct, Fuller and Leeman (2020: 73) cite LippiGreen (2012: 67), who defines this ideology as a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant block institutions and which names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class. The emphasis in the citation is ours; pointing out these components of a standard language ideology is key, as in Chapter 2 we introduce the notion of an idiolect. If everyone speaks a language somewhat diferently, it is not possible to have a homogenous version of that language. Due to this fact, those who produce grammars and dictionaries must perforce try to distill what they consider to be a language’s essence, hence the need for abstraction and idealization. Again, such distillations might prove valuable for certain analyses, but our socialization to accept books, particularly technical ones, as unquestionable comes in to play. To illustrate this, we return to the Spanish 101 class, where the students are now taking a vocabulary test on food. They are asked to give the Spanish word for “pie.” Those who studied the night before write down “tarta.” Those who went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant instead of hitting the books enter “pay” (rhymes with “Thai”). The instructor grades the tests, and the learners who provided the latter answer have points taken of. Those who wrote “pay” protest they saw that word on the restaurant’s menu and on ordering “pay” did indeed get a slice

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of pie. The instructor replies that “pay” is not in the textbook, and, to further drive the point home, brings up the RAE’s website, www.rae.es, and enters the word “pay” in its online dictionary. The dictionary states, “La palabra pay no está en el Diccionario,” no “pay” is found. The instructor now has incontrovertible evidence from two authoritative sources that justify taking of points for “pay.” The students who lost points on the test might then ask, if “pay” is not a word, then why is it on the menu? The instructor replies that “pay” is slang, and “tarta” is the correct word. The students, having been socialized that using slang in their native tongue around the house is okay, but not at school, have little other choice than to acquiesce. They know that if you’re at school, you have to use “good” English, not the street stuf, so Spanish has to be the same. Again, this might seem like a trite example, but it represents a very real situation with regard to USMS. Any number of researchers who study it will frequently refer to its “non-standard” features, noted in the Lippi-Green (1997) citation earlier. They take for granted that everyone knows what standard Spanish is, relying on the Aristotelian binary distinction of standard/non-standard. Regarding the “standard language” construct, Leeman (2012) establishes that: Although many laypeople and linguists alike use the term ‘standard language’ to refer to language varieties perceived to be, and free of regionalisms, researchers working within the framework of language ideologies argue that given the inherent variability of language, such varieties do not actually exist. (48–49, our emphases) You may have noticed our continued insistence that what we present in this book is firmly grounded in how people speak USMS. While we do employ language abstractions throughout this volume, we draw those from actual speech samples. If you were to say, “I want to see some of those samples for myself!” we would tell you to search the Internet with a phrase like “unam español del suroeste.” That will take you to the website containing transcripts of conversations with USMS speakers collected by Juan M. Lope Blanch and his team of researchers. In that way, you can turn our abstractions back into real speech to verify if those abstractions hold up or not. You cannot do the same for standard Spanish. You might find recordings or transcripts of the speech of upper-middle-class speakers from the capital cities of Argentina, Uruguay, or Ecuador. These, in theory, would be the “standard Spanish” speakers who use a “neutral, correct, and uniform” version of the language. Yet that speech would not be uniform in the sense that a meter or a gram is. There will always exist some feature in the sounds, grammar, or vocabulary that sets it apart from other varieties of Spanish. You cannot turn an abstracted “standard Spanish” back into real speech, because nobody speaks that way. The long tradition of writing in Spanish, and about how to write it, contributes centrally to the standard language ideology that surrounds it. We have mentioned Nebrija’s Gramatica as an important point in the institutionalizing of that ideology,

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but he certainly was not the first to attempt to codify it. Hidalgo (2018: 38) writes, “The precedent to normalization of Spanish medieval usages can be found in the intense work of Alfonso X the Learned (1221–1284) who was determined to set the rules of castellano drecho (correct Castilian) since the mid-13th century.” Almost eight centuries of attempts to “normalize” Spanish weigh heavily on modern thought about what the “correct” form of the language might be, either written or spoken. Nonetheless, we must set aside the standard language ideology in order to have a clearer picture of what USMS consists of. Aristotle simply cannot lend us a hand in this task. Regional variation

In Chapter 2, we address the notion of boundaries, political, geographic, and demographic. You will notice we use phrases like “Washington Spanish,” “traditional New Mexican Spanish,” “southern Colorado Spanish,” “Kansas Spanish,” and the like to refer to various dialects of USMS. However, as noted in Chapter 2, these borders are often completely arbitrary, consisting of little more than lines on a map and a collection of survey monuments out in the countryside. These borders can be completely re-drawn. Woodard’s (2011) American Nations and, earlier, Garreau’s (1981) Nine Nations of North America remap the United States based not on political borders or geography but rather on the peoples that inhabit the lands. Both authors designate the southwestern regions we study here as “El Norte” and “Mexamerica,” respectively, reflecting their current demographic composition and the historical connections with Mexico. At the same time, geography does come into play. The earliest Spanish-speaking settlers in the West followed reliable sources of water in their migrations northward, an absolutely essential requirement as they passed through the high Chihuahuan desert. If you look at a current map of west Texas and central New Mexico, you will find that many of the place-names along the Rio Grande are Spanish: El Paso, Las Cruces, Socorro, Albuquerque, Bernalillo, Alcalde, and Embudo. As those settlers established themselves in what is now northern New Mexico, they moved into the watersheds outside the Rio Grande valley, founding communities such as Santa Cruz, Tierra Amarilla, Truchas, Trampas, Coyote, Gallina, and Questa [sic], to name only a few. Moving away from the Rio Grande, you find English place-names: Silver City, Lordsburg, Caprock, Lovington, Hobbs, Clovis, and Carlsbad. The descendants of those early settlers are the traditional New Mexican Spanish (TNMS) speakers that Bills and Vigil (2008) identify. During the early period of settlement in the upper reaches of the Rio Grande and the surrounding watersheds, population growth came mainly from within the communities; continued migration from the south was minimal (Sanz and Villa 2011). This allowed for a certain degree of homogeneity in the development of TNMS and its emergence as a unique dialect in the Spanish of the Americas. The same holds true for geographic regions in northern Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas. Watersheds, river valleys,

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mountains, grasslands, deserts, and other geologic features impacted the settlement patterns of early Spanish speakers, and thus how the dialects of Spanish they spoke developed. As time passed, though, technological and transportation advances began to reduce the geographically determined isolation of the far-flung Spanish-speaking populations. Animal-drawn carretas (carts) with solid wooden wheels gave way to spokewheeled carros or guayines (wagons). The Santa Fe Trail linked western Missouri to the Camino Real and thus Mexico City. Later, the coming of the railroads provided a web of transportation throughout northern Mexico and the western United States. Railroads not only lured Spanish-speaking workers to north but also carried refugees out of war-torn regions during the Mexican Revolution. Dirt tracks gave way to paved roads, and the automobile could access areas that the railways did not reach. Even more recently, air travel reduces trips that took days or weeks to a matter of hours. Modern airliners traveling at an altitude of 30,000 feet are not bounded by any geographic feature, only by the places where they can take of and land. Reduced mobility caused by geographic barriers gave rise to the possibility of the appearance of unique language features. The ability to move over long distances facilitates the spread of those features. We find an appropriate metaphor for these processes in genetics. As early humans moved out of Africa, they could travel in a day only as far as they could walk. Ice sheets, ocean levels, mountains, savannas, and the food supplies all limited their movements. Populations remained in certain regions for thousands of years, long enough for them to develop unique genetic markers that geneticists can now use to track the human diaspora over the face of the globe (see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans). Modern mobility now allows for the mixing of those unique features. For example, graduate students from Central Asia can come to the United States to pursue their education. While in school, they may partner with other international students from, say, northern Europe and decide to have children. Those ofspring will have genetic features from populations that formerly were widely dispersed. Unless their parents provide them with details about their ancestry, those individuals may find themselves as adults mailing DNA samples to a company that promises to open a window into their distant past for a nominal fee. Such is the case with language, although the changes occur during a much shorter time span. In the language difusion we present here, groups of Vulgar Latin speakers from diverse backgrounds in the Italic Peninsula migrate to a new geographic region, the Iberian Peninsula. There, over the span of some 1,400 years, new dialects of the older Vulgar Latin emerge. Speakers of those dialects crossed the Atlantic to invade the Americas and, in doing so, merged the older dialects into newer ones almost immediately, passing them on to indigenous peoples. Over some 300 years, those mixed groups migrated north and ultimately encountered speakers of diferent languages, resulting in further modifications of their dialects. At each major point in this process, we can tie language change to a region.

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The historic progression described in the preceding paragraphs takes place roughly from 200 CE to 1848 CE, constrained to one degree or another by geography. From about the middle of the 19th century to the present, wagons, trains, automobiles, and finally airplanes, began to erase those geographic impediments, and populations of USMS speakers started, and continue, to flow like rivers between various regions of the West, northern Mexico as well as other regions of the Spanish-speaking world. In 1700, a trip from Mexico City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, may have taken many months; now it can be accomplished in less than a day. The same goes for travelers between León, Zacatecas, Portland, Denver, San José, Dallas, or Tulsa. Bills and Vigil (2008: 155–157) ofer a concrete example of this language diffusion. They analyze the distribution of the word cunque, “cofee grounds” or “crumbs,” one of a few lexical items in USMS that come from a northern New Mexican Puebloan language. As such, it serves as a unique “marker.” It would have entered TNMS during the period of geographic isolation in the 16th and 17th centuries that characterized all regions north of Mexico City. Then, as population movements became more common, that term was distributed throughout New Mexico and down into Chihuahua (see Bills and Vigil 2008, Map 9–1: 156). As the authors note, “New Mexican Spanish seems to have contributed something to Mexican Spanish other than Anglicisms” (2008: 155). On a larger scale, the same is true for the word bil, “bill for water, gas, electricity, etc.” Espinosa (1914) attests this form in TNMS at the turn of the 19th century. USMS speakers in Washington State, a much more recently founded speech community, also employ that word (Villa et al. 2014). This common usage demonstrates that certain items can be linked to a geographic region but can no longer be characterized as bounded by that region. This is true for items such as truje, “I brought.” Such forms are often ascribed to TNMS as “archaisms,” leftovers from the early colonial years, and not found in other varieties of “modern” Spanish. Yet that form is also used in Washington State by individuals who moved there directly from northern Mexico (Villa et al. 2014). In addition, a quick check of the ofcial corpus of the Real Academia Española, CORPES, reveals that truje occurs eight times, with six of the uses coming from Mexico, one from Honduras, and one from Venezuela (https://apps2.rae.es/CORPES/). In other words, forms such as truje are not unique to USMS but are also encountered across international boundaries. Regarding the current movements of USMS-speaking populations, the linguistic literature often mentions that work in the agricultural and construction sectors motivates migration. In addition, quality-of-life issues can enter into the “decision to migrate” equation. As we have noted, USMS speakers occupy all levels of society and are not principally bound to low-wage jobs to the same degree as they may have been in the past. Thus, USMS speakers may be motivated to move by factors such as real estate prices. If it becomes virtually impossible to aford a house in California’s Bay Area, perhaps Oregon or Texas become more attractive places to live. If the West Coast forest fires render life unbearable there,

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then maybe Albuquerque is the place to move to. If the cold, damp Washington weather becomes depressing, then perhaps the dry, sunny Tucson climate presents a more livable alternative. Given this modern demographic fluidity, we agree with Erker’s (2017: 2) reservations about “the idea that languages can be delineated into regionally circumscribed varieties.” USMS speakers are no longer tied by geographic constraints to any particular region in the areas we study. They can move rapidly from place to place in response to economic, educational, familial, or other factors that drive migration. If we refer to “Washington Spanish” or “Oregon Spanish,” we do not imply that any dialectal features are circumscribed by the political boundaries between those two states; rather, they are points of reference that indicate where USMS speaker populations can be found. Given those geographic foci, we can then use tools such as those provided by the Census to better understand certain demographic characteristics of those populations, or to choose where we might wish to go in order to conduct field research. At the same time, the arbitrary delimitations between countries and states have concrete implications for their inhabitants. As Saraceni and Jacob (2019: 1) write, “named languages and their borders do exist and play very important roles not only as layman’s concepts but also as part of the long process of political and cultural decolonization in many parts of the world.” As an example, at the beginning of the 19th century, people could travel from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, as freely as they could from Baltimore, Maryland, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the 21st century, they no longer can, as the former trip requires extensive governmental documentation that the latter does not. USMS speakers residing in New Mexico enjoy state constitutional language protections that their neighbors in Arizona, Colorado, and Texas do not. California has passed English-only legislation that Texas has not. We do not argue that language is neatly bounded by inventions such as state borders, but rather that the regions in which USMS speakers live have an impact on their day-to-day sociopolitical realities. Social class and language subordination: the standard language ideology applied

In Chapter 5, we discuss the interactions between the race construct and agency. We assert that the construct of race has begun to fall by the wayside as a legal means of discrimination against USMS speakers, due in part to their increased societal agency as well as to changes in federal legislation. However, language use is not protected under law as civil rights are. Lippi-Green (1997: 66) observes: We do not, cannot under our laws, ask a person to change the color of her skin, her religion, her gender, her sexual identity, but we regularly demand of people that they suppress or deny the most efective way they have of situating themselves socially in the world.

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Here we turn to the issue of conflict between USMS speakers and speakers of other varieties of Spanish. The standard language construct is particularly pertinent to a discussion of the attempted suppression of USMS that we present in Chapter 6. To begin, remember that historically, speakers of the popular forms of the language have disseminated Spanish. It was Vulgar, not Classical, Latin that was exported to the Iberian Peninsula, and the elite Peninsular variety, Castilian, never did take root in the Americas. The majority of those who carried Spanish northward from Mexico City spoke popular Spanish dialects, while the elites remained behind. That remains the case to the present. Those Spanish speakers who have populated the western United States are generally not the writers, poets, and language scholars that make up the governing bodies of the Spanish language academies. Yet the tendency to attempt suppressing their way of speaking the language continues. Cashman (2010: 327), in her examination of the status of Spanish in Arizona, quotes Lippi-Green (1997: 73), who writes that “[accent discrimination is] so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination.” Cashman then continues: Unfortunately, the recent wave of anti-immigrant, anti-Spanish backlash in Arizona indicates that the door is a little more open than Lippi-Green might have thought. Researchers and students of Spanish, linguists in particular, and particularly those who study Spanish in the Southwest, need to ask themselves what it will take to close that door. (2010: 327) We extend the concept of “accent discrimination” to include all other aspects of USMS that have been commonly labeled “non-standard.” In the application of the standard/non-standard ideology to USMS, Hidalgo (1990: 111), after reviewing the construct of a “standard” language, concludes that “the criteria of establishing the distinction between a language and a dialect are not well defined,” clearly departing from an Aristotelian-based binary distinction. She continues to note that “in some Latin American countries the speech variety spoken in the national capital represents the ideal linguistic norm and a model worthy of imitation” (Hidalgo 1990: 111). This assertion casts “standard” squarely into the role of “the paradigm case” or “the best there is.” Thus, the identification of a standard is not founded in linguistic analyses but rather on the political and philosophical stance of those who are in the position to make the choice. If racial discrimination is illegal, social discrimination is not. It remains to be seen if normative organizations such as the RAE and ANLE, along with adherents to the ideologies they promulgate, will have any success in their attempts to impose other Spanish-speaking countries’ social and linguistic norms on USMS speakers. We present our take on this issue in Chapter 13. 

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Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 8

1 Think about how you use prototypical categorization. For example, if friends are visiting from out of town and ask you to recommend a good local restaurant, what are the most important aspects of making that recommendation? What are the central aspects of that category, and what features are less important? This applies to just about any choice you make when there are a variety of options. In reaching a decision, how do you go about choosing which cell phone, cell phone plan, car, shoes, clothes, computer, or flat-screen TV to purchase? 2 Can you identify instances when you use an Aristotelean category to make a decision? When does a binary option serve to reach a decision on something? In other words, what things are “black-and-white” for you, when it is one but not the other, with no gray areas? For example, for strict vegans, any foodstuf containing meat is completely excluded from their diet. There is no gray area; anything containing even a very small amount of meat is unacceptable. 3 Regarding the construct of a “standard language,” does it have an impact in the “real world”? For example, if a chemistry professor assigns a writing exercise, should that instructor take points of an essay if a student writes “your” instead of “you’re,” that is, something that has nothing to do with chemistry? Should a business manager not hire a job applicant because the candidate has a distinct regional accent in either Spanish or English? Remember, there is no legal protection for discrimination based on language use as there is for age, gender, ethnic origin, etc. 4 In the past, geography, difculty of travel, and lack of fast communication affected how languages interacted and evolved. How is it diferent today? Do languages change more or less frequently? Think of some specific examples and try to identify the motivations for the changes. 5 In your opinion, who speaks the “best” Spanish or the “best” English? Why does that person or group qualify as being the best speaker(s)?  Additional readings Erker, Daniel. 2017. The limits of named language varieties and the role of social salience in dialectal contact: The case of Spanish in the United States. Language and Linguistics Compass 11: 1–20. Hidalgo, Margarita. 1990. On the question of ‘standard’ vs. ‘dialect’: Implications for teaching Hispanic college students. Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic Issues, John L. Bergen (ed.), 110–126. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge. Taylor, John R. 1991. Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Chapters 2 and 3 are particularly relevant for this discussion.) Villa, Daniel J. 1996. Choosing a “standard” variety of Spanish for the instruction of native Spanish speakers in the U.S. Foreign Language Annals 9(2): 191–200. 

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References Bills, Garland D., and Neddy A. Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Cashman, Holly R. 2010. Research, responsibility and repression: Anti-bilingualism in Arizona. Spanish in the Southwest: A language in transition, Susana V. Rivera-Mills and Daniel J. Villa (eds.), 319–336. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Erker, Daniel. 2017. The limits of named language varieties and the role of social salience in dialectal contact: The case of Spanish in the United States. Language and Linguistics Compass 11: 1–20. Espinosa, Aurelio M. 1914. Studies in New Mexican Spanish, part III: The English elements. Revue de Dialectologie Romane 6: 241–317. Fuller, Janet M., and Jennifer Leeman. 2020. Speaking Spanish in the US: The sociopolitics of language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Garreau, Joel. 1981. The nine nations of North America. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifin. Hidalgo, Margarita. 1990. On the question of ‘standard’ vs. ‘dialect’: Implications for teaching Hispanic college students. Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic issues, John L. Bergen (ed.), 110–126. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Hidalgo, Margarita. 2018. Diversification of Mexican Spanish: A tridimensional study in New World sociolinguistics. Berlin: de Gruyter. Labov, William. 1973. The boundaries of words and their meaning. New ways of analyzing variation in English, Charles J. Bailey and Roger W. Shuy (eds.), 340–373. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Leeman, Jennifer. 2012. Investigating language ideologies in Spanish as a heritage language. Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: The state of the field, Sara M. Beaudrie and Marta Fairclough (eds.), 43–60. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge. Makoni, Sinfree, and Alastair Pennycook. 2006. Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Disinventing and reconstituting languages, Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook (eds.), 1–41. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, Internet resource. Nebrija, Antonio de. 1946 [1492]. Gramática castellana, texto establecido sobre la ed. “princeps” de 1492. Madrid: Talleres de D. Silverio Aguirre y de Gráficas Reunidas. Sanz, Israel, and Daniel J. Villa. 2011. The genesis of Traditional New Mexican Spanish: The emergence of a unique dialect in the Americas. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 4: 417–442. Saraceni, Mario, and Camille Jacob. 2019. Revisiting borders: Named languages and decolonization. Language Sciences 76: 1–10. Smith, Robin. 2020. Aristotle’s logic. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/aristotle-logic/. Taylor, John R. 1991. Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Villa, Daniel J., Naomi Lapidus Shin, and Eva Robles Nagata. 2014. La nueva frontera: Spanish-speaking populations in Central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: 149–172. Villa Cresap, Daniel. 1997. El desarrollo de futuridad en el español. México, DF: Eón. Woodard, Colin. 2011. American nations: A history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America. New York: Viking.

9 THE LEXICON Part 1

200 BCE to 1492 CE

We assert earlier that Spanish in general and USMS in particular are direct descendants of Vulgar Latin. We stress here that Spanish did not borrow words from Vulgar Latin; it is Latin, albeit a modern version. One way to verify this is through Mark Davies’ (2006) Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. This is a collection of the 5,000 most common words in Spanish, drawn from a corpus of 20 million words containing both written and oral texts from around the Spanish-speaking world (see Davies 2006, Introduction, for a detailed description of the corpus). The words are ranked by how often they appear in the corpus; number 1 is el, la, “the,” with cueva, “cave,” being number 5,000. We categorized the first 200 most common words in Davies’ dictionary with regard to their grammatical function and their origin. That gave the following results. Function words such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns are the grammatical glue that hold Latin-origin languages together, in this case forming the foundation of Spanish. As you can see, these words are the very most common in Table 9.1 but drop of quickly in number as the list progresses toward the lesser common items. The number of verbs is fairly evenly distributed, given the fact that some verbs such as ser and estar, both meaning “to be,” also serve mainly grammatical functions. Nouns, which tend not to have grammatical functions, are scarce in the first 50 items but begin to appear with increasing frequency as the grammatical items drop of. In all cases, these items, the foundations of Spanish, come from Latin forms. The single exception lies in the verbs. Of the 43 forms encountered in the 200 most common words, all are Latinate, except for tomar “to take,” empezar “to begin,” and buscar “to look for.” Scholars who specialize in Spanish etymology, or where words come from, often list these as origen incierto, “uncertain origin.” These last three DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-11

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TABLE 9.1 Grammatical function and origin, 200 most common words in Spanish

Function

Frequency: 1–50

Frequency: 51–100

Frequency: 101–150

Frequency: 151–200

% Latin origin

Article Preposition Conjunction Pronoun Verb Adverb Noun Adjective Cardinal number

3 8 8 7 11 3 1 9 0

0 2 2 5 13 9 7 9 2

0 1 3 4 11 7 13 10 1

0 1 1 3 11 6 22 5 1

100% 100% 100% 100% 93% 100% 100% 100% 100%

point to the fact that Latin, be it Vulgar or Classical, did not suddenly spring up fully formed in the Italic Peninsula. Rather, it demonstrates influences from other Italic languages, such as Oscan and Umbrian. To just what degree these two languages share common roots with Latin is a matter of debate. Elerick (1983) points this out, but grounding his work on inscriptions found in historical sources, such as the Iguvine Tablets, a lengthy document inscribed on bronze plates from the 1st or 2nd century BCE. He asserts, “I present evidence drawn directly from the materials [i.e. the Tablets] that attest Oscan and Umbrian and attempt to show how features of those Italic languages have interacted with Latin at the formative stages of ProtoSpanish” (1983: 1). He continues to note that Oscan and Umbrian existed in what is now Italy until at least AD 200, and that there was a 500-year period of contact between those languages and Vulgar Latin, resulting in a mixing of those forms of communication. Thus, there is a good chance that a number of the words found in the Vulgar Latin exported to the Iberian Peninsula may have come from Oscan or Umbrian, and the blending of the languages shaped the way that Vulgar Latin was to develop in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ. So in a very real sense, from the very beginning, Spanish grew out of what some might call “impurities,” or language contact. Whatever the case of early Spanish might be, there is absolutely no doubt that during its development in the Iberian Peninsula, it absorbed words from many diferent languages. Scholars such as Joan Corominas (1980), Rafael Lapesa (1981), Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1950), Ralph Penny (1991), Melvyn Resnick (1981), and Robert Spaulding (1943), to name but a few, have documented the borrowing from other languages into Spanish. This situation was the case from the earliest Roman migrations to the Iberian Peninsula; the Latin-speaking settlers who migrated to what is now Spain and Portugal adopted words from the peoples who preceded them. As a result, in USMS, the terms cerveza “beer”; álamo, which can mean “poplar” but, in USMS, almost always means “cottonwood tree”; gancho “hook”; camino “road”; camisa “shirt”; carpintero “carpenter”; carro “cart” and, more recently, “automobile”;

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and cabaña “cabin” or “hut” are all thought to have originated in the Celtic languages spoken in the Peninsula before the arrival of the Romans. Another source for early borrowings was the Basque language; from it we find cachorro “puppy”; chaparro, earlier, “dwarf oak,” but almost always now meaning “short person”; izquierdo “the direction left”; legaña “what you find in the corner of your eye when you wake up in the morning”; and urraca “magpie,” among others. Another important early source was Greek, which loaned words to Vulgar Latin even before it reached the Iberian Peninsula. They became such a part of spoken Latin that most of those who used the language probably did not recognize them as borrowings. Thus, we have terms from Greek such as baño “bath,” cuchara “spoon,” lámpara “lamp,” piedra “stone,” plaza “town” or “square,” sábana “sheet for a bed,” cereza “cherry,” espárrago “asparagus,” to name just a few. And Spanish has continued to borrow words from Greek, as it has often been used as a source for scientific, literary, or technical terms. As a result, we find anatomía “anatomy,” estómago “stomach,” gramática “grammar,” clima “climate” or “weather,” academia “academy,” idioma “language,” problema “problem,” and many, many others. As noted in Chapter 3, the Roman Empire fell into decline around the 4th and 5th centuries CE, brought about in part by the invasion of Germanic tribes from northern Europe. During the 5th century CE, a sizable portion of the Iberian Peninsula came under the control of the Vandals and Swabians, who then were displaced by Visigoths, another of the northern European tribes. An interesting historical note is that, although these conquerors spoke Germanic languages, they eventually abandoned them in favor of Vulgar Latin, so completely so that the number of words taken from Germanic sources are relatively few in number. Among them are banco “bench,” brasa “ember” or “coal,” guerra “war,” jabón “soap,” rico “rich,” robar “to steal,” and tapa “lid” or “cover,” to name a few. The descendants of the Visigoths, who mixed to one degree or another with the Hispano-Romans, held sway in a large part of the Peninsula until 711 CE, the year of the Moorish invasion. The Moors brought tremendous changes to the peninsula, advancing agricultural practices, introducing or re-introducing science, math, chemistry, and changes in everyday household practices. The Arabic they spoke provided words for many new concepts and technologies, in some instances replacing pre-existing Latinate words. For example, they grew new crops like alfalfa “alfalfa,” algodón “cotton,” limones “lemons,” and naranjas, “oranges” and introduced azúcar “sugar,” zanahorias “carrots,” and arroz “rice” into the diet. They watered the crops through systems of acequias “canals,” and albañiles “masons” built houses of adobe “adobe,” decorating them with azulejos “ceramic tiles.” They put alfombras “rugs” or “carpets” on the floors, rested their heads on almohadas “pillows” in the alcobas “bedrooms.” An alcalde “mayor” was responsible for civic administration, making sure that the barrios “neighborhoods” were well cared for and peaceable, especially if there were those who partook of alcohol “alcohol.” The list goes on and on, but as you can see from the earlier examples, some of the most common, everyday words in Spanish are, in fact, Arabic.

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The Moors maintained a presence in the Iberian Peninsula for some eight centuries, although shrinking in numbers until the last Moorish rulers were expelled in 1492, which in part resulted in the Reyes Católicos funding Columbus’ voyages. It is at this point that Spanish ceased to be a Peninsular language as it was spread to the Americas. Up to this historical juncture, all Peninsular dialects shared common roots to one degree or another, which is why words like alcohol “alcohol,” azúcar “sugar,” baño “bath,” boca “mouth,” camisa “shirt,” casa “house,” mapa “map,” ojo “eye,” and temperatura “temperature,” among many others, tend to be recognized throughout the Spanish-speaking world. That is, no matter what dialect the earliest Spanish immigrants spoke, they tended to share such words in common. 1492 to 1848

The lexical commonalities among the European Spanish speakers ceased with their arrival in the Americas. When they invaded what were to them uncharted territories, they encountered many diferent peoples speaking many diferent languages. Spanish speakers had to adapt their language to name unknown flora and fauna, social structures, and cultural practices. The process of borrowing words into Spanish continued apace. The collision with indigenous peoples and their languages left a huge mark on the Vulgar Latin brought to these shores, causing, in part, the appearance of distinct varieties of American Spanish. Again, as our focus is on USMS, we restrict ourselves to contact with North American indigenous languages. The very first interaction the Europeans had with Amerindians was in the Caribbean. As Bills and Vigil note, “the most prominent of the initial lenders were the speakers of several Arawakan and Carib languages in the West Indies” (2008: 80). Columbus and his crews incorporated words such as barbacoa “barbecue,” caimán “alligator,” canoa “canoe,” cacique “ruler” or “leader,” hamaca “hammock,” huracán “hurricane,” and papaya “papaya” into their Spanish. Later, Cortés conquered the Aztecs, but the Spaniards, even being in power, nonetheless borrowed a large number of words from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec people. Thus, we have in modern Mexican Spanish and USMS Nahuatl terms for indigenous plants, animals, and food, such as chocolate “chocolate,” cacao “cocoa,” chile “chile,” aguacate “avocado,” guacamole “guacamole,” tomate “tomato,” chipotle “chipotle,” tamal “tamale,” mezcal “mescal,” coyote “coyote,” ocelote “ocelot,” peyote “peyote,” chayote “chayote,” and mesquite “mesquite.” Nahuatl words were even incorporated when a term already existed in Spanish, as mentioned earlier. Thus, we have tecolote vs. buho “owl,” chapulín vs. saltamontes “grasshopper,” zacate vs. grama or césped “grass,” chapopote vs. brea “tar,” popote vs. paja or pajita “drinking straw,” papalote or güila vs. cometa “kite,” escuincle vs. bebé or infante “baby” or “infant,” chiquihuite vs. canasta “basket,” and mecate vs. soga “rope,” to list a handful. In fact, the borrowings from indigenous peoples in Mexico are so extensive that one researcher, Francisco J. Santamaría (1959), authored a tome titled the Diccionario de mejicanismos (Dictionary of Mexicanisms) that consists of 1,197 pages.

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In Chapter 3, we date the emergence of USMS to the 1546 founding of Zacatecas, an arbitrary point in time. We choose that date and that area due to the fact that the original group of colonists left from that region some 50 years later, in 1598, to settle in what is now the state of New Mexico. The Spanish they spoke at that time demonstrated the mixing of Spanish and Nahuatl previously described. As Bills and Vigil observe, “throughout the early colonial period in Mexico, the Spaniards’ interaction with this new language [Nahuatl] was intimate, particularly so given the frequency of intermarriage and concubinage due to the paucity of Spanish women” (2008: 93). The almost 80 years between the defeat of the Aztecs, the founding of Zacatecas, and the departure of Spanish-speaking colonists to the north witnessed the birth of multiple generations of Spanish-speaking mestizos, and hence the integration of Nahuatl vocabulary into the Spanish of that era. At the same time, we by no means imply that Zacatecas was the sole origin of USMS. The following cities were established during the same era: Querétaro (1531), San Miguel de Allende (1542), Guanajuato (1548), Durango (1563), León (1576), and San Luis Potosí (1592), as well as others. In many cases, the Spaniards built their cities on top of or in close proximity to pre-existing indigenous communities. While Nahuatl is, without question, a principal vocabulary source in Mexican Spanish and USMS, other native languages may have contributed as well. As a result, the subsequent groups of settlers who originally populated the current US Southwest did not speak a homogenous variety of northern Mexican Spanish, due to the distances between the major population centers listed previously. In addition, as observed, earlier roads to the northern territories ran north and south to central Mexico, not east and west between the four population centers at the northern extremes of New Spain. As a result, the settlers for each northern region did not depart from the same points of origin in the same time frames. Oñate and his group arrived at their destination in 1598, while Serra and the California settlers established the first mission there in 1769, over 170 years later. Yet in studying California Spanish of the 18th century, Moyna and Decker note, “[I]t [California Spanish] is a variety closely related to those of Mexico, a claim that can be substantiated with phonological, syntactic, and lexical evidence” (2005: 152). Lipski (2008: 214–220) discusses Sabine River Spanish, now in decline and possibly extinct. The Sabine forms the Texas/Louisiana border, which would have been the extreme eastern edge of the Spanish Empire’s northern frontier. Regarding that region, he notes, “Spain made several attempts to settle eastern Texas and adjoining areas of Louisiana, but it was not until 1716 that missions and then permanent communities were established in Los Aes (San Augustine)” (2008: 215). This would place settlement of that area almost 120 years after the New Mexico colony. Regarding that dialect’s lexical characteristics, he states that Mexicanisms are common: “These are the most abundant in Sabine River Spanish and definitely prove the Mexican provenance of dialect” (2008: 219). He lists such items as guajolote “turkey,” tecolote “owl,” cacahuate “peanut,” zacate “grass,” mecate “rope,” and elote “ear of corn,” all of Nahuatl origin (2008: 219).

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These lexical commonalities, dispersed over space and time, point to the distinct possibility that a closely related group of northern Mexican dialects had emerged during the 16th and 17th centuries. They derived from the early contact between Spanish and Nahuatl speakers in central Mexico’s altiplano while acquiring distinguishing characteristics in northern Mexico. These related dialects were then carried to the northern frontier of the Spanish Empire over a time period of some 170 years and a geographic distance of approximately 1,600 miles, east to west. Of these early dialects, most have disappeared or been largely absorbed, as is the case in Texas and California. Of the earliest colonial USMS dialects, perhaps the only extant one remaining is traditional New Mexican Spanish, as documented in Bills and Vigil’s 2008 Atlas, perhaps due to the larger concentration of Spanish speakers in that state at the time of the Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty. At the same time, the Spanish brought north by the continued post-1848 migrations described in Chapter 3 has been principally that of northern Mexican Spanish speakers, as those individuals have made up the majority of post-1848 arrivals here. If 18th-century California, Arizona, and Texas Spanish was overlain with other dialects, those dialects are of the same provenance as the earlier ones. That is, the linguistic ancestors of both northern Mexican Spanish and USMS speakers are one and the same. We examine this relationship in the following section. The USMS lexicon prior to 1848: an empirical analysis

Given the common roots of USMS with northern Mexican Spanish as well as other world Spanishes as described earlier, we can analyze samples of it in order to better understand the historic layers that make up its dialects. We begin with the lexicon pertaining to the period before Guadalupe Hidalgo, predating widespread contact with English in the United States. We selected a modern USMS speech sample from the Lope Blanch corpus, a transcription of an interview with a 39-year-old male from San Marcos, Texas (for a description of and access to this corpus, search on “unam español suroeste”). He was born and raised in that community; his parents were also born and raised in the same area. He reports that both his maternal and paternal grandparents were originally from Parras, Mexico. Only the speech from this individual was included; the question and comments of the interviewer, from Mexico City, were excluded. This resulted in a sample of 4,010 words. We then determined the origin of each word in the sample. As a guide, we selected the 30 most common words in Spanish from the Davies dictionary described earlier. For those who do not have the Frequency Dictionary handy, we list those 30 most common words (Davies 2006: 12) in Table 9.2, including with each their frequency number, Latin root, and English equivalent. These 30 most common Spanish words were counted in our sample, resulting in a total of 1,493 items, or 37.2% of the total sample. That is, of the 5,000 most common words Davies (2006) lists, the first 30 represent only 0.6% of that total, yet in the USMS speech sample from San Marcos, they make up over a third of the

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TABLE 9.2 Thirty most common words in Spanish

1 2 3 4

el, la < ille, illa, “the” de < de, “of, from” que < quid, “that, which” y < et, “and”

16 17 18 19

22 23 24

como < quomodo, “like, as” estar < stare, “to be” tener < tenere, “to have” le < ille, third person pronoun, le di, “I gave to him/her” lo < illo, article, “the,” lo mejor es estudiar, “the best thing is to study” lo < illo, pronoun, “it,” lo compré, “I bought it” todo < totus, “all, every” pero < per + hoc, “but, yet, except” más < magis, “more”

25 26 27 28 29 30

hacer < facere, “to do, make” o < aut, “or” poder < potere, “to be able to, can” decir < dicere, “to tell, say” este/a < iste/a, “this” ir < ire, “to go”

5 a < ad, “to, at”

20

6 en < in, “in, on”

21

7 un < unus, “a, an” 8 ser < sedere, “to be” 9 se < se, reflexive pronoun, se lavaron las manos, “they washed their (own) hands” 10 no < non, “no” 11 haber < habere, “to have” 12 por < pro, “by, for, through” 13 con < cum, “with” 14 su < suus, “his/her/their/your” 15 para < per + ad, “for, to, in order to” Source: Davies (2006).

vocabulary. That is, a significant portion of the speaker’s vocabulary comes from the pre-colonial periods, 1492 and earlier. These items represent the language exported to the Americas before it came into contact with indigenous languages here. In order to facilitate the continued analysis, the 30 most common words were removed from the sample. Then, items for place-names of English origin and modern technologies were removed. The reason for omitting these is that place-names cannot be generalized to other dialects or varieties of Spanish, as can the most common 30 words. The exclusion of place-names is common practice in studies of borrowings, since the speakers of the language have no choice but to adopt these words (Poplack et al. 1988; Clegg 2006). Also, some English loans such as televisión entered common usage after the 1848 cutof date. The result is a vocabulary selection of 2,301 words. This portion of the sample consists of the USMS words with Latin roots, while others are borrowings. For example, the relationship terms padres “parents,” hermana “sister,” novia “girlfriend” or “bride,” abuelo “grandfather,” primos “cousins,” and nieto “grandson” are of Latin origin and among the most common 5,000 words. The Latinate origin is true for verbs such as acabar “to finish,” comer “to eat,” correr “to run,” quemar “to burn,” salir “to leave or go out,” and venir “to come.” The same holds for nouns such as casa “house,” comida “food,” domingo “Sunday,” estudiante “student,” octubre “October,” vacaciones “vacation,” and valle “valley.” In this sample, all adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns are Latinate. We did find slim evidence for early borrowings

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from other languages such as escuela “school” from Greek, and barrio “neighborhood” and arroz “rice” from Arabic. One, canicas “marbles,” appears to come from Germanic roots. Regarding post-1492 contact, we only encountered three words from Amerindian languages, specifically, Nahuatl: güila “kite,” tamales “tamales,” and pisca “harvest.” In sum, the pre-1848 USMS lexicon in this sample represents 94.6% of the total text. Of this percentage, the majority is from Vulgar Latin, supporting our claim that USMS is firmly rooted in that language, sharing those roots with all other varieties of world Spanishes. We conclude our analysis by acknowledging that this single sample of USMS cannot be generalized to the USMS macro-dialect we propose; the proportions of vocabulary sources will certainly vary from one sample to the next. At the same time, it represents the idiolect of one speaker, the concrete as opposed to the abstract. In addition, it shares features found in the Spanish spoken in Washington State. As Villa et al. (2014: 157) note, “The lexical items of the participants [in the study] place them squarely within a Mexican variety.” The appearance of significant numbers of Spanish speakers in the Pacific Northwest postdates the 1848 cutof. We mention it here to illustrate the temporal and geographic diferences of the spread of the USMS macro-dialect. English borrowings in the USMS lexicon: returning to the issue of language and power

We choose 1848 as a cutof date as it marks the period in time in which northern Mexican Spanish comes into intimate contact with English as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. We address the post-1848 USMS vocabulary in detail in the following chapter. Here we observe it was in the mid-19th century that the seeds of mistrust toward English as an “invasive species” were sown. We borrow that phrase from the biological sciences in their reference to a plant or animal that causes ecological or economic harm in an environment in which it is not native. The (in) famous tumbleweed, so closely associated with the southwestern landscape, is one example of an invasive species, having been unwittingly imported from the Russian steppes during the late 19th century. From the viewpoint of Spanish language purists, English has been an invasive species since the mid-1800s, causing cultural and economic harm to Spanish-speaking populations around the globe since then. Returning now to the topic of USMS as a variety of global Spanish, the importance of establishing its lexical origins lies in part in a notion circulating in some popular and academic circles that USMS is something other than Spanish, as discussed in Chapter 7. This perception is based in large part on the English-language borrowings in USMS. One example of this misconception is Ilan Stavans’ Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, which we briefly refer to in that chapter. According to Stavans (2003: 3), “Spanglish” is understood as a hodgepodge representing the language of an underclass, a trap that condemns its speakers to a deadend future. In labeling it “a new American language,” he suggests it is no longer

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Spanish. To support his arguments, Stavans includes a glossary of what he considers to be a Spanglish vocabulary. Regarding how he chose which words to include, Stavans writes, “The research that has gone into this volume involved endless hours of reading periodicals and literature from the 19th century to the present” (2003: 55–56, our emphasis). He appears to recur to the common idea that US Spanish is a foreign language recently introduced to this nation, as were other non-English languages during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In doing so, he omits some 2,000 years of history in the preparation of his dictionary. He does take a stab at including historic items. For example, in Stavans’s (2003: 55–250) Spanglish–English lexicon, he lists common-use Latin-based Spanish words, found in non-specialized dictionaries; in the following the definitions are his. These include académico “scholar,” aficionado “enthusiast,” and baile “party,” among others. In and of themselves, these words do not distinguish any one variety of the language from another, that is, “real” Spanish vs. “Spanglish.” Also included are Arabic-origin words, such as adobe “mud and straw mixture used for architecture,” arroz “rice,” and barrio “neighborhood,” all predating the 1492 arrival of Spanish speakers to the Americas. As we have shown earlier, these also do not serve to distinguish any one group of Spanish speakers from another, as they are found in all varieties of Spanish. He includes a handful of words from indigenous languages, such as chile “American Indian chili,” coyote “prairie wolf,” and guacamole “Mexican appetizer salsa made with avocado.” These point toward Mexican dialects of Spanish, but they also do not distinguish those dialects from “a new American language.” Leaving these items to one side, on the whole the majority of his lexicon consists of English-origin words. This plays directly into the narrative that English is contaminating Spanish, the former representing the invasive species mentioned in the preceding text. In Chapter 6, we trace the process of regularizing Castilian in the Iberian Peninsula and the creation of the RAE to ensure order in language development. One result of those eforts has been to engender a stream of publications decrying the corrosive presence of English. García Morales (2009) presents a comprehensive overview of works on English borrowings that stretches back some 50 years. She considers Alfaro’s 1950 Diccionario de anglicismos “Dictionary of Anglicisms” to be a pioneering work on English-origin borrowings into Spanish. Referring to a number of such borrowings, she cites Alfaro (1950), who writes, “[Certain English loans] are English speakers’ phrases that are as much disagreeable as they are unnecessary and quarrelsome with the genius of our language” (García Morales 2009: 19, our translation). More recently, she notes that Pérez Ruiz (1997), who, in analyzing English loans in the information technology field, “urges the avoidance of lexical vices by selecting, if it exists, the term in Spanish [in preference to the English word]” (García Morales 2009: 53, our translation). In a similar vein, Núñez Nogueroles (2017), in her article titled “An up-to-date review of the literature on Anglicisms in Spanish,” examines the impact of English loanwords on Peninsular and Latin American varieties of the language. Regarding the notion of English as a contaminant and the reaction to that supposed

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contamination by certain language researchers, she quotes Pratt (1980), who studies Peninsular Spanish (Núñez Nogueroles 2017: 8). We feel her discussion of this topic encapsulates the contamination narrative we suggest: Pratt accuses them [Spanish etymologists] of, blinded by patriotism, deriving all the present-day words that contain classical elements directly from Latin or Greek. He states that their purist attitude may be linked to a historical event: the idea at that moment was that accepting the loss of the last colonies of the Empire – something which happened in 1898 and which provoked a tremendous shock in Spain for a long time – was enough; they were not going to acknowledge a foreign influence because they saw that as a sign of subordination; another country was more powerful and had a more prestigious language which spread its vocabulary, so the Spanish language, once the colonizer, ran the risk of being colonized. (2017: 8) This centrally locates the contamination narrative within an ideological framework, as opposed to a linguistic one. Regarding the “colonizer as colonized” aspect of that ideology, the ascendancy of English-speaking nations as world powers is certainly a major concern for those who view those political entities as linguistic invaders. As noted in Chapter 7, Franco Trujillo and Lara (2016: 1–2) establish that British English provided the source of English loanwords in Spanish in the 19th and early 20th century, to be replaced about mid-century by US English. This was due in part to the fact that the continentally contiguous United States did not sufer the destructive horrors of war that other world powers did. Its agricultural and industrial infrastructure remained completely intact, humming along in high gear as a result of wartime production. The US economy had outpaced England’s by the late 19th century; by the 20th, it became the largest in the world. We point this out as one result of the US economic expansion is that all varieties of Spanish are now in constant contact with US English. García Morales’s (2009) publication, cited earlier, contains references to studies on borrowings from English into Spanish throughout the Americas and Europe. The Internet, the media, the entertainment, technical, and sports industries, to name only a few conduits, facilitate the exportation of US English vocabulary to all Spanish-speaking countries. The situation of USMS is distinct in the sense that English-origin borrowings result from coexisting with English in the same geographic and social environments. As a result, the range of borrowings may be wider, as they are not filtered through the conduits mentioned earlier. At the same time, it is similar to all other varieties in that the source of the borrowings is exactly the same. Regarding the relationship between language and power, US English as a source for loans is not spreading due to “traditional” imperialism. Both English and Spanish were exported from Europe to the Americas through invasion and occupation. It is the case that the United States exported English to former Mexican regions

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through the 1846 invasion. However, the post–World War II global expansion of US English as a lingua franca, a common international language, is not due to territorial expansion of this country through military conquest. Rather, it is the result of what has come to be known as “soft power,” in contrast with “hard power,” for example, military might. Joseph Nye coined this phrase and defines it as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments” (Nye 2004: x). He principally examines the role of soft power with regard to US foreign politics; we restrict our discussion here to its linguistic impact. Regarding the use of soft power, the conduits mentioned previously are not coercive in nature. Rather, they seek to attract the attention of potential international consumers of US goods, services, and cultural resources through their desire to own cell phones and computers, listen to American pop music, watch Hollywood movies, and learn about networking and programming to better surf the Internet. We again cite Núñez Nogueroles’s (2017: 8) assertion that “the Spanish language, once the colonizer, ran the risk of being colonized” (our emphasis). At many points in this volume we state that languages do not die, compete for dominance, or undergo changes by themselves. They do so as a result of the communities that speak them. Here we assert that English speakers do not impose the use of English words on Spanish speakers. Rather, the latter do so at their own behest. In Chapter 7, we examine the motivations for borrowings from English into Spanish. These are not unique to USMS but serve to better understand the mechanics of such borrowings into all Spanish varieties. You will note that in the literature there is no mention of coercion as a motivator. That is, there exists no coercion in the borrowing process, unless you consider the appeal to someone’s consumeristic, cultural, or technical communicative needs as coercive. To sum up, there are those who predict the demise of Spanish due to the English words it absorbs, or that USMS is something else other than Spanish due to the influence of English. Once more, 2,000 years of history show us that the process of borrowing words into Spanish is the norm, not an exception to the rule. It may be that some monolingual Spanish speakers are not familiar with certain lexical items either in their own variety of Spanish or in USMS, but again this is a norm; as we have noted, no one completely controls the entire vocabulary of their native language. For example, over the years, Villa has presented the following sentence to graduate students who come from all parts of the Spanish-speaking world. 1 El vato estaba en el borlo tirando chancla con su ruca. The reaction was generally one of confusion. There are no English-origin words in the sentence – rather, only those that pertain to some dialects of USMS. Yet in spite of its being written using only Spanish, the speakers of other dialects did not understand its meaning. He then rewrote the sentence, replacing certain lexical items with others:

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2 El joven estaba en la fiesta bailando con su novia. It then became clear to all that both sentences mean “the young man was at a party, dancing with his girlfriend.” The grammar remains exactly the same; only the words change. We have noted several times that if speakers of one dialect of Spanish come into contact with other dialects, some negotiation on what certain words mean will be necessary. In the following chapter we do focus on those items that have English as their origin. However, before doing so, with this section we wish to stress that these have become part and parcel of the USMS lexicon. They do not convert USMS into some other language, rendering it unintelligible to speakers of other Spanish varieties. They join the words from Greek, Basque, Arabic, Taíno, and Nahuatl, among other languages, that have enriched Spanish over the centuries. Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 9

1 Search the Internet for “Arabic in Spanish” and find a vocabulary list for Arabic loanwords in the Spanish language. What are some items other than the ones presented in this chapter? Why would they have been borrowed? 2 Conduct another search as in 1, but using instead the keywords “Nahuatl in Spanish.” Again, what are some items other than the ones presented in this chapter? Why would they have been borrowed? 3 What are Arabic- and Nahuatl-origin words in Spanish that also appear in English, other than the ones presented in this chapter? Why would English speakers have adopted those terms? An online English etymological dictionary will be of help for this exercise. 4 Find a text in Spanish from any source, either in print or online. Select a sentence from that text at random. In that sentence, how many words are of Latin origin? Is the sentence mostly Latinate? If not, what language do the words come from? Consulting the online Diccionario de la lengua español (www.rae.es) will be of help for this exercise. 5 Words such as creation, invention, detention, abstention, and nation trace their roots directly back to Latin. Excluding words that end in -tion, what other terms in English can you identify that come from Latin? Again, an online English etymological dictionary will be of help for this exercise. Additional readings Bills, Garland D., and Neddy A. Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. (Chapters 1–4 are of particular interest for this discussion.) Lapesa, Rafael. 1981. Historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Gredos. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1950. Orígenes del español: Estado lingüístico de la península ibérica hasta el siglo XI. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.

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Moyna, Irene, and Wendy Decker. 2005. A historical perspective on Spanish in the California Borderlands. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 24: 145–167. Penny, Ralph. 1991. A history of the Spanish language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

References Alfaro, Ricardo J. 1970 [1950]. Diccionario de anglicismos. Madrid: Gredos. Bills, Garland D., and Neddy A. Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Clegg, Jens. 2006. Lone English-origin nouns in the Spanish of New Mexico: A variationist analysis of phonological and morphological adaptation. University of New Mexico. Dissertation. Corominas, Joan, and José A. Pascual. 1980. Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico. Madrid: Gredos. Davies, Mark. 2006. A frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners. London: Routledge. Elerick, Charles. 1983. Italic bilingualism and the history of Spanish. Spanish and Portuguese in social contexts, John J. Bergen and Garland D. Bills (eds.), 1–11. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Franco Trujillo, Erik Daniel, and Luis Fernando Lara. 2016. El anglicismo en el español nacional de México. México, DF: El Colegio de México. Thesis. García Morales, Goretti. 2009. Medio siglo de interés por el anglicismo léxico hispánico. Léxico y Cultura, por María Josefa Reyes Díaz (ed.), 17–65. Badajoz: @becedario. Lapesa, Rafael. 1981. Historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Gredos. Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1950. Orígenes del español: Estado lingüístico de la península ibérica hasta el siglo XI. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Moyna, Irene, and Wendy Decker. 2005. A historical perspective on Spanish in the California Borderlands. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 24: 145–167. Núñez Nogueroles, Eugenia Esperanza. 2017. An up-to-date review of the literature on Anglicisms in Spanish. Diálogo de la Lengua IX: 1–54. Nye Jr., Joseph S. 2004. Soft power: The means to success in world politics. New York: PublicAfairs. Penny, Ralph. 1991. A history of the Spanish language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pérez Ruiz, Leonor. 1997. Usos y abusos de anglicismos en el inglés técnico informático: préstamo y calco. XVIII Congreso de AEDEAN. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares: 343–350. Poplack, Shana, David Sankof, and Christopher Miller. 1988. The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation. Linguistics 26: 47–104. Pratt, Chris. 1980. El anglicismo en el español peninsular contemporáneo. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Resnick, Melvyn. 1981. Introducción a la historia de la lengua española. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Santamaría, Francisco J., and Joaquín García Icazbalceta. 1959. Diccionario de mejicanismos: Razonado, comprobado con citas de autoridades, comparado con el de américanismos y con los vocabularios provinciales de los más distinguidos diccionaristas hispanamericanos. México: Porrúa.

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Spaulding, Robert K. 1943. How Spanish grew. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stavans, Ilan. 2003. Spanglish: The making of a new American language. New York: Harper Collins. Villa, Daniel J., Naomi Lapidus Shin, and Eva Robles Nagata. 2014. La nueva frontera: Spanishspeaking populations in Central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: 149–172.

10 THE LEXICON Part 21

1848–present

In Chapter 9, we look at how Spanish developed and spread to the Americas, specifically to the West, by examining its core lexicon and the results of contact with indigenous languages, principally Taíno and Nahuatl. In this chapter, we focus on how USMS has emerged as a distinct variety through tracing the Spanish spoken in northern Mexico from just before the Mexican–American War to the present. The macro-dialect we suggest is the tie that spans this historical sequence, forming a base for the collection of Mexican-origin Spanish dialects spoken in the western United States. In Chapter 9, we rely on historical sources; here we have firsthand access to documentation that supports our arguments. Our foray into identifying this facet of USMS is based on the following corpora. The first is a collection of documents written between the years 1839 and 1844 (Congressional Series of United States Public Documents, Volume 1581. 1873–4). These texts trace the process of northern Mexican colonists seeking permission from the Mexican government to settle on land in the Mesilla Valley, a region in what is now southern New Mexico, before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase conceded Mexican territories to the United States. In addition to other Spanish-speaking communities already settled in the area, these were the individuals who did not cross the border but rather had the border cross them. The second is Aurelio Espinosa’s (1914) “Studies in New Mexican Spanish, part III: The English elements.” It contains Spanish–English contact data drawn from research conducted by the author in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. The third data set comes from personal correspondence found in the Amador Collection, housed in the archives of New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces (Amador Family Papers. Ms 0004). We focus on the Spanish DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-12

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of southern New Mexicans who were born after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and grew up in a bilingual environment. They were among the first native speakers of USMS in this area. The fourth is a set of transcripts of interviews carried out in the mid-1970s with mexicanas born in the late 19th and early 20th century who migrated from Mexico to the United States in the early 20th century (Montiel and Montiel 2022). These data represent speech samples of northern Mexican Spanish speakers who acquired Spanish in a monolingual environment but who spent most of their lives in a bilingual setting. The fifth set are those data reported on by Villa et al. (2014), collected in the 21st century, which also includes Spanish speakers born in northern Mexico. As with the previous data set, this corpus includes Spanishdominant speakers from northern Mexico who also have spent a significant portion of their lives in a bilingual environment, but in the Pacific Northwest rather than in a border region. Taken collectively, these data ofer a window into over a century and a half in the development of the Mexican-origin Spanish found in the western United States. Once again, it should be noted that in proposing a macro-dialect that encompasses the various dialects of USMS, we are not ignoring the difculties in identifying linguistic boundaries, a topic we address in Chapter 2. Our goal is not to precisely delineate geographic regions but rather to underscore the rooting of this larger dialectal area in patterns of settlement, communication, acquisition, and linguistic negotiation that predate the establishment of a new border in the mid-1800s and that were then modified (not discontinued) by its presence. The ties that bind

In Chapter 3, we assert that the development of USMS begins with the settlement of Zacatecas in 1546. We chose this arbitrary date as it is at this juncture that northern Mexican Spanish begins to emerge as a distinct set of dialects in Mexican Spanish. It forms the foundations of the language carried to presentday northern New Mexico in 1598. After the annexation by the United States of the northern half of Mexico in 1848, USMS continues changing as a function of interactions of local, pre-existing Hispanic populations with various waves of arrivals from Mexico. We agree with Parodi’s (2014b: 1541) assessment that forms of USMS, such as “español chicano” or LA Spanish, have efectively replaced earlier forms of the language in much of the western United States. However, USMS speakers maintain dialectal features that are historically and sociolinguistically connected to those of the wider northern area of Mexico before the redrawing of a new international border. As Villa and Sanz (2015: 135) point out, this assertion is based on a large body of literature that describes features of USMS which note the dialectal continuities with varieties of Mexican Spanish, especially that of rural areas of northern and western Mexico (Bills and Vigil 2008; Hidalgo 1987; Lipski 2008: 75–97, 192–222; Lope Blanch 2000; Parodi 2014a, 2014b, to cite only a few). In addition, elements of this history can be traced

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in archival and sociohistorical records (e.g., Moyna 2009; Moyna and Decker 2005; Sanz-Sánchez 2014). In the following we ofer details of the corpora employed in our analyses. Data: the Ancón de Doña Ana/Doña Ana Bend Colony documents

The first set of data is a series of formal letters written between 1839 and 1844 in El Paso del Norte. The documents represent the process that residents of la villa del Paso, today Ciudad Juárez, followed in order to obtain a land grant in the Mesilla Valley, some 50 miles to the north. The Spanish version of the name of the proposed grant, “Ancón,” comes from a term meaning “a bend in the river” located at a northern point of the paraje de Doña Ana, a resting place on the Camino Real. By the early 19th century, arable land around El Paso del Norte had become scarce. This was due in large part to the annual spring flooding of the Rio Grande, commonly known in Mexico as the Río Bravo, the “wild river.” In the time period in question, the spring snowmelts in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado did indeed make the río bravo, a common occurrence before the building of the Elephant Butte Dam in the early 20th century. The ensuing floods would wipe out any crops planted in the lower areas around El Paso, and hence the need for new farmlands. The request for the land was granted, and in 1839, permission to establish the new colony was given. In seeking clear title to the land after it became a part of US territory, the heirs of the original settlers included the documents in a legal petition to the federal government for tenancy, as detailed in Chapter 5. These documents were then published in the 1873–1874 Congressional Record. Data samples from this source are labeled Ancón. The Espinosa study

Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa was born in southern Colorado in 1880. He attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, and after obtaining his undergraduate and master’s degrees, he went on to the University of Chicago to study for his doctoral degree (for a discussion of Espinosa’s background, see Nieto-Phillips 2004: 178–187). During the opening decade of the 20th century, he gathered data for his 1909 dissertation, which was subsequently published in the form of several papers between 1911 and 1914. The one we use here is the third, titled “Studies in New Mexican Spanish, part III: The English elements.” This work provides a treasure trove of information on a dialect of USMS in the years following the integration of former Mexican territories into the United States. As Espinosa (1914: 242) notes in the first chapter of his text, New Mexican Spanish had been in close contact with English at that time for some 65 years. His work provides a baseline for analyzing the subsequent evolution of USMS lexicon in New Mexico and elsewhere. For the purposes of this discussion, we focus on the loanwords he documents. Data samples from this source are labeled Espinosa.

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The Amador papers

The Amadors were one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Mesilla Valley after it became a territory of the United States. The documents they left behind include correspondence, financial, and legal records, now curated at the New Mexico State University library (http://lib.nmsu.edu/archives/rghc.html). The parents, Martín and Refugio, were younger contemporaries of the first settlers of the Mesilla Valley, as Martín’s mother, the widow Gregoria Rodela de Amador, moved to the newly founded town of Las Cruces in 1850, just some ten years after the Ancón colonists initiated their grant request. The data are drawn from a sampling of the correspondence between the Amador children and their spouses, relatives, and friends of the family. These individuals were born in the latter half of the 19th century, following the annexation of former Mexican territories. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway line reached Las Cruces in 1881 (Roberts et al. 2004: 250), and with its arrival came an influx of English speakers. Thus, the Amador children represent a native-born first generation of USMS speakers in what had become the southern portion of the New Mexico Territory, coming of age in a Spanish/English bilingual environment. Being members of a prominent family, the Amador children, as well as many of their relatives, were taught in English as well as in Spanish; some also studied French. The letters analyzed for this study are written primarily in Spanish. Students taking advanced undergraduate and graduate Spanish courses at NMSU read and transcribed the letters employed for this analysis. Data samples from this source are labeled Amador. The Mexican revolution period data

In the mid-1970s, a research team led by Dr. Miguel Montiel, then a professor at Arizona State University, carried out a series of oral history interviews principally with Mexican-born women who migrated north from their homeland during the Mexican Revolution Period (MRP) in the early 20th century (Montiel and Montiel 2022).2 They gathered stories from over a hundred participants in Arizona, California, and the Midwest. These women arrived from the following Mexican states, principally northern: Sonora, Sinaloa, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, Baja California Sur, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, México, Tlaxcala, and Tamaulipas. A portion of the data was transcribed at that time and then digitized in 2018. The importance of this particular data set for this chapter is that the interviewees represent monolingual speakers of a dialect of northern Mexican Spanish who came into contact with established dialects of USMS in the areas in which they settled. A comparison between their speech, as recorded in these interviews, and early 20thcentury USMS, as documented by Espinosa, confirms that many of their dialectal features were already present at that time in the southwestern speech communities into which they integrated. That is, USMS features were not confined only to New

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Mexico but had also spread to the other regions where these data were collected. Data samples from this source are labeled MRP. Washington Spanish

We draw the present-day USMS data as spoken outside the Southwest from two sources: Naomi Shin’s Corpus of Spanish in Washington and Montana (Villa et al. 2014) and Melero and Van Buren 2016 (working with data from the Shin corpus). The data from Shin’s corpus were recorded in the form of sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012 with migrant workers from Washington State who came to pick cherries in western Montana (see Villa et al. 2014 for a detailed description of this corpus). Most of the adults interviewed were born in northern Mexico, while their children were born in the United States. These data reflect the arrival of monolingual speakers into a bilingual environment, as with the MRP collection, but a century later and in a region far removed from the US–Mexico border. Here again we find items that both overlap and difer from Mexican dialects, clearly demonstrating links to USMS. These data ofer additional proof that, over the past several decades, USMS has continued to spread far from the Southwest into areas where it has a relatively recent history. Data samples from this source are labeled CSWM. Additional present-day data come from Bills and Vigil’s (2008) Atlas. The field research for this magnum opus, titled the “New Mexico/Colorado Spanish Survey” (NMCOSS), was conducted during the 1990s (for a detailed description of the project, see Bills and Vigil 2008: 21–27). Spanish speakers from 12 regions in New Mexico and southern Colorado were interviewed, with the resulting recordings digitized and then a portion transcribed. We include these data from the Southwest so that we can compare CSWM data not only with a historic source but also with current-day USMS in another region. Tracing the lexical arc of USMS

In this section, we use this historical documentary sequence to shed light on the development of USMS over the past century and a half. Specifically, we focus on items that demonstrate transfers from English or can be argued to be typical of USMS, for example, borrowings such as lonche “lunch” and semantic calques such as casa de corte “courthouse” (for a discussion of the classification of transfers, see Clegg 2015). At the same time, we note that certain USMS lexical items also appear in dialects of Mexican Spanish. For example, in Chihuahua, troca “truck” is commonly used instead of camioneta, and in Guadalajara, one can buy a delicious sandwich called a lonche in a lonchería, semantic extensions of the USMS borrowing of “lunch.” Indeed, some USMS lexical items, such as chequear “to check” and parquear “to park (a car),” have become so common that they appear in the Diccionaro de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española (www.rae.es/), indicating they are used in other regions of

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the Spanish-speaking world. As a result, we recognize that certain items historically found in USMS now appear (or are at least acknowledged) in other varieties of the language in the Americas as well as in Europe. We ofer a representative sample of the lexical trends gleaned from these corpora. The Ancón de Doña Ana/Doña Ana Bend Colony documents

Regarding lexical influences from contact with English in the Ancón data, we find none. There was certainly some contact with English speakers, as the Santa Fe Trail, established in 1821, and the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro were active trade routes linking St. Louis with Mexico City via Santa Fe and Chihuahua. As El Paso del Norte was founded on the Camino Real, certainly some English-speaking traders would have passed through. However, their linguistic and social impact in the area is not present in the texts. For example, all geographical measurements are those of Mexico at that time, that is, vara “rod” and legua “league,” instead of yarda “yard” and milla “mile.” Land designated for houses is labeled solar “parcel of land,” not lote “lot.” The reglamentos for the layout of the village of Doña Ana dictated the traditional plaza model found throughout the Spanish-speaking world. They also dictated the construction of an azequia [sic], the traditional means of irrigation still in use today. Indeed, the then-recent secession of Texas from Mexico is evident in Article 12: Á ningun estranjero se permitira entrada a esta sin que haya manifestado á la autoridad política el pasaporte respectivo (No foreigner will be permitted to enter this [community] without having presented to the political authorities their respective passport). After that secession, English-speaking extranjeros were suspect, and by extension the language they spoke. Hence, this may have contributed to the absence of English-origin loans in the documents. The style used in the texts is a very formal written one and most probably does not reflect how the authors spoke in everyday contexts. However, they do ofer us a window into the Spanish of northern Mexico in the 19th century before intensive contact with English. In sum, the Ancón data represent a baseline dialect of the northern Mexican Spanish from which USMS derives, one that had existed there for centuries and was then incorporated into the United States. The Espinosa study

While lexical influence from English seems to be absent from the Ancón documents, the same is not true for the Espinosa data. He records in great detail the results of Spanish/English contact in what was, at that time, the Territory of New Mexico. We focus on Espinosa’s documentation of loanwords (as defined by Clegg 2015) in his lengthy 1914 article on the influence of English in New Mexican Spanish. In the introduction to this study, Espinosa notes the sudden increase of English speakers in certain regions of northern New Mexico following Stephen Kearny’s 1846 military incursion and provides a general description of the demographic and sociolinguistic landscape of contact between both languages in the territory (1914: 241–245). As

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a result of these contacts, for loanwords he records items such cute “coat,” queque “cake,” greve “gravy,” jarirú “how do you do,” breca “brake,” chequiar “to check,” yarda “yard,” and suichi “switch” among many, many others (Espinosa 1914: 245). Espinosa was careful to note the complex sociolinguistic patterns of use of these loanwords, which were common among some New Mexican and southern Colorado Spanish speakers but less frequent among others. Another aspect discussed by Espinosa concerns the various degrees of phonological and morphological integration of each item. If we take the degree of phonological integration of a loanword as an indication of its sociolinguistic history and its incorporation as part of the active lexicon of the speakers of a language regardless of their degree of bilingualism (Bills and Vigil 2008: 165–190), there can be little doubt that the examples Espinosa documents had become part and parcel of New Mexican Spanish at that time. As he writes: Words that are once adopted and which become phonetically Spanish, become a part of the New Mexican Spanish vocabulary and no one is cognizant of their English source. The New Mexicans who come from the mountain districts, or from the remote country villages and who speak only Spanish, and on arriving at a town enter a drug store to ask, ‘Quier’ una botëit’ e penquila (PAIN-KILLER, a patent medicine), or a saloon to ask, ‘Quier’ un frasquitu e juisque (WHISKEY), ˆ are speaking, as far as they are concerned, pure Spanish. (1914: 247) In sum, with his work Espinosa identifies one of the earliest forms of USMS to emerge from Mexican Spanish after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. These data complement those in Sanz-Sánchez (2014). In this more recent study of New Mexican Spanish, based on private correspondence between the 1840s and the 1930s, influence from English lexicon in the first decades after annexation appears to be primarily semantic (with Spanish words taking on the meaning of formally equivalent English words). English loanwords start being incorporated at higher rates in the late 1800s, thus coinciding with Espinosa’s description. Bills and Vigil (2008: 190) point out a particularly telling parallelism between Espinosa’s data and theirs; every single one of the fully integrated English loans that they found in their survey of New Mexican and southern Colorado Spanish was already present in Espinosa’s early 20th-century data (bísquete “biscuit,” craque “cracker,” cuque “cookie,” pene “penny,” queque “cake,” sute “suit”). Interestingly, this fact underscores the role of contact with English as a factor in the historical continuity of traditional New Mexican Spanish and not just as one of the reasons for the dialect’s demise. The Amador papers

The Amador data provide additional evidence of a USMS dialect emerging at approximately the same time as the one Espinosa studies. He notes that:

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Santa Fé, Taos, Socorro, Las Cruces, Tomé, West Las Vegas and a score of other smaller towns and many more villages are predominantly Spanish and in these places the English influence on language, customs and habits in life is very insignificant. (1914: 243, our emphasis) It may be due to the conservative nature of the Spanish in contact with English in Las Cruces that we find few incorporated borrowings, but rather, the use of English words (or high-frequency lexical chunks) embedded in the Spanish texts (1–4). These may actually represent language-switching, as opposed to the borrowings that Espinosa identified. In the following, the author and date of the letter are included in addition to the data source. 1 Y el baby de Juan ¿a quien se parece? (And Juan’s baby, who does it look like?) (Amador, Gregoria, 1897) 2 [S]algo á pasearme en trineo á la luz de la luna con algunas friends. (I go out for a moonlit sleigh ride with some friends.) (Amador, José, 1899) 3 [D]ices que yo ya se quien es tu novio, sere yo? Hope so. (You say you already know who your boyfriend is, could it be me? Hope so.) (Amador, signature illegible, 1897) 4 Ya escribi que no mandaron el Citizen [newspaper]. (I already wrote that they didn’t send the Citizen.) (Amador, Emilia, 1902) We do encounter isolated instances of loanwords, as in 5: 5 [S]olo tu no sabes jugar ni poca ni damas, hombre, yo tampoco se jugar poca, ni entripado ni jugar alguno con baraja. (poca “poker,” Espinosa 1914: 259) (Only you don’t know how to play poker or checkers, man, I don’t know how to play poker either, 21 or any card games.) (Amador, J. M. Falomir, 1898) There are also a few instances of semantic extension via calquing: 6 Espero que no se te olvide la tasacion, pues le temo a la multa. (I hope you don’t forget the tax bill, as I’m afraid of the fine.) (Amador, Emilia, 1902) In this case, a Spanish word takes on the meaning of a word in English that is perceived to be its formal equivalent; tasación derives from the verb tasar, which the

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Real Academia Española defines as “[f]ijar oficialmente el precio máximo o mínimo para una mercancía” “ofcially fix the maximum or minimum price for merchandise” (RAE tasar, cf. English “value” or “rate”). In this letter, however, it refers to a tax payment. Recall that this form of influence on the lexicon of USMS Spanish has been described as pervasive in other studies (Espinosa 1914; Moyna and Decker 2005: 160–161; Sanz-Sánchez 2014). Sociolinguistically, it reveals the agency of bilingual speakers with knowledge of both languages so as to access the forms of both lexicons, as well as the meaning in English. In sum, we may characterize the Spanish in which the Amador letters were written as a dialect that demonstrates incipient, although not significant, lexical influence from English. The fact that the Amador children and their contemporaries were, to one degree or another, bilingual is evidenced by their inclusion of English words and phrases. As with the Ancón generation, there is every possibility that they used loanwords that do not appear in their correspondence. There can be no doubt English loanwords existed in USMS at this time period, as documented by Espinosa. This appears to confirm, at least at the lexical level, the emergence of the macro-dialect we propose. The Mexican revolution period data

However frequently loanwords may have been used by the Amador children, it is the case that by the time the interviewees in the MRP data arrived in the United States, those items had become part of the USMS lexicon. This is evidenced by the fact that the señoras who migrated north integrated a number of these loanwords into their vocabulary. The following comes from an MRP interview with Esperanza, born in 1898, who migrated to Arizona at the age of 24: 7 [C]ruzamos el desierto en un troque. (Troque “truck”) (We crossed the desert in a truck.) 8 Allí atrás iba mi esposo con todos los niños y lonche. (Lonche “lunch”) (My husband rode in the back with the children and our lunch.) 9 Había jáiscul, elemental. Había tres escuelas para los niños. (Jáiscul “high school”) (There was high school, [and] elementary. There were three schools for the children.) 10 Él [Esperanza’s husband] era timbrero. (Timbr- “timber,” + -ero, “a man who installs timbers in a mine shaft”) (He was a timberman.) 11 Tú tienes que venir a una mitin. (Mitin “meeting”) (You have to come to a meeting.)

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12 [E]n cuando llegué al bas dipo una persona me preguntó si quería un cuarto. (Bas dipo “bus depot”) (When I arrived at the bus depot somebody asked me if I wanted a room.) 13 [E]n El Triumfo estuve un año, no un año complete en el quinto. (Complete “complete”) (I spent a year in El Triumfo, not the complete year in the fifth [grade].) (El Triunfo is a small mining town in Baja California.) Also found in Esperanza’s speech are English-origin Arizona toponyms: Yurón “Jerome,” Supirio “Superior,” and Clacdel “Clarkdale.” She employed several loanwords found in Espinosa’s study, such as quequi “cake” (queque in Espinosa) and yarda “yard, area in front and back of a house” (vs. patio), indicating that certain items were not just regional, as toponyms might be. Other USMS forms in these data that are not loanwords from English but emerged via forms of semantic extension and semantic calquing are vistas “movies” (vs. películas in other dialects of Spanish), aplicación “application” (vs. solicitud), and blanco “blank application form” (vs. formulario or impreso in other Spanish dialects). At this point, we must mention that while these USMS features are present in the MRP data, they are infrequent; for example, in the Esperanza interview, we identified 36 items, such as those mentioned earlier, out of a total of 23,772 words, or 0.1% of the total.

US Mexican Spanish outside the Southwest

We now turn to the present era with the CSWM. In order to support our assertion that USMS has expanded out of the southern US border region, we compare the CSWM data with those of Espinosa (1914), a historical form of USMS, and Bills and Vigil (2008) USMS dialects from the southwest region. In Table 10.1, the CSWM items are listed in column 1. In column 2, they are identified as to their class, either as a borrowing or as a semantic extension of a commonly used Spanish form, for example, aplicación “application for a job,” vs. solicitud in other varieties of Spanish. We then indicate with a check mark () who documents the items in other historic moments or in other regions of the United States: in column 3, Espinosa (1914), and column 4, Bills and Vigil (2008). Additional items that do not appear in Bills and Vigil’s (2008) Atlas but are equally drawn from NMCOSS data were provided by Bills to the authors.3 Further, there are items in the Bills and Vigil column that appear neither in their Atlas nor in the additional NMCOSS data (the entire NMCOSS recordings have yet to be transcribed). A double check mark () in that column indicates that these are items that Villa, a native New Mexican, can anecdotally assert are common in New Mexico. The importance of including this anecdotal evidence is that the county in which he resides, Doña Ana, borders Mexico and is therefore one of the earliest settings of contact between current US and Mexican communities. The farthest northern county represented in the CSWM data, Okanogan, borders Canada. Thus,

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the data presented in Table 10.1 is drawn from communities located on or near the southern international boundary and those on the northern border, separated by a distance of some 1,700 miles. In columns 5 and 6 we note if the CSWM items occur in the Diccionario de anglicismos del español estadounidense (Moreno Fernández 2019) and the Diccionario de americanismos by the Real Academia Española (www.rae.es/). The Moreno Fernández and RAE collections are somewhat problematic in that they cover the entire United States and not just its western region. However, we include those sources as they document the common use of the items in US Spanish, and indeed so common that they have now been entered into the RAE’s dictionary, which is intended to cover the Americas. We only include items from the RAE that are explicitly identified as being used in the United States. The exceptions, which are identified only as a voz inglesa “English word” by the RAE, are marked with a dagger (†); we include them

TABLE 10.1 USMS items found in Washington State Spanish common to other historic

periods and other regions CSWM

Type

semantic extension (“application,” for example, for a job) army (armi) borrowing (“army”) basketbol (básquetbol) borrowing (“basketball”) bil borrowing (“bill,” for example, for water, gas, electricity, etc.) cachar borrowing (“catch”) chanza semantic extension (“opportunity”) cherry borrowing (“cherry”) chor (chortes) borrowing (“shorts,” short pants) colegio semantic extension (“college,” postsecondary institution) cora (cuara) borrowing (“quarter,” the coin) eskipar (esquipear) borrowing (“skip” school) fil (field) borrowing (“field”) high school (jáiscul) borrowing (“high school”) lonche borrowing (“lunch”) nersería (nursería) borrowing (“nursery” for plants) pushar (puchar) borrowing (“push”) sortear borrowing (“sort,” the verb) tip borrowing (“tip”) troca borrowing (“truck”)

Espinosa Bills and Moreno RAE Vigil Fdez.

aplicación

yarda yonke (yonque)

borrowing (“yard,” for example, of a house) borrowing (“junk”)









  



  †



 



 

 



    



   

       



 

    †

 



     





†







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as, anecdotally, they are widely used in USMS. This last source documents the fact that these items are now recognized internationally. These data show that a number of the items used among Mexican-origin speakers in a state bordering with Canada have a long history in USMS, as proven by their inclusion by Espinosa. The fact that Bills and Vigil include many of these items shows that the dynamics of contact with English in USMS have continued to evolve since the time when Espinosa collected his data. Therefore, this comparison demonstrates that, regarding the lexicon, features found in the 19th and 20th centuries in a border region with Mexico are also found in the 21st in a border region with Canada. Indeed, these features have embedded themselves deeply enough in USMS that they are recognized in other regions of the Spanish-speaking world alongside widely used terms such radio, televisión, internet, and guglear. The origin of USMS loanwords

One reviewer of an initial draft of this book asked us, “How do you know these loanwords originated in the Southwest?” Our answer is that we have documented instances of a number of them in early 20th-century research, as we demonstrate earlier. However, there exists a possibility that they originated elsewhere and were imported here. Regarding the use of loanwords in US Spanish in general, there are those that appear to be common to all varieties, and others that are clearly regional. Francisco Moreno Fernández, Director of the Instituto Cervantes, brought this to our attention when he contacted Villa a number of years ago with a request to evaluate a collection of loanwords he gathered for a Diccionario de Anglicismos del Español Estadounidense (DAEE) (Dictionary of US Spanish Anglicisms) that he was researching and continues to work on (https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/sites/ default/files/diccionario_anglicismos.pdf). At that time, Villa was teaching a class on US Spanish and thought that reviewing the collection would represent a fascinating exercise for his students. So the list was divided into sections; each student took one and went out into the community to determine if Southern New Mexican/West Texas Spanish speakers recognized the words or not. Once they had collected their data, the results were examined and the group decided to label each loanword as “C” común (common, just about everybody recognized it), “I” inusual (uncommon or rare, only one or two people recognized it), or “D” desconocido (unknown, nobody recognized it). In the following discussion of the analyses, the definitions provided by Moreno Fernández in the DAEE at that time were used. Unsurprisingly, words that referred to places far outside the region were unknown; one example is Sagüesera “South West,” a section of Miami, Florida. And evidently, the students did not find any avid baseball fans. Nobody recognized specialized terminology from that sport, such as rolata “rolling,” escón de ponche “skunk,” and zona foul “foul zone.” Other loanwords from the DAEE not found in our area include aguaquear “to awaken,” águate “be aware” or “be careful,” enguaynar “to get drunk on wine,” and tinajero, -ra “teenager.” Words that a few people recognized, the

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“uncommon” ones, are beismen “basement,” dorman “doorman,” cherman “chairman,” and nuyorican “Newyorican.” These might be rare, as many houses in the region do not have basements, the respondents might not participate regularly in formal meetings, and doormen in general and Puerto Ricans from New York in particular are few and far between here. On the other hand, loanwords were identified that everybody recognized, the “common” ones in the region. These include checar “to check,” cuque “cookie,” parquear “to park [a car]),” queque “cake,” and troca “truck,” items listed in our analyses earlier. As a result, we can assert that certain loanwords are relatively common to all varieties of US Spanish, but the question of provenance remains unresolved. We can assert that other loanwords provide a distinctive “flavor” to any one dialect of US Spanish. The word Sagüesera lends a Caribbean savor to Florida Spanish, while Loris, Yurón, and Supirio (Lordsburg in New Mexico, Jerome, and Superior in Arizona, respectively) are as southwestern as green chile. As more historical documents come to light, we may be able to better understand this dynamic. To sum up this chapter, the presence of English-origin loanwords in USMS corpora ranged from none, as noted for the Ancón documents, to a handful, as in the MRP and CSWM data and the Lope Blanch sample analyzed in the previous chapter. We recognize that these data cannot be generalized to USMS in general, as the sample size is far too small. However, in the samples we analyzed, there is no evidence of a wholescale “contamination” of English. USMS does indeed contain English-origin loans, as do all varieties of Spanish. However, to date, no empirical studies demonstrate that a new language is emerging, or that USMS is some sort of a “hybrid” language. Examples such as the deliberamos grocerías, mentioned in Chapter 7, appear to be more urban legend than anything else. So caveat lector, let the reader beware of misrepresentations and distortions circulating about USMS! Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 10

1 Look up the words “marketing,” “footing,” “camping,” “parking,” and “copyright” (with those spellings) in the Diccionario de la lengua española, www.rae.es. Given that Spanish already has terms for these concepts, why have the English forms been imported into the language? 2 Many people assume that the Spanish word carro comes from the English term “car.” Consulting an online English etymology dictionary, determine if this is the case. If it is not, why would that assumption exist? 3 English is classified as a Germanic language. Yet the Dictionary.com website, www.dictionary.com/e/word-origins/, states that “[a]bout 80 percent of the entries in any English dictionary are borrowed, mainly from Latin.” Has the integrity of the English language been destroyed due to this fact? Why or why not? 4 The cities Amarillo, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; Plano, Texas; Atascadero, California; Salinas, California; and Salida, Colorado, all take their names from local geographic features. What are they for each city?

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5 Are the words taco, tamales, enchilada, guacamole, tostada, burrito, cerveza, and tequila now part of the US English vocabulary? Why or why not? Consulting any common-use US English dictionary, either in print or online, will be of help with this exercise.  Additional readings Clegg, Jens. 2010. On becoming a borrowing: Integration, difusion and attestation of English-origin nouns in New Mexico Spanish. Building communities and making connections, Susana Rivera Mills and Juan Antonio Trujillo (eds.), 184–201. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Montiel, Miguel, and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel. 2022. World of our mothers: Mexican Revolution – era immigrants and their stories. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Moreno Fernández, Francisco. 2019. Diccionario de anglicismos del español estadounidense. Cambridge, MA: Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University. Poplack, Shana, David Sankof, and Christopher Miller. 1988. The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation. Linguistics 26: 47–104. Pratt, Chris. 1980. El anglicismo en el español peninsular contemporáneo. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.

Notes 1 Portions of this chapter previously appeared in the International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, 2015: 1–2. 2 Our gratitude to Drs. Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel for sharing these incredible historic gems with us. 3 Our thanks to Dr. Garland Bills for sharing this very important resource with us. 

References Amador Family Papers. Ms 0004. Rio Grande historical collections. Las Cruces, NM: New Mexico State University Library. Online: http://lib.nmsu.edu/archives/rghc.html. Bills, Garland D., and Neddy A. Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Clegg, Jens H. 2015. Para atrás: Contact induced change or language internal evolution? International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (1,2): 51–65. Congressional Series of United States Public Documents, Volume 1581. 1873–4. Executive documents printed by the order of the Senate of the United States for the first session of the forty-third Congress, Doc. 43. Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofce. Online: www.books. google.com. Espinosa, Aurelio M. 1914. Studies in New Mexican Spanish, part III: The English elements. Revue de Dialectologie Romane 6: 241–317. Hidalgo, Margarita. 1987. Español mexicano y español chicano: Problemas y propuestas fundamentales. Language Problems and Language Planning 11: 166–193. Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lope Blanch, Juan M. 2000. Español de América y español de México. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

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Melero, Fernando, and Jackelyn Van Buren. 2016. De los [files] sureños a los norteños: English lexical insertions in New Mexico and Washington State. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, Unpublished Ms. Montiel, Miguel, and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel. 2022. World of our mothers: Mexican Revolution – era immigrants and their stories. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Moreno Fernández, Francisco. 2019. Diccionario de anglicismos del español estadounidense. Cambridge, MA: Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University. Moyna, Irene. 2009. Back at the rancho: Language maintenance and shift among Spanish speakers in post-annexation California (1848–1900). Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 7: 165–184. Moyna, Irene, and Wendy Decker. 2005. A historical perspective on Spanish in the California Borderlands. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 24: 145–167. Nieto-Phillips, John M. 2004. The language of blood: The making of Spanish-American identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Parodi, Claudia. 2014a. El español de Los Ángeles: Koeneización y diglosia. Lenguas, estructuras y hablantes: Estudios en homenaje a Thomas C. Smith Stark, Thomas C. Smith-Stark, Rebeca Barriga Villanueva, y Esther Herrera (eds.), 1099–1121. México, DF: El Colegio de México. Parodi, Claudia. 2014b. El español y las lenguas indígenas de los mexicanos en los Estados Unidos. Historia sociolingüística de México, Vol. 3: Espacio, contacto y discurso político, Rebeca Barriga Villanueva y Pedro Martín Butragueño (eds.), 1525–1567. Mexico, DF: Colegio de México. Roberts, Susan A., Calvin A. Roberts, and Kathy Chilton. 2004. A history of New Mexico, 3rd ed. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Sanz-Sánchez, Israel. 2014. Como dicen los americanos: Spanish in contact with English in territorial and early statehood New Mexico. Spanish in Context 11: 221–242. Villa, Daniel J., and Israel Sanz-Sánchez. 2015. U.S. Mexican Spanish: A historical perspective on the development of the macro-dialect spoken in the Western U.S. International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 34: 129–148. Villa, Daniel J., Naomi L. Shin, and Eva R. Nagata. 2014. La nueva frontera: Spanish-speaking populations in Central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 7: 149–172.

11 PHONOLOGY

The sound system of the macro-dialect

We now turn to the USMS sound system. In Chapter 2, we recognize the necessity at certain points to employ selected abstractions in our representation of USMS. In the following discussion of the proposed macro-dialect’s core sound system, we recur to those abstractions. That is to say, in the following we do not claim that any particular USMS speaker or group of speakers will, of necessity, use the sound system exactly as we represent it. Rather, we aim to present a framework that will serve as a starting point to identify features that an individual may employ or a group of speakers may share that can be modified in order to more closely capture the phonological features of any particular idiolect or dialect of USMS. At the same time, we note that what we represent in the following is firmly grounded in empirical field research. We do not attempt to ofer any abstraction based on our perceptions of what the USMS sound system might or might not contain. We employ data from field recordings conducted by the authors and other researchers. So while it may be the case that we present a distilled version of the USMS sound system, it is centrally grounded in individual speakers’ use of the language. As with the development of lexical items presented in Chapters 9 and 10, the sound system of USMS represents a historical development intimately linked with northern Mexican dialects, as well as others. Another abstraction that we need to make in order to present and compare the USMS sound system is the concept of General Spanish. In reality, this form of language does not exist in the “real world” and has no native speakers. It is the form of the language often presented to language and linguistics students in textbooks on phonetics and linguistics. It contains a set of sounds that are common in most varieties of Spanish and is a good basis of comparison for our purposes here. We also note DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-13

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that while the sound system of USMS is a direct descendent of Northern Mexican Spanish, it is important to acknowledge that there is variation within Northern Mexican Spanish, just as in any other variety. Scholars like Hidalgo (2018) point out that variation existed in Spain prior to colonization, during colonization, and continues to this day. As we have observed elsewhere, the language exported from Spain did not consist of a single dialect but rather a temporally and geographically diverse collection that was to further develop into the varieties now found in the Americas in general and North American in particular. As noted in Chapter 2, by the later colonial period in the mid- to late 1600s, most of those living in Mexico were speaking some form of Mexican Spanish, not a version of one or another Peninsular dialect. As Mexican Spanish speakers moved northward and expanded into what would eventually become the US Southwest, the sound systems they took with them reflected those origins. As also observed in Chapter 2, the area of Mexico that contributed most to that expansion was the northern regions of present-day Mexico, including Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Zacatecas, Durango, and other areas in relative proximity to what would become Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. One of the difculties in establishing what a language sounded like in the past is the obvious lack of recordings and/or transcribed records of the sounds. In remote areas like the northern settlements of Mexico during the colonial period, there were no language scholars like Nebrija to document and study such details of the language. In Chapters 9 and 10, we use historical records to track changes in the lexicon of the language as it become USMS. However, it is much more difcult to do the same for sounds. There are examples of misspellings in the written records that can show that there was some confusion about how sounds were written, such as using graphemic {b} in the place of {v}, as in {baca} “cow” instead of {vaca}, but there is not much more that can be gleaned about subtle variations in the early USMS sound system (we describe the use of the brackets {} in the following). To compensate for this, we rely on a combination of the earliest documentations by linguists of the sound systems that would become USMS, as well as comparisons to how Mexican donor dialects and USMS have evolved into modern Mexican Spanish and USMS. For USMS, the earliest complete linguistic description of one of its dialects is the work of Aurelio Espinosa (1909) on northern New Mexican Spanish, labeled by Bills and Vigil (2008) as traditional New Mexican Spanish (TNMS). This work constitutes an excellent platform for describing USMS for a number of reasons. First, it is the oldest surviving Spanish dialect in the western United States, with one of the largest populations of Spanish speakers in the Southwest from the colonization period up until the early 1900s. Second, TNMS speakers were less influenced by English speakers after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo than in other areas like Texas and California. This combination of factors resulted in TNMS being spoken up to the present, albeit with changes introduced over the centuries (Waltermire 2015). In the next section, we present the USMS sound system, grounded in Espinosa’s (1909) research.

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163

As we begin this analysis, it is important to note that when it comes to sounds, we have more in common with other varieties of Spanish than not. In comparing what he calls Mexican American Spanish to General Spanish, Foster (1976: 25) states that “[g]enerally speaking, the consonants of Mexican-American Spanish presented no patterns of major interest,” implying that they are basically the same as General Spanish. Sánchez (1982: 18–19), in her study of what she referred to as Southwest Spanish, identified the same results, pointing out that: The phonetic variants that I shall describe are common in the popular Spanish varieties of Chicanos but may be found throughout the rest of the Spanish speaking world. Some changes . . . are part of the informal style of all Spanish speakers, whether their main language codes are standard or proper. In her study, Merz (1977: 63) found that “there is no evidence that the Spanish of Tucson varies in its phonemic structure from other dialects of General American Spanish.” Those diferences that do arise tend to be found in the consonants of diferent varieties and dialects; thus, we start with them. Before beginning, we again stress that the following is a “bare-bones” presentation of the USMS core sound system. For a complete treatment of General Spanish phonetics and phonology, see Clegg and Fails (2018). USMS consonants

The following chart contains the representation of USMS sounds, following the norms of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). These follow Espinosa’s early 20th-century work, updated to modern transcriptions. We begin with consonants, as seen in Figure 11.1.

USMS consonants Place →

Bilabial

Mode↓

U

V

Occlusive

p

b β

Fricative

Labiodental U

f

V

Interdental U

V

Dental U

V

t

d

ð

Alveolar U

V

s

Velar

V

U

V

ʝ

k x

g ɣ

ʧ m

n l

Lateral Vibrant Tap Vibrant Trill

ɾ r

U = Unvoiced V = Voiced. FIGURE 11.1

U

z

Affricate Nasal

Palatal

Sound chart of consonants in USMS.

Source: Adapted and updated from Espinosa (1909 p. 59 and 97).

ɲ

ŋ

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In the following, a character between square brackets [] represents a sound, not the alphabet letter. The curly brackets {} indicate the orthographic form. In describing the consonants, we give English equivalents with the cautionary note that the sounds are not precisely the same in the two languages. What we ofer are approximations. In addition, a particular consonant may be modified depending on where it occurs. We will note these in the following descriptions. The chart contains three elements: “place,” meaning the point in the vocal tract where the sound is articulated; “mode,” signifying how the flow of air is modified in the production of a sound; and “voiced/unvoiced,” the former indicating the vocal cords vibrate in producing a sound, and the latter that they do not. Occlusives

To begin, occlusion means that the flow of air from the vocal tract is completely blocked; air pressure builds up behind the occlusion and is then released. “Bilabial” means the lips come together to stop the airflow. For the “dental,” the tip of the tongue comes into contact with the back of the upper front teeth. For the “velar,” the back of the tongue comes into contact with the upper rear portion of the vocal cavity. • The first occlusive listed is [p], unvoiced. An example of it is found in the word pato “duck” [páto], similar to the English “pants” [pænts]. Orthographically, this has only one representation, {p}. Following is [b], which corresponds to [p], but voiced. This is found in words like beso “kiss” [béso]; in English, this corresponds to “bill.” Orthographically, the letters {b} and {v} are both pronounced with the sound [b] in most dialects of USMS; exceptions are discussed later in the chapter. This sound has an alternate variant, [β], most often occurring when it occurs between two vowels, as in the word cabeza “head” [kaβésa]. • The next two occlusives are [t] and [d]. [t], unvoiced, is represented by the letter {t}. It can be found in words like todo “all” [tóðo] and gato “cat” [gáto], similar to the English [t], as in tot [tɑt]. The corresponding [d], voiced, is represented by the orthographic {d}. Like the [b] mentioned before, it has two variations, [d] and [ð]. Both sounds can be observed in the word dedo “finger” [déðo]. The first sound is the occlusive [d], and the second [ð] is the version that occurs most frequently between vowels. [d] occurs in English in “dodo” [doʊdoʊ]. The diference between the USMS and English [d] is that for the latter, the tongue touches the alveolar ridge, and in the former, the tongue touches the teeth. • The final two are [k] and [g]. [k], unvoiced, has several orthographic representations. They are {qu, ca, co, cu}, as in queso “cheese” [késo], casa “house” [kása], cosa “thing” [kósa], or cuchillo “knife” [kuʧíʝo]. This consonant corresponds to the English [k], as in “kiss” [kɪs]. [g], voiced, is represented by various orthographic combinations, as is the case with [k]. They are {gue, gui, ga, go,

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gua}, as in guerra “war” [géra], guiso “stew” [gíso], gato “cat” [gáto], gordo “fat” [góɾðo], and guapo “handsome” [gwápo]. It is similar to the English [g], as in “good” [gʊd]. [g] also has two variants, [g] and [ɣ]; the latter appears between vowels, as in hago “I make” [áɣo]. There is no similar sound in English for the variant [ɣ]. Fricatives

To create a fricative sound, the mouth is narrowed and air is forced through a small or restrictive opening. The sound changes are based on where the narrowing occurs. Note that for the fricatives, there exists only one variant for each point of articulation, either voiced or unvoiced. “Labiodental” means the lower lip approaches and lightly touches the upper teeth. “Alveolar” signifies the sound produced by placing the tongue tip just behind and above the front teeth, close to but not touching it. “Palatal” indicates that the tongue raises toward the roof of the mouth. “Velar” is essentially the same as for [k] and [g], “velar”: the back of the tongue comes into contact with the upper rear portion of the vocal cavity. • [f], unvoiced, is represented by {f}, as in fecha “date” [féʧa] or café “cofee” [kafé]. This exists in English as in “fun” [fʌn]. • [s], unvoiced, has a variety of orthographic representations: {s}, {z}, and {ci}. These are found in ser “to be” [seɾ], luz “light” [lus], and cinco “five” [síŋko]. The English [s] is found in the word “sea” [si]. In Spanish, when the sound [s] is immediately before a voiced consonant, it will take on the voiced characteristic of that following consonant and become the variant [z], as in the word mismo “same” [mízmo]. • [ʝ] is represented by {ll} and {y}, as in ella “she” [éʝa] and ayer “yesterday” [aʝéɾ]. This is similar to the [ʝ] at the beginning of the English word “yes” [ʝɛs]. • [x], the last fricative, is unvoiced. It has a number of orthographic representations {ja, je, ji, jo, ge, gi}, as in caja “box” [káxa], jerga “slang” [xéɾga], jícama “jicama” [xíkama], José “Joseph” [xosé], gente “people” [xén̪ te], and gigante “giant” [xiɣán̪ te]. There is no clear comparison between this sound and any English sound. The closest sound would be English [h], as in help [help]. However, the English [h] is a pharyngeal sound produced in the throat, and the Spanish sound [x] is produced in the back of the mouth, with the tongue coming close to the velar region and having more friction than the English [h]. Africate

The africate is a mix of occlusive and fricative, starting with a blockage of air that is then released through a narrow opening, [ʧ]. This is orthographically represented as {ch} in Spanish as muchacha “girl” [muʧáʧa] and as “church” [ʧɛːɾʧ] in English.

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Nasal

Nasals are produced when the airflow from the vocal tract is released through the nasal cavity; all are voiced. • [m] is articulated as a bilabial, similar to [p] and [b]. It is represented by {m}, as in cama “bed” [káma]. The English equivalent is [m] as well, as in “mom” [mɑm]. • [n] is alveolar, as is [s]. It is represented by {n}, as in cana “a gray hair” [kána], corresponding to the English “nice” [naɪs]. • [ɲ] is palatal, as are [ʝ] and [ʧ]. Orthographically, it is {ñ}, as in caña “(sugar) cane” [káɲa]. English has no single orthographic symbol for this sound; it is approximated by {ni}, as in “onion,” and {ny}, as in “canyon.” Lateral

[l] is a lateral, meaning, that the sound moves around the sides of the tongue when it is raised to and comes out from the sides. This is similar to [s], except that the tip of the tongue contacts the area behind and above the front teeth. It is voiced. Orthographically, [l] is represented as {l}. Examples include lado “side” [láðo] and algo “something” [álgo]. The English [l] is found in words such as “last” [læst]. Vibrant tap

[ɾ] is a vibrant tap. Vibrant means that the sound is made by touching the alveolar ridge, mentioned in the descriptions of [s], [n], and [l], briefly with the tongue. This is orthographically represented as {r}, as in para “for” [páɾa] and hablar “to speak” [abláɾ]. The closest English equivalent is orthographically {tt}, as in the word “butter” [bʌɾɚ]. Vibrant trill

[r] is realized the same as [ɾ], with the exception that the trill requires more than one tap. Orthographically, it is written as {rr}, as in perro “dog” [péro], or {r} at the beginning of words like rojo “red” [róxo]. US English has no equivalent for this sound, although some dialects of Scottish English employ it. Vowels

As observed earlier, we find relatively few diferences between the vowel systems of the many Spanish language varieties. Foster (1976), in his study of Mexican American Spanish, found that the same five basic vowels, together with their varying diphthong combinations, are used across all dialects of USMS. These are presented in Figure 11.2.

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USMS Vowels Semi-Vowel High/closed Mid Low/open FIGURE 11.2

Front j/i i e

Central

Back w/u u o

a

Sound chart of vowels in USMS.

Source: Adapted and updated from Espinosa (1909 p. 59 and 97).

All vowels are voiced. To produce them, we use the position of the tongue in the mouth (front, central, and back) and level of openness of the mouth (open, mid, closed). The vowels [a], [e], [i], [o], and [u] are represented orthographically as {a}, {e}, {i}, {o}, and {u}, respectively. There are no direct English equivalents. • The high front [i] is realized in si “if ” [si] and vivir “to live” [biβíɾ]. • The mid front [e] occurs in que “that” [ke] and pero “but” [péɾo]. • The low central [a] is found in words like mamá “mommy” [mamá] and algo “something” [álgo]. • The mid back [o] appears in otro “other’ [ótɾo] and oro “gold” [óɾo]. • The high back [u] occurs in mujer “woman” [muxér] and luna “moon” [lúna]. There are two variant forms of the vowels [i] and [u], used to represent the Spanish diphthongs. • When [i] forms part of a diphthong and is the first of the two vowels, it is represented by the semi-vowel [j], as in the word bien “well, good” [bjén]. When [i] is the second vowel, it becomes the semi-vowel [i̯ ], as in the reina “queen” [rei̯ na]. • The vowel [u] follows the same pattern; as the first vowel in the diphthong it is represented by the semi-vowel [w], as in bueno “good” [bwéno]. If the second, it appears as [u̯ ], as in autor “author” [au̯ tór]. A sampling of dialectal variations in the USMS sound system

We begin this section with a cautionary note. Certain dialectal variations, such as the ones presented in what follows, are often cited as characterizing USMS, whether they are common or not in any one dialect of that variety. We attribute this to the “sore thumb” factor, as in the saying “(anything unusual) sticks out like a sore thumb.” References to them have become so common in the literature that they are seen as universal markers of USMS, which they are not. As an example, we are reminded of an academic conference in which a colleague presented some distinctive features of USMS speech samples recorded in Montana. After finishing, another

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colleague in the audience raised her hand and quite earnestly inquired as to where in New Mexico Montana was located. Since there exists a fairly large body of research on New Mexican Spanish, it becomes rather easy to assume that certain dialectal features found there are representative of all USMS dialects, which is not the case. Thus, the following represents certain dialectal variation found in some USMS dialects and not in others. • [b]/[v] variation. Certain USMS researchers observe that some dialects alternate between [b] and [v]. The latter is a voiced labiodental fricative similar to the [v] sound in English, as in “vase.” In these USMS dialects, [v] corresponds to the orthographic {v} in written Spanish, as in vaso, pronounced as [váso], as opposed to [báso] in other dialects. The sound [v] is not common in General Spanish or widespread in Mexican Spanish. However, it is regularly reported in the Spanish of the Southwest (Bills and Ornstein 1976; Foster 1976; Phillips 1976, among others) and in New Mexican Spanish (Torres Cacoullos and Ferreira 2000; Espinosa 1909). Post (1975) as well as Merz (1977) report that [b] and [v] are also used interchangeably in Arizona Spanish. In looking to explain the use of [v] in USMS, Merz (1977) found that the more frequently her participants spoke English, the more likely they were to use [v] instead of [b]. Phillips (1975) found this alternation also exists in Los Angeles Spanish. Torres and Ferreira (2000) found that for New Mexican Spanish, in many cases this usage of [v] is the retention of an older dialect feature. They point out that this is especially true if there is influence from Judeo-Spanish, which may be the case in some areas of TNMS but may not be the norm in other dialects of USMS. Torres and Ferreira (2000) further found that research on bilinguals in the United States, and particularly formally educated speakers, has shown that in cases where there is an English cognate with a [v], there is a higher likelihood that a bilingual speaker will use that [v] in Spanish as well, as in the English receive and the Spanish recibir. The [v] from the English form may carry over to the Spanish form as [resivíɾ]. This leads to the conclusion that [v] has two potential origins, the preservation of a historical feature in some cases and the influence of English pronunciation for bilinguals in others. • [ʝ] variation. In Figure 12.1, we employ the consonant [ʝ] as the pronunciation represented orthographically by {ll} and {y}, as in the words ella “she” [éʝa] and llamar “to call” [ʝamár], and yeso “gypsum” or “plaster” [ʝéso]; again, this corresponds to the English {y} in “yes.” For USMS, there are two additional variants: [ʤ] and [ø] (no sound). For the former, {ll} in ella is represented by the symbol [ʤ], giving [éʤa]. The [ʤ] sound has no exact equivalent in English but would resemble a slightly softer English [ʤ], as in “judge” [ʤʌʤ]. The third, [ø], occurs when orthographic {ll} and {y} are eliminated entirely and not pronounced, as in ella “she” [éøa] or capilla “chapel” [kapíøa]. Villa tends to use this third pronunciation; when in Guadalajara, he found he had to be careful in pronouncing his last name in order to have it spelled correctly (Villa vs. Vía).

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• [r]/[ɾ] variation. Several authors (Foster 1976; Hammond 2000; Phillips 1975) find that the multiple vibrant /r/ may be reduced to the single vibrant [ɾ] in differing contexts. Hammond (2000) noted that the multiple variant [r] is stylized and appears in more formal speech, while the tap [ɾ] is used in the place of [r] in conversational speech, especially in word-initial position. The only context in which the distinction between the two vibrants is consistently maintained is between vowels, as in the words perro “dog” and pero “but” and carro “car” and caro “expensive,” where there are clear meaning distinctions. Lipski (1994: 279) points out that in Mexican Spanish, it is common for bilinguals (Spanish/Quiche or Spanish/Nahuatl) to reduce [r] to [ɾ]. Because this variation appears to be conditioned by sociolinguistic factors, the degree and frequency at which this happens is not known and requires further sociolinguistic study. • [h] variant. Espinosa (1909: 118) finds the unvoiced glottal fricative [h] in TNMS, postulating two diferent sources for it. The first is the vestigial remains of the Old Spanish [h]. Orthographically, in written general Spanish, the {h} is not pronounced; for example, in humo “smoke” [úmo], it is silent. However, for some TNMS speakers, it is [húmo] much like the {h} in the English “hello” [həˈloʊ]. This usage of [h] is reported as occurring in various dialects of Southwest Spanish, especially in older studies that did not rely on large data sets and extensive interviews with speakers. Most modern research indicates USMS follows the norm of other varieties of Spanish in that the orthographic {h}, as in the words hola “hello” [óla] and ahora “now” [aóɾa], is not pronounced. The second instance of [h] occurs as an aspirated form of [s]. For example, in many varieties of Spanish, the [s], as in the word nosotros “we” [nohótɾos], is realized as the fricative [h]. However, according to Espinosa (1909: 118), in TNMS, the [s] between two vowels becomes the velar [x] and, due to its “weak quality,” represents it as [h], as in [nohótɾos]. Lipski (1994: 280–281) confirms that this weak pronunciation of [s] as [h] does appear in some dialects of USMS but asserts it is restricted primarily to northern New Mexico and southern Colorado Spanish. Lance (1975) finds that the realization of [s] as [h] is common in Texas Spanish, and Merz (1977) notes it in Arizona as well. In TNMS, the phenomenon of [s] > [h] can also happen in syllable-initial position (Espinosa 1909; Brown 2005). A common example of this is the pronunciation of the phrase sí señor “yes sir” as [híheɲóɾ], encountered in many areas of northern New Mexico. The syllable initial [s] > [h] is also reported for Arizona (Post 1975) as well as broader Southwest Spanish (Lipski 1994; Sánchez 1982). In sum, [s] > [h] as described earlier does appear in some USMS dialects but is relatively uncommon and does not form a part of the larger USMS core sound system. • The [ɛ] variant. Espinosa (1909) identified the vowel sound [ɛ] as being used in TNMS. This is an open-mid-front vowel and occurs in closed syllables, such as el “the” [ɛl] (Espinosa 1909: 60) as an allophone of the vowel /e/. An allophone is how a sound can vary depending on where in a word it occurs. An example of [ɛ] in English can be found in the word tell [tɛl]. According to Lipski (1994: 279,

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2008: 84), [ɛ] is common in all of Mexico and dialects of USMS in final closed syllables. Several researchers (Foster 1976: 23; Merz 1977) confirm that [ɛ] is basically the dominant form in this phonetic context, a closed syllable, for Arizona Spanish and broader Southwest Spanish. Clegg and Fails (2018) assert that the occurrence of [ɛ] as an allophone of /e/ in this context is a general feature of all dialects of Spanish, not just USMS. Vowel reduction. This feature involves reducing unstressed vowels; thus, entonces becomes entons and presidente gives presdente. In both cases, the unstressed vowels come before [s]. According to Lipski (2008), speakers of Spanish from central Mexico may reduce unstressed vowels, while those from northern Mexico normally do not. For the southwestern regions of the United States, Lipski (2008) states that vowel reduction is uncommon, since most speakers in this area are connected to dialects that do not reduce vowels. Diphthongs. For all dialects of Spanish, when two vowels that are not normally diphthongs co-occur in the same word, they may be maintained as two separate syllables (hiatus) or combined into one syllable to create a diphthong. An example of hiatus is found in the word pelear “to fight,” which in some dialects has three separate syllables pe/le/ar. Combining the two vowels into one syllable to form a diphthong would result in pe/liar, with the second [e] becoming an [i], which then combines with [a] to form the diphthong [ja]. The word media “half ” contains an example of this sound. Multiple researchers have found that in USMS, this reduction of hiatus into a diphthong is common (Sanchez 1982; Alba 2005; Espinosa 1909; Foster 1976; Jenkins 1999; Lipski 2008; Merz 1977). However, while it does occur in USMS, it does not appear to be the dominant usage. The maintenance of hiatus as two separate syllables is more common. The schwa [ə]. A less common feature in other varieties of Spanish but attested in USMS by some researchers (Foster 1976; Phillips 1975; Sánchez 1982) is the relaxing, or laxing, of unstressed vowels. This feature is the norm in English; unstressed vowels are frequently laxed, or reduced, to [ə], or schwa. The classic example in English of the [ə] is the word America [əˈmɛrəkə], common in many dialects of US English. Sánchez (1982) found that this happens in some USMS dialects, for example, as in pero “but” [pəɾə]. Phillips (1975) found that when [ə] occurs, it occurs most often in words of English origin. Foster (1976) also reports this reduction of unstressed vowels in Mexican American Spanish. However, the full extent of the occurrence of this sound is unknown and poorly documented, indicating that it is unlikely to be commonly found in USMS. [ʧ]/[ʃ] variation. The [ʧ] as described in Figure 11.1 is realized as [ʃ] in some USMS dialects as well as in northern Mexican Spanish. Thus, muchacha “girl” [muʧáʧa] is pronounced as [muʃáʃa]. This unvoiced palatal fricative corresponds to the orthographic {s} in the English “sugar,” as described earlier. The [ʧ]/[ʃ] variation can be found in TNMS and the Spanish of the Southwest (Boggs 1954; Espinosa 1909: 101; Lipski 2008; Merz 1977). Méndez (2016) finds that the alternation between [ʃ] and [ʧ] is common in various regions of Chihuahua and

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has extended to Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas. He notes that the use of both sounds is common in the same contexts by both bilinguals and monolinguals in El Paso. In sum, USMS demonstrates some minor phonological diferences from other Spanish varieties; however, most of the sounds in USMS can also be found in the broader Spanish-speaking world. We note that in the USMS sound system, there are only two variants that may be influenced by English, the [v] and the reduced vowel [ə], which are not widely reported or well documented. This leads us to conclude that the USMS sound system is one that closely resembles Mexican Spanish in general and very closely that of northern Mexico. These similarities may be why those who characterize USMS as “Spanglish” or some eroded variant of Spanish rarely or never mention its sound system, given its overall resemblance to General Spanish. USMS and Chicano English

Throughout this book, we stress our reliance on documented language use to support the arguments we advance. Here we allow ourselves to engage in a little speculation regarding USMS as it is perceived by certain US English speakers, particularly monolinguals. Anecdotally, over the years we have encountered individuals who say something to the efect that, “These people around here don’t speak Spanish or English any good. It’s just Spanglish.” Upon asking how well they know Spanish, they reply that they do not speak or understand it at all, that is, they are monolingual in English. We have thus been left wondering how they can judge a person’s competence in Spanish, given the fact that their knowledge of the language at most consists of “hasta la vista, baby,” “mi casa es su casa,” and “dos cervezas por favor.” But if monolingual English speakers cannot distinguish between dialectal diferences in Spanish, they can most certainly do so in English. And as pointed out in Chapter 2, everyday language users key on sounds to distinguish between groups of people and their social attributes, such as social class, educational level, socioeconomic status, and place of origin, among many other factors. Regarding the US English sound system, all dialects exhibit variation. One example of this is wordfinal [r], {r}. Speakers of many “mainstream” American English dialects tend to pronounce this [r], as in [dɔr] {door}, [fɔr] {for}, [flɔr] {floor}, and so on. However, speakers of other dialects drop the [r] so that the same words are pronounced as [doʊ] {do’}, [foʊ]{fo’}, and [floʊ]{flo’}, respectively. Other sounds are also eliminated, as in [tʃɑɪl] {chil’} vs. [tʃɑɪld] {child}. In other cases, some vowels are pronounced as diphthongs, as in [keɪnt] {cain’t} vs. [kænt] {can’t} or [peɪnts] {paints} vs. [pænts] {pants} (article of clothing). The list goes on and on, but sufce it to say that in spite of all the communication technologies that link us together, regional variation is still very much a part of the English-language landscape in this country. Using markers such as these, some speakers of majority US English dialects may look down on speakers of other dialects of the same variety as uneducated, ignorant,

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low-class, poor, or lazy. This may occur within a region, or between regions. For instance, a common perception is that Northerners look down on how Southerners speak English. But it is also the case that some Northerners may look down on other Northerners’ English, and some Southerners may look down on other Southerners’ English. When it comes to ethnic origin, some of those who are of European descent may look down on how those who are of African, Mexican, Asian, or Middle Eastern descent speak English. Remember that we do not refer to immigrants, but rather to those who were born and raised in the United States. This brings us to Chicano English (ChcE). Regarding ChcE, scholars such as Fought 2003; Galindo 1987; Mendoza-Denton 1997; Ornstein-Galicia 1984; Santa Ana and Bayley 2008, among others, have studied the collection of American English dialects whose origins trace back to the earliest days of Spanish/English contact west of the Mississippi. Their work, in part, points to the fact that as a result of time of contact and the impact of local English varieties and social milieus, English speakers of Mexican descent do not all share the same dialect of ChcE. For example, in discussing this group of speakers, particularly students, Santa Ana and Bayley (2008: 408) write: [S]ome Chicano students speak the English dialects of their Euro-American teachers, while others speak a native English dialect that both Chicano and Spanish-speaking immigrant children acquire in their home communities. This final variety is ChcE, which appears to maintain certain phonological features that are characteristic of Spanish native-speaker, English-as-a-second-language learner interlanguage, or in the current terminology of U.S. public schools, English language learner (ELL) speech. Speakers of ChcE express social solidarity in their native community dialect by way of these features. They also observe, “A commonplace [idea] often bandied about is that ChcE is merely ‘Spanish-accented English’” (2008: 407). This widespread misconception apparently motivates another comment we have encountered: “well, if they don’t speak Spanish, how come they have a Spanish accent?” Richard Anthony “Cheech” Marin, the actor and comedian, is perhaps one of the best-known public figures to employ that type of dialect. As Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheech_ Marin) observes, “Marin’s trademark is his characters’ strong Chicano accents, although Marin himself is not fluent in Spanish.” Marin has had a prolific career, and if you search the Internet for “Cheech Marin,” you will find any number of clips in which he uses Chicano English, albeit in a somewhat-exaggerated manner from time to time. Incidentally, if you find one in which he is being interviewed and not “in character,” you will find that he switches out of ChcE, that is, he is bi-dialectal in English. But at any rate, even if he relies on language stereotypes, you can get an idea of what non-specialists might be keying on in judging USMS speakers’ competency, or lack thereof, in Spanish. Regarding those English-speaking Hispanics who employ a diferent dialect than their own,

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those non-specialists (and perhaps a number of specialists) may be extending their negative views of ChcE to USMS. To put it another way, we surmise that a popular attitude might be, “Well, if they speak bad English they must speak bad Spanish.” This transference requires no knowledge of Spanish. As noted in Chapter 1, when we present anecdotal evidence, we point that out, and that indeed is the case here. As our research agendas focus on USMS, we have not investigated the possible transference of monolingual mainstream English speakers’ negative attitudes from ChcE to Spanish varieties in the West. As a result, any detailed discussion of these Spanish/English contact phenomena regarding their sound systems falls well outside the focus of this book. We include these brief observations due to a curiosity resulting from living in a bilingual world; they are a small extension of the discussions in Chapter 7. Future research will help shed light on this particular aspect of Spanish/English contact west of the Mississippi, in particular to better understand the attitudes of monolingual English speakers toward USMS. Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 11

1 Search your favorite video website for “Mexican Spanish Dialects.” What sounds are used to characterize the various dialects there? 2 Visit the website www.coerll.utexas.edu/spintx/. This is a collection of video interviews of Spanish speakers in Texas. Using the sound charts in this chapter, what features in their speech can you identify? Do you find sounds not listed in the chapter’s descriptions? 3 Search your favorite video website for “Gabriel Iglesias Spanish.” Gabriel is a bilingual standup comedian who often inserts Spanish into his routines. You may find some sketches in which he compares diferent groups of US Spanish speakers. In general terms, how does he characterize the pronunciation of Spanish? 4 Watch the video “Adonio Pacheco,” located at www.youtube.com/watch?v= rdAGJz4NvAg. If the URL has changed, search for “Adonio Pacheco New Mexico Spanish.” Listen to Adonio; what sounds in his speech can you detect that fall outside of the USMS macro-dialect system presented in this chapter? 5 Search the Internet for the web page titled “Shit Burqueños Say” (“Burqueños” is an in-group label used by residents of Albuquerque, New Mexico). What sound features are emphasized to represent that English dialect?  Additional readings Brown, Esther. 2005. Syllable-initial /s/ in Traditional New Mexican Spanish: linguistic factors favoring reduction ahina. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 24: 13–30. Clegg, J. Halvor, and Willis Fails. 2018. Manual de fonética y fonología españolas. New York: Routledge. Fought, Carmen. 2003. Chicano English in context. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Waltermire, Mark. 2015. Mexican immigration and the changing face of northern New Mexican Spanish. International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 34: 149–164. 

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References Alba, Matthew. 2005. Hiatus resolution between words in New Mexican Spanish: A usage-based account. The University of New Mexico. Dissertation. Bills, Garland D., and Jacob Ornstein. 1976. Linguistic diversity in Southwest Spanish. Studies in Southwest Spanish, J. Donald Bowen and Jacob Ornstein-Galicia (eds.), 4–16. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Bills, Garland D., and Neddy A. Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Boggs, Ralph. 1954. Phonetics of words borrowed form English by New Mexican Spanish. Homenaje a Fritz Kruger 2: 305–312. Brown, Esther. 2005. Syllable-initial /s/ in traditional New Mexican Spanish: Linguistic factors favoring reduction ahina. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 24: 13–30. Clegg, J. Halvor, and Willis Fails. 2018. Manual de fonética y fonología españolas. New York: Routledge. Espinosa, Aurelio M. 1909. Studies in New Mexican Spanish, part I: Phonology. Revue de Dialectologie Romane 1: 157–239, 269–300. Foster, David William. 1976. The phonology of Southwest Spanish. Studies in Southwest Spanish, J. Donald Bowen and Jacob Ornstein-Galicia (eds.), 17–28. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Fought, Carmen. 2003. Chicano English in context. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Galindo, D. Leticia. 1987. Linguistic influence and variation on the English of Chicano adolescents in Austin, Texas. University of Texas, Austin. Dissertation. Hammond, Robert. 2000. The multiple vibrant liquid in U.S. Spanish. Research on Spanish in the United States: Linguistic issues and challenges, Ana Roca (ed.), 331–347. Somerville: Cascadilla Press. Hidalgo, Margarita. 2018. Diversification of Mexican Spanish: A tridimensional study in New World sociolinguistics. Berlin: de Gruyter. Jenkins, Devin. 1999. Hiatus resolution in Spanish: Phonetic aspects and phonological implications from Northern New Mexico data. University of New Mexico. Dissertation. Lance, Donald. 1975. Dialectal and nonstandard forms in Texas Spanish. El lenguaje de los Chicanos, Eduardo Hernández-Chávez, Andrew D. Cohen, and Anthony F. Beltramo (eds.), 37–51. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Lipski, John M. 1994. Latin American Spanish. New York: Longman Press. Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Méndez, Luis Alberto. 2016. Weakening of the africate /t/ [voiceless postalveolar fricative] in the Spanish of Ciudad Juárez. University of Texas El Paso. Dissertation. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1997. Chicana/Mexicana identity of linguistic variation: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of gang afliation in an urban high school. Stanford University. Dissertation. Merz, Geri. 1977. A phonological study of the Spanish spoken in La Reforma neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona. The University of Arizona. Dissertation. Ornstein-Galicia, Jacob. 1984. Form and function in Chicano English. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Phillips, Robert. 1975. Variations in Los Angeles Spanish phonology. El Lenguaje de los Chicanos, Eduardo Hernández-Chávez, Andrew D. Cohen, and Anthony F. Beltramo (eds.), 52–60. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.

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Phillips, Robert. 1976. The segmental phonology of Los Angeles Spanish. Studies in Southwest Spanish, J. Bowen and J. Ornstein (eds.), 74–92. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Post, Anita. 1975. Some aspects of Arizona Spanish. El Lenguaje de los Chicanos, Eduardo Hernández-Chávez, Andrew D. Cohen, and Anthony F. Beltramo (eds.), 30–36. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Sánchez, Rosaura. 1982. Our linguistic and social context. Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic aspects, Jon Amastae and Lucía Elías-Olivares (eds.), 9–46. New York: Cambridge University Press. Santa Ana, Otto, and Robert Bayley. 2008. Chicano English: Phonology. The Americas and the Caribbean, Bernd Kortmann and Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), 219–238. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton. Torres Cacoullos, Rena, and Fernanda Ferreira. 2000. Lexical frequency and voiced labiodental-bilabial variation in New Mexican Spanish. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 19: 1–17. Waltermire, Mark. 2015. Mexican immigration and the changing face of northern New Mexican Spanish. International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 34: 149–164.

12 LANGUAGE STRUCTURE1

A comparison of USMS verb selection with other varieties in the Americas

As we see in Chapters 9 and 10, a common result of language contact is the introduction of new terms into the lexicon; witness the current spread of words for social media platforms such as “Twitter,” “Facebook,” “Instagram,” “YouTube,” and “Soundcloud.” These all appear on the home page of the archconservative Real Academia Española (www.rae.es), along with their “política de cookies”! On the other hand, the way that words are constructed and how they are ordered (technically, morphology, and syntax) are much more resistant to external influences. Changes in language structure may take centuries or even millennia and tend to be internal to the language (see, for example, Villa Cresap 1997 for the development of futurity in Spanish). This is why we assert that USMS is one of the many varieties of global Spanish and not some type of hybrid language. To support this argument, we have looked at the history of USMS speakers, their shared linguistic roots with other Spanish speakers, and the words that make up their vocabulary. We employ these analyses to demonstrate that the macrodialect we label USMS belongs to a larger collection of Mexican Spanish dialects. To further substantiate our position, we now turn to a comparison of current verb usage in USMS, its related “parent,” Mexican Spanish, and other varieties of the language in the Americas. We choose the verbal system precisely because it represents one of the Spanish-language structures resistant to changes due to language contact. Before beginning, we note that the internal workings of verbs in USMS and other American and European varieties, that is, their verbal morphology, function exactly the same. For example, a regular verb consists of a verb stem (the lexical part of the verb), a marker for tense (past, present, future), aspect (perfective or imperfective), and mood (indicative or subjunctive), and a marker for person and number (who is doing the action, singular or plural). Following this model, a conjugated form of DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-14

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comer “to eat,” comes, consists of com- “ingest nutrients,” -e- “present tense, indicative,” and -s, “informal you tú.” All this put together means something like “you now ingest nutrients.” A plural form, comemos, gives “we now ingest nutrients,” as the -mos corresponds to nosotros, “we,” as opposed to -s, tú, “you.” (If “ingest nutrients” seems a bit stif, replace it with “chow down on tacos.”) Frequency and verb preference in USMS

To better understand the USMS verbal system as it compares with varieties of noncontact Spanish, we examine three diferent corpora collected by Lope Blanch (1977, 1986, 1990). The first is a 1990 corpus of spoken USMS, consisting of approximately 83,000 words, referred to earlier. The second is a 1986 collection, made up of sociolinguistic interviews of Spanish speakers from Mexico City, containing about 362,000 words. Lope Blanch labels this corpus popular, implying that the speakers are of a lower educational and socioeconomic status. Hereafter, we refer to this corpus as “MexPop.” These first two corpora are located at www.iifilologicas. unam.mx/elhablamexico/. The third (1977) he labels as the habla culta, implying that the speakers are of a higher educational and socioeconomic status. The interviews for this corpus were carried out in a variety of major cities from across the Spanish-speaking Americas; hereafter, it is referred to as “HabCult.” This collection represents the “spoken language of the upper middle class” in a standard language ideology that Lippi-Greene (2012: 67) identifies. The goal of this analysis is to determine the 50 most frequent verbs in each of these corpora and compare those frequencies to determine how USMS Spanish verb usage aligns with popular Mexican Spanish and the collection of upper-middle-class dialects. To accomplish this, we extracted all forms of a verb from the three corpora and then condensed the diferent forms into a total frequency for that verb, labeled in Table 12.1 by the corresponding infinitive. Once the forms were extracted and a lexical frequency was condensed for each verb, they were ranked in order of most frequent, from 1 to 50. In order to compare the distribution of the verbs, we divide the items into four groups. The first contains verbs 1–5, the second 6–15, the third 16–30, and the fourth 31–50; each group is divided by a horizontal line. The groups grow in size as their rank increases due to the fact that as the frequency decreases, the matches become farther apart. The results are presented in Table 12.1. TABLE 12.1 The 50 most frequent verbs in USMS, MexPop, and HabCult R = ranking

R

USMS

R

MexPop

R

HabCult

1 2 3 4

Ser Tener Estar Ir

1 2 3 4

Ser Decir Ir Estar

1 2 3 4

Ser Haber Tener Estar (Continued)

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TABLE 12.1 (Continued)

R

USMS

R

MexPop

R

HabCult

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Haber Decir Hacer Venir Saber Trabajar Hablar Ver Poder Querer Vivir Dar Gustar Creer Llamar Pasar Salir Conocer Poner Quedar Andar Llegar Acordar Llevar Ayudar Dejar Morir Parecer Comprar Usar Mirar Nacer Entrar Casar Estudiar Cambiar Aprender Pensar Tratar Oír Seguir Tomar Cantar Comer Entender Tocar

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Tener Haber Hacer Ver Dar Saber Venir Querer Poder Trabajar Andar Salir Llevar Gustar Poner Llegar Fijar Quedar Pasar Dejar Vivir Mirar Conocer Creer Comprar Llamar Comer Hablar Casar Entrar Tomar Empezar Tocar Morir Seguir Oír Estudiar Mandar Pensar Sentir Ayudar Buscar Ganar Deber Volver Entender

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Decir Ir Hacer Poder Ver Saber Creer Dar Pasar Hablar Querer Llegar Parecer Gustar Venir Poner Salir Trabajar Llamar Conocer Mirar Pensar Vivir Llevar Deber Estudiar Dejar Oír Tomar Encontrar Quedar Entender Empezar Sentir Leer Seguir Fijar Entrar Acordar Volver Existir Contar Recordar Buscar Cambiar Resultar

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Comparing the frequency rankings of the three corpora in Table 12.1, the first five most frequent verbs match almost exactly, with the MexPop corpus and the HabCult corpus sharing four of the five highest-frequency verbs with USMS. The only verb not held in common between the three is decir “to say,” listed as number 6 for USMS. This indicates that, overall, the highly frequent verbs are the same across all three groups. This is unsurprising, as Davies (2006) establishes that these verbs are among the 30 most common words in the Spanish language. We begin to find some slight diferences in frequency between the three corpora in the next ten verbs (numbers 6–15). Note that the MexPop corpus shares seven out of ten verbs with USMS and the HabCult six out of ten, indicating that the three varieties are still remarkably similar up to this point. Of interest is the fact that the verb andar “to walk” ranks at number 15 for MexPop but is lower in USMS at 25. However, this item does not appear at all in the top 50 for the HabCult. This may be due to the use of andar “to walk” as an auxiliary verb instead of estar “to be,” as in ¿qué andas haciendo? “What are you doing?” a feature of Mexican Spanish, vs. ¿qué estás haciendo? in other varieties. Whatever the case may be, evidence begins to emerge indicating that MexPop is more like USMS than HabCult. With the next 15 verbs, we start to see more variation between the three varieties, and also that MexPop and USMS continue to be more similar to each other. That pattern continues in the last group of 20 verbs. The percentage of similarity of each of the three corpora is presented in Table 12.2. Each frequency grouping has more variation than the last, with the first five being nearly identical across USMS, MexPop, and HabCult. The last 20 verbs demonstrate a larger diference between USMS and MexPop, with an even larger diference between those two and HabCult. When we look at the top 50 items from USMS as compared to MexPop, there are only eight verbs from the latter that were not on the former (fijar, empezar, mandar, sentir, buscar, ganar, deber, and volver, “to fix or set,” “to begin,” “to send or command,” “to feel,” “to look [for],” “to earn,” “to owe,” and “to return,” respectively). That is, 42 out of 50, or 84% of the verbs, are on both lists, but with diferent frequencies. For the HabCult top 50 list, there were 13 verbs out of the top 50 that were not on the USMS list (deber, encontrar, quedar, empezar, sentir, leer, fijar, volver, existir, contar, recordar, buscar, and resultar, “to owe,” “to find,” “to remain,” “to begin,” “to feel,” “to read,” “to fix or set,” “to return,” “to exist,” “to count,” “to remember,” “to look [for],” and “to result,” respectively), that is, 37 out of 50 were shared. This TABLE 12.2 Comparison of frequency groupings between USMS, MexPop, and HabCult

USMS

MexPop

% match

HabCult

% match

Verbs 1–5 Verbs 6–15 Verbs 16–30 Verbs 31–50

4/5 7/10 11/15 11/20

80% 70% 73% 55%

4/5 6/10 7/15 6/20

80% 60% 46% 30%

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results in a 74% similarity between the USMS and HabCult. USMS verb selection is closer to MexPop, but all three corpora remain remarkably similar to each other. This analysis serves to support our use of the terms language, variety, and dialect, introduced in Chapter 2. In general terms, the verb pool USMS, popular Mexican Spanish, and “educated” Spanish of the Americas draw from is essentially the same, placing all in the category “Spanish.” At the same time, how these verbs are utilized does not have an exact one-to-one correspondence; witness the variation in the use of andar as an auxiliary verb. These diferences underscore the fact that there are distinct varieties in American Spanish. And the diferences between the verb frequencies of USMS and popular Mexican Spanish demonstrate that even though those varieties share a common history, there are still dialectal diferences between the two that go beyond their vocabularies. To sum up, at this structural level of USMS, there is no evidence of any influence or variation resulting from its close contact with US English. This further debunks the “Spanglish is gobbledygook” myth that circulates in some professional and popular circles. Additional verbal variation

While all dialects of Spanish draw from a common verb pool, speakers may exhibit variation in the way some verbs are pronounced. Certain researchers commenting on USMS will mention a number of such verbal forms as evidence that it represents a corruption of “standard” Spanish. Recall that a standard language ideology holds that there is only one “right” way to say any particular word, and that any deviation from that norm is “incorrect” or “non-standard.” Lipski (2008) ofers a literature review of scholarship on “Mexican American Spanish” (MAS). In it, he observes that some researchers assert “[MAS is] characterized by a very high degree of archaic, rustic, nonstandard, and even ungrammatical elements” (2008: 91). In Table 12.3, we list a number of such variant forms often cited in the literature. Regarding the geographic distribution of these types of forms, Espinosa (1946) notes the comments of Ángel Rosenblat, a well-known Spanish dialectologist. TABLE 12.3 Commonly cited verbal variants in USMS

Variants íbanos puédemos fuistes truje (yo) traiba vide haiga semos (yo) ha venido

English meaning íbamos podemos fuiste traje (yo) traía vi haya somos yo he venido

we used to go we can you (informal) went I brought I used to bring I saw that it would/could/should be we are I have come

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Rosenblat documents morphological diferences such as those in Table 12.3 and gives evidence of other regions in the Spanish-speaking world in which these same features have been attested. To ofer but two examples, Espinosa (1946: 221) states that Rosenblat documents íbanos in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Peru, and Spain. Truje is found in Mexico, the Antilles, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Spain. Essentially, these forms are found in nearly all varieties of Spanish (Espinosa 1946: 270–273). We could continue to specify the distribution of all the forms in Table 12.3 but hopefully have made our point. These forms are found in many Spanish varieties and dialects. Presenting them as archaisms or other linguistic oddities is not an accurate description of what they are, widely identified variant forms in the conjugation of these high-frequency verbs. The verb + patrás construction

As noted previously, certain verbal variants such as truje and traiba are often cited as characterizing USMS, whether they are common or not in any one dialect of that variety. Recall the “sore thumb” factor introduced in Chapter 11. References to them become so common in the literature that they come to be seen as universal markers of USMS. To illustrate this, we move from verb usage to a grammar, or syntactic, issue. One such structure consists of the phrase verb + patrás, as in te llamo patrás, “I’ll call you back.” In the section titled “Syntactic Characteristics of Mexican American Spanish,” Lipski (2008: 87) writes that: Combinations involving para atrás (patrás) to translate the English particle “back” are frequent . . . llamar patrás (to call back, to return a call), dar patrás (to give back, to return an item), pagar patrás (to pay back [a loan]), pensar patrás (to think back, recollect), and so forth. As this structure closely maps onto the English construction “verb + back,” as in “I’ll call you back,” “I’ll give it back,” or “I’ll pay it back,” researchers attribute it to an insertion of English grammar into Spanish, identifying this usage as frequent. In the following we address the assertion that this structure derives from English. Various researchers such as Lipski 1985; Otheguy and García 1988; Otheguy 1995; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Villa 2005, 2010; Clegg 2015, among others, have analyzed and commented on the phrase verb + patrás. Lipski (1985) finds that this phrase occurs frequently in all varieties of Spanish in contact with English. He determines that it is used to calque such English phrases as “pay back, come back, give back, move back, put back, etc.” (1985: 92). He also finds that patrás exists in all varieties of Spanish. Lipski bases his claim that patrás is a contact phenomenon on the fact that bilingual communities have developed the same usage independent of each other and employ it far more frequently than monolingual speakers. Otheguy (1995) claims that patrás is known in non-contact varieties of Spanish and that it is a common construction in the Spanish language. The preposition para

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Linguistic perspectives

in Spanish is used to indicate future union or a trajector moving toward a landmark, or target. In this context, think of a trajector as a dart tossed at a dartboard. For Otheguy, the expression llamar patrás does not difer from this traditional Spanish usage. It indicates that para will move toward the intended landmark of atrás. Therefore, llamar para atrás (patrás) used in this sense is not diferent from traditional Spanish usage and therefore is not a linguistic innovation. According to Otheguy, the meaning of para and atrás has not changed; they are still the same established phrases and convey the same basic meaning. Silva-Corvalán (1994: 175) counters Otheguy’s argument, writing: In Los Angeles Spanish, as in all other varieties of U.S. Spanish, para atrás has extended its meaning to include not strictly “repetition” as Otheguy (1993) suggests, but rather “in reply” or “in return”, which back has in such English verb phrases as “to call back”, “to come back”, “to send back”. This would indicate that a new semantic meaning has been attached to the phrase verb + patrás. She also states in her research that the extension of a new meaning to patrás has allowed it to combine with a whole new series of verbs with which it did not previously occur in monolingual varieties of Spanish. In diachronic studies of patrás, Villa (2005, 2010) found that this structure has existed in Spanish in one form or another since the 15th century and has slowly grown in frequency. He suggests the emergence of the agglutinated form patrás from para atrás. He asserts that it follows the same pattern as other forms, such as delante (de), which results from the fusion of the Latin prepositions de + in + ante. Villa proposes that the development of patrás is not evidence of external influence but rather a language internal development that has gradually evolved over time on a grammaticization cline. He asserts that the core meaning of para has evolved from a trajector moving toward a landmark to a trajector moving toward a landmark and then returning to the point of origin. In this case, think of the trajector as a ball being tossed between two people, from person A to person B and back to person A. He proposes that patrás is now a regressative marker in Spanish with the meaning of “return to point of origin.” Villa further finds that patrás occurs with a variety of verbs that do not indicate physical movement, such as mirar patrás “to look back.” However, as Villa states, “What we do not know is the distribution of the construction verb + patrás throughout the Spanish speaking world” (2005: 2315). Lipski (1985) claims that in his personal experience, patrás occurs in all varieties of Spanish in contact with English and that the construction patrás is far more frequent in these contact situations than in non-contact situations. This would indicate that English does influence the development of patrás, since contact with English leads to a higher frequency of patrás. However, Lipski bases his comments on anecdotal evidence. Thus, an important element in understanding the quantitative and qualitative diferences in the use of patrás lies in analyzing documented instances of the

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construction. If it is found that English/Spanish bilingual speakers not only use the term patrás more frequently (quantitatively) but also use it in a diferent sense (qualitatively) than monolingual speakers, then that would provide evidence that English has contributed to, caused, or accelerated the evolution of the new structure and meaning. Our goal here, then, is to conduct such an analysis employing documented sources. To complete the quantitative study of the frequency of patrás (including all variants such as para atrás or patrá), examples were extracted from corpora representing monolingual Spanish and Spanish in contact with English. The selected corpora contain written and spoken samples of the Spanish of Mexico, Latin America, and Spain, as well as the American Southwest. The first monolingual corpus, the oral one, comes from the habla culta project cited earlier in this chapter. The written monolingual corpus comprises 15 novels selected from Spanish-language literature. The authors were chosen as representatives of the same capital cities as in the oral corpus. The novels used in the corpus are (1) Maladrón; (2) Rayuela; (3) El camino; (4) Casa de campo; (5) La muerte de Artemio Cruz; (6) Los pies de barro; (7) La reivindicación del conde Don Julián; (8) Cien años de soledad; (9) Tiempo de silencio; (10) Sobrepunto; (11) Gazapo; (12) La guaracha del Macho Camacho; (13) De dónde son los cantantes; (14) Los hombres de a caballo; and (15) La tía Julia y el escribidor. The written corpus contains a total of 1,327,156 words. The third corpus, the Southwest Spanish Corpus, also described earlier in this chapter, represents USMS in contact with English. Each of the corpora was searched, and all the occurrences of patrás (or any of its variants) were located and extracted, including the surrounding text, in order to place the phrase in the proper context. For the qualitative study of the individual uses of patrás in the written corpus, all its occurrences were analyzed, and a classification system developed. The first category in the classification system was spatial, the typical usage of para indicating movement toward a fixed target in space. Some examples of this usage from the corpus are: 1 Talita echó la cabeza para atrás y se golpeó contra la pared del pasillo (Rayuela: 300). Talita threw her head back and hit it against the wall of the hallway. 2 Lo arrastraron para atrás y se paró un montón de la gente delante del muerto (Buenos Aires: 344). They dragged him back and a large group of people stopped in front of the dead man. In example 1, the phrase para atrás indicates the specific direction of Talita’s head toward the target of the wall. The second example uses para atrás in this same directional sense, where he, or lo, is dragged toward the target of atrás, where he had been before.

184

Linguistic perspectives

The second category used to analyze the occurrences of patrás was temporal, meaning, that patrás indicates a reference to a target in time. Examples of this type of usage from the corpus are: 3 Yo considero, cuando miro para atrás, a veces, y eso que fui feliz con mi marido. (Santiago de Chile: 177) I consider, when I look back, sometimes, and all that I was happy with my husband. 4 No, no pienses para adelante sino para atrás. (La muerte de Artemio Cruz: 192) No, don’t think ahead think back. In example 3, para atrás is used to indicate a direction in time. When the informant “looks back,” she is not moving toward a target in space but rather in time. Example 4 has a similar meaning in that instead of thinking forward in time, the listener is urged to think back. The third category is pleonastic. A common reading of “pleonasm” holds that more words than necessary are used to convey a certain meaning. Thus, if a verb occurring with patrás already indicates “moving back,” as in volver “to go back to a point of origin,” then patrás as “back” is redundant. However, in an expanded definition of the term, an additional word may serve to add an extra semantic dimension. An English example would be “rise,” meaning, “to get up from a kneeling or sitting position.” However, in the phrase “rise up,” the additional “up,” already semantically present in “rise,” lends more of a meaning of “revolt,” as in “the people must rise up against tyranny.” In using pleonastic as a category item, we refer to this expanded definition. Examples of this usage from the corpus are: 5 Una ciudad y después otra y volver para atrás y no fatigarse. (Los hombres de a caballo, 341) One city and then another and return again and not tiring. 6 La curva de la espalda los hombros – volvió un poco para atrás – la hondada de la cintura – se sonrió lamentando no tener. (Los hombres de a caballo, 352) The curve of the back, the shoulders – stepping back a little – the curvature of the waist – he smiled, regretting not having them. In example 5, the verb volver signifies “to go back”; the addition of para atrás reinforces the sense of engaging in an arduous task with fatiguing. In the case of example 6, the meaning of volver is changed from “returning” to “stepping back,” in a sense returning to a previous position. The extracted samples of patrás were also analyzed to see if they contained the new meaning of “in reply” or “in return” ascribed to them by Silva-Corvalán (1994). This category will be referred to as regressative following the analysis of

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Villa (2005), which indicates that the object moves toward the target then returns to the original position. To evaluate the predictions of Silva-Corvalán (1994) and to determine if a usage pattern was present in monolingual Spanish as well as in a contact variety of Spanish, the occurrences of patrás were also analyzed to identify which verbs they collocated with and how frequently each verb occurred with patrás in the diferent corpora. An analysis of all the occurrences of patrás in each of the corpora finds that there is a lower occurrence of patrás in monolingual varieties. Of the 1,532,291 words in the oral corpus, patrás only occurs 13 times. In the written corpus of 1,327,156 words, patrás occurs only 19 times. These two corpora are relatively large, yet the number of occurrences of patrás as compared to the number of total words is small. In the corpus representing contact varieties of Spanish, patrás occurs 27 times out of 83,870 words. If we combine the two corpora representing monolingual Spanish, the oral and written corpora, the total is 2,859,447 words, with 32 examples of patrás. This combined corpus consists of about 34 times as many words as Lope Blanch’s Southwest Spanish corpus, and yet the former contains only 5 more examples of patrás than the latter. This means that in the USMS corpus, patrás occurs once every 3,354 words, while in the monolingual written and oral corpora combined, it occurs only once every 95,314 words. This would answer the quantitative question posed by Villa (2005, 2010) and shows that contact with English likely contributes in some way to this striking rise in frequency. For the qualitative portion of the study, the samples were analyzed individually to determine if there was a diference in usage. The system employed to evaluate the qualitative diferences was the identification and categorization of all usages of patrás into the four categories listed previously, spatial, temporal, pleonastic, and regressative. The results of this evaluation are presented in Table 12.4. The spatial usage was found in all corpora and is the most prevalent in all of them; this appears to be the prototypical usage of patrás. The pleonastic usage was found only twice in the written corpus and once in the USMS corpus. The regressative use was found once in the written corpus and three times in the USMS corpus. An instance of the regressative use can be found in example 7 in the following. In this example, the speaker goes to Laredo and then comes back, showing the process of a trajector moving toward a landmark and then returning to its point of origin.

TABLE 12.4 Qualitative uses of patrás

Usage

Oral

Written

USMS

Total

Spatial Temporal Pleonastic Regressative Total

10 3 0 0 13

14 2 2 1 19

18 5 1 3 27

43 10 3 4 59

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Another regressative form in the USMS corpus can be found in example 8, in which the speaker is writing back in reply to someone with whom she has already corresponded. 7 Y nomás a Laredo y patrás. (Southwest Spanish 17: 3) And just to Laredo and back. 8 [Y] luego que le escribió p’atrás, ya después de que se había ido. (Southwest Spanish 306: 9) And later (he or she) wrote (him or her) back, after (he or she) had already left. In the written corpus, one example of the regressative, or “in reply” usage, was found, as seen in example 9. In this example, Doctor Severino is going to return the call. 9 El Doctor Severo Severino lo llamará para atrás. (Macho 46: 2) Doctor Severo Severino will call you back. These examples indicate that this new regressative meaning of patrás does exist but is not frequent in these corpora. The USMS corpus, though quite small when compared to the oral and written corpora, contained 27 total usages of patrás. When compared with the other corpora, the USMS corpus did contain, relative to its size, more occurrences of temporal patrás. The oral and written combined contain five temporals, the same number as the USMS corpus, with 30 times the words. The spatial usage of patrás in the USMS corpus is similar to the spatial usages in the other two corpora. If English were influencing the development of patrás, it would be expected that the pleonastic and regressative uses would be more frequent in the USMS corpus, since they represent the greatest change from the original meaning. Proportionally speaking, there are more regressative uses in USMS, but the numbers are not large enough to make a strong claim of English influence. However, in all the corpora, the temporal and spatial uses comprise the majority of the tokens. Table 12.5 contains the five most common combinations of verb + patrás from each of the corpora. To be included in the table, the verb had to occur at least three TABLE 12.5 Verb usage with patrás

Verbs

Written

Oral

USMS

Mirar Echar Ir Venir Non-verbal

3 4 1 0 0

3 7 1 0 0

0 0 7 7 3

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separate times in one of the corpora. There were other verbs used, but they are not included in the figure. The verbs that the oral and written corpus combined with most frequently were mirar, as in example 3 cited previously, and echar as, in example 1. The USMS corpus did not contain these two verbs with patrás. The USMS corpus preferred the verbs venir and ir, as in examples 10 and 11: 10 Fui y le platiqué a mi tío, que era un poquito mayor, y vino p’atrás muy enojao. (Southwest Spanish 192: 5) I went and spoke to my uncle, who was a little older, and he came back really angry. 11 ¡Vamos p’atrás, pa la casa! (Southwest Spanish 179: 3) Let’s go back to the house! One interesting and unusual usage of patrás was the non-verbal usage. There were only three examples of this, found only in the USMS corpus. Examples 12 and 13 illustrate this usage: 12 Pero ahora nohotros tenemos que comprar lo que eos agarraron años p’atrás. (Southwest Spanish 158:7) But now we have to buy what they took years ago. 13 Comoquiera p’atrás para . . . darle poquita información, sea de mi vida o sea de San Marcos. (Southwest Spanish 156:3) Even though it might be in the past . . . to give you a little information, about my life or about San Marcos. In both examples, there is no verb with which patrás can be linked. Both of these examples were identified as temporal, since the speaker is using the phrase to indicate a moment in time and, in these cases, a moment in the past. This non-verbal usage of patrás is unique to the USMS corpus and appears to parallel the English “back,” as in the sentence, “A few years back, I was a farmer.” Other varieties of Spanish would render example 12 as Pero ahora nosotros tenemos que comprar lo que ellos agarraron hace años. The use of patrás in this context is an example of extending its semantic meaning to include the concept that was formerly expressed by the verb hacer. The results of this study of verbs co-occurring with patrás indicate that SilvaCorvalán’s claim that patrás will combine with diferent verbs appears to be accurate. In the USMS corpus, patrás combined with the verbs volar “to fly,” comprar “to buy,” regresar “to return,” caminar “to walk,” dar “to give,” and escribir “to write.” In the USMS corpus, patrás not only combined with more verbs but, as the results show, also co-occurred with diferent verbs than in the oral and written corpora. In the

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qualitative analysis, most of the cases of patrás are, as Otheguy claims, the standard usage of para indicating movement toward a specific target in space. These spatial uses can be found in all the corpora analyzed in this study. The temporal usage of patrás is also found in all the corpora. This usage of patrás is similar to the spatial one in that a trajector is moving toward a landmark, with the diference being that the landmark is a point in time. The pleonastic and regressative uses are the most innovative and appear in the written and USMS corpora. This regressative use is more common in the USMS corpora and has expanded to include metaphorical targets, not just spatial or temporal ones, as in example 14. 14 Tener una fiesta, pa celebrar esto, y pa traer p’atrás un orgullo en la comunidá. (Southwest Spanish 185: 4) To have a party, to celebrate this, and to bring back a sense of pride in the community. In this example, the speaker parallels the English “bring back the pride” using traer p’atrás. This is a clear example of regressative, not with a concrete landmark in time or space, but rather with a metaphorical concept. The target of patrás in this sentence is un orgullo, which is not a defined point in space or time; un orgullo is not a direction in which we can go. Anecdotally, while shopping with his wife in a department store in Albuquerque, Clegg observed a young child crying because his balloon had deflated. The child turned to his mother and said, “¿Mamá, puedes soplarlo patrás?” “Mom, can you blow this back up?” This is another example of patrás functioning with a diferent verb, with the meaning of getting something, the balloon, back to its previous state. The analysis of verb collocations with patrás indicates that in a contact variety of Spanish, it collocates not only with more verbs than monolingual Spanish but also with diferent verbs. This confirms the predictions of Silva-Corvalán (1994) and demonstrates that for speakers of USMS, patrás has advanced beyond the basic meanings assigned to the phrase in other varieties of Spanish. The question that remains, then, is, to what do we attribute this influence? The results of the quantitative analysis clearly indicate that patrás is nearly 30 times as frequent in USMS as in monolingual Spanish. This, together with the evidence that it collocates with diferent verbs and is used diferently, would indicate that English is an agent of change, especially since most of the examples translate using “back” in English. It is also clear, however, that patrás does exist in monolingual Spanish and with remarkably similar meanings. Is it possible that the pattern of extension of usage and meaning given to patrás could be an internal linguistic innovation on a grammaticization cline as claimed by Villa (2005)? Can both theories be right? Is the evolution of patrás both a language internal process and a contact phenomenon? The answer is

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yes. As Silva-Corvalán (2001: 286) points out, a rise in frequency of a form can be attributed to language contact. Patrás already existed in Spanish before it came into intensive contact with English. However, the rise in frequency of use is attributable to English as well as its use of “back” in a variety of contexts. This rise in frequency of use, together with the formation of the collocated form, causes speakers to take note of patrás and use it in more and varied contexts, thus adding new usage, meaning, and flexibility to the form. These new meanings and usages are not so foreign to Spanish that they are unintelligible and, in fact, may someday extend to patrás in monolingual Spanish. The English influence simply accelerated and broadened the change. Overall, in the corpora analyzed here, we find that USMS speakers select highfrequency verbs, as do other speakers in Mexico and Latin America, regardless of social class. In addition, a syntactic structure supposedly unique to USMS is found in other non-contact varieties of Spanish, albeit at a higher rate in the former. It is clear that in the speech samples analyzed here, the influence of contact with English has had little influence on the internal structure of USMS, apart from a few examples of accelerating a change that was already underway in the Spanish language before it came into intensive contact with English. Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 12

1 Visit the page on the website “Spanish in Texas Project” located at www.coerll. utexas.edu/spintx/. Select three of the interviews and read the transcript that accompanies each interview. Select all the verbs, find the infinitive form for each, and then compare your list with Table 12.1 found in this chapter. Do the verbs you found match those presented there, or are they diferent? 2 Consulting the same page as in 1, do you find any of the variants listed in the lefthand column in Table 12.3? Do you find any verb form that varies from other dialects of Spanish (e.g., comistes vs. comiste)? 3 Browsing through the same videos as in 1 and 2, can you find any instances of verb + patrás? If so, how is that phrase used (i.e., spatial, temporal, etc.)? If you cannot find any instances of that structure, why would that be? 4 The verb llamarse “to call oneself ” is sometimes used when you introduce yourself to another person. Thus, me llamo Daniel literally means “I call myself Daniel” and is the equivalent of the English “I’m Daniel.” Those who are just learning Spanish, though, will often say, “Me llamo es Daniel,” adding in es “is.” Discuss the impact of English grammar on a learner’s variety of Spanish grammar. 5 We have discussed grammatical variation in USMS, as in sentence 12 earlier, in which años p’atrás is used instead of hace años. This type of variation in verb use is not unique to USMS. Some monolingual English speakers will say, “I’m gonna learn him a thing or two” instead of “I’m gonna teach him a thing or two.” Why would this type of variation exist?

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Additional readings Lipski, John. 1985. The construction pa(ra) atrás among Spanish-English bilinguals: Parallel structures and universal patterns. Revista/Review Interamericana 25: 91–102. Otheguy, Ricardo. 1993. A reconsideration of the notion of loan translation in the analysis of U.S. Spanish. Spanish in the United States: Linguistic contact and diversity, Ana Roca and John M. Lipski (eds.), 21–45. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Roca, Ana, and John Lipski, eds. 1993. Spanish in the United States: Linguistic contact and diversity. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1990. Current issues in studies of language contact. Hispania 73: 162–177. Smead, Robert N., and J. Halvor Clegg. 1996. English calques in Chicano Spanish. Spanish in contact: Issues in bilingualism, Ana Roca and John B. Jensen (eds.), 123–130. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Note 1 Portions of this chapter previously appeared in the International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 2015: 1–2. 

References Clegg, Jens. 2015. Para atrás: Contact induced change or language internal evolution? International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 34: 51–65. Davies, Mark. 2006. A frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners. London: Routledge. Espinosa, Aurelio M. 1946. Estudios sobre el español de Nuevo México, Parte II: Morfología. Traducción, reelaboración y notas de Ángel Rosenblat: Biblioteca de Dialectología Hispanoamericana. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge. Lipski, John M. 1985. The construction pa(ra) atrás among Spanish-English bilinguals: Parallel structures and universal patterns. Revista/Review Interamericana 25: 91–102. Lipski, John M. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lope Blanch, Juan M. 1977. Estudios sobre el español hablado en las principales ciudades de América. México, DF: UNAM. Lope Blanch, Juan M. 1986. El estudio del español hablado culto. Historia de un proyecto. México, DF: UNAM. Lope Blanch, Juan M. 1990. El español hablado en el suroeste de los Estados Unidos: Materiales para su estudio, 1st ed. México, DF: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas. Otheguy, Ricardo. 1993. A reconsideration of the notion of loan translation in the analysis of U.S. Spanish. Spanish in the United States: Linguistic contact and diversity, Ana Roca and John M. Lipski (eds.), 21–45. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Otheguy, Ricardo. 1995. When contact speakers talk, linguistic theory listens. Meaning as explanation: Advances in linguistic sign theory, Ellen Contini-Morava and Barbara S. Goldberg (eds.), 213–242. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Otheguy, Ricardo, and Ofelia García. 1988. Difusion of lexical innovations in the Spanish of Cuban Americans. Research issues and problems in U. S. Spanish: Latin American and Southwestern varieties, Jacob Ornstein-Galicia, George K. Green, and Dennis J. Bixler-Márquez (eds.), 281–292. Brownsville, TX: Pan American University Press. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1994. Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. New York: Oxford University Press. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 2001. Sociolingüística y pragmática del español. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Villa, Daniel J. 2005. Back to patrás: A process of grammaticization in a contact variety of Spanish. ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jef McSwan (eds.), 2310–2316. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Villa, Daniel J. 2010. Y nos vamos patrás: Back to an analysis of a supposed “calque”. Spanish of the Southwest: A language in transition, Susana V. Rivera-Mills and Daniel J. Villa (eds.), 239–251. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Villa Cresap, Daniel. 1997. El desarrollo de futuridad en el español. México, DF: Grupo Eón.

13 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Just the FAQs

In the old television show Dragnet, Sergeant Joe Friday is credited with asking for “just the facts, ma’am,” a quotation probably more of an urban myth than anything else since we could not locate any film clips with the actor Jack Webb uttering that line. What is not myth is the emergence on the Internet of pages dedicated to “frequently asked questions” (FAQs), short information bites designed to help users wend their way through commonly found issues of one sort or another. In the preceding chapters, we address a number of myths that surround USMS and ofer here a summary of those in an “easy-to-access” format. • Is “Spanglish” a language? No. You hear that word applied to conversations carried out in the Spanish language and the English language, a phenomenon referred to as “code-switching,” “code mixing,” “language switching,” or “translanguaging.” Some people may use the term to mean the English words that have entered into Spanish. However, it is not a new or hybrid language. • Who speaks “pure” Spanish? Nobody. The Spanish language contains a rich mixture of words from other languages that have accumulated over the last 2,000 years or more. • Is USMS real Spanish? Yes. It has very close ties with northern Mexican Spanish and shares the exact same roots as all the other varieties of Spanish found throughout the world.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315172187-15

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• Do only the “low” social classes speak USMS? No. All social classes speak it. We all inherit it from the same sources. • Can you speak USMS in formal settings? Yes. You can speak USMS in meetings, church services, classrooms, radio, and television broadcasts – anywhere you could speak other kinds of Spanish. • Is USMS destroying the integrity of the Spanish language? No. All Spanish varieties follow similar paths of historic change, and USMS does not change those paths. • Is the use of English-origin words and phrases in USMS corrupting the Spanish language? No. Language cannot be corrupted. Given the close and continuous contact that USMS speakers have with English speakers in an English-speaking environment, it is normal and necessary to use and adopt some English language terminology. • Is it necessary to be prescriptive and “correct” or stop using USMS forms of the language that may be considered by the academia as non-standard? No. No form of any language should be considered standard or non-standard. The way that a community of speakers has chosen to communicate is their right and privilege, not something that needs to be judged correct or incorrect. The community does not serve the language; the language serves the community. • Does USMS have a morphology and syntax that it follows? Yes. The syntax and morphology of USMS is essentially the same as for Mexican Spanish and many other varieties of the language. • Does USMS sound diferent from Northern Mexican Spanish? No. The two varieties sound remarkably similar, sharing a common phonological system. We do not have a crystal ball, but . . .

Throughout this book we have resisted making any predictions about the future of USMS in the West, and indeed the nation. We continue not to do so at this juncture, particularly given the unexpected twists and turns that life takes in these times. However, there are some seemingly unrelated issues to keep an eye on that will impact the continued presence of USMS speakers here.

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Internal migration

The efects of climate change are far-reaching, to say the least. One area of impact that may surprise you is the distribution of Spanish speakers in the West. Noted in Chapter 2 are the geographic and climactic obstacles to the early settlement of the Southwest: vast deserts stretching from California to west Texas, mountain chains running north to south in the central West, swampy regions in eastern Texas, and vast stretches of arid plains from western Texas up into central Oregon and Washington. The arrival of the railroads, then interstate highways and large-scale water projects, all aided in overcoming these natural barriers to settlement. Major population centers have sprung up in the coastal Pacific Northwest, northern and southern California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. However, climate change now presents new challenges to many of the technologybased gains in the West that make those regions habitable. One particularly disturbing environmental phenomenon is aridification, a long-term trend in reduced precipitation. This stands in contrast with “drought,” which is presumed to be relatively temporary. As Overpeck and Udall (2020) note, “This [drying trend] translates into an increasingly arid Southwest and West, with progressively lower river flows, drier landscapes, higher forest mortality, and more severe and widespread wildfires – not year on year, but instead a clear longer-term trend toward greater aridification.” The major reservoirs of Lake Mead in Nevada and Arizona and Lake Powell in northern Arizona and southern Utah are at historic lows. As Seo (2021) establishes, “More than 40 million people rely on the water reserves held by Lake Powell and Lake Mead, two of the USA’s largest reservoirs that both sit along the Colorado River.” This situation represents the case for surface water supplies throughout much of the Southwest. These factors may contribute to internal migration patterns in the greater region we study. Within the greater population changes, we focus on those of USMS speakers. Table 13.1 presents changes in USMS populations from the period 2000– 2020. States are ranked by population size. As seen in Chapter 4, the majority of the USMS population remains concentrated in the “traditional” Southwest (shaded in Table 13.1). The state with the most Spanish speakers continues to be California. However, the rate of growth in that state has slowed; data indicate that its Spanish-speaking population increased 24.1% from 2000 to 2010 but fell to 4% in the 2010–2020 period. In Texas, the Spanishspeaking population growth remained relatively stable, at 15.3% and 11.1% in the two time periods. Arizona and Colorado also saw decreases in Spanish speakers’ growth over the two time periods. New Mexico actually witnessed a decrease in the number of Spanish speakers there. Regarding these numbers, recall that earlier we mention margins of error in the Census. It is in working with these figures that that caveat comes into play. According to Jenkins (2022), the 2020 Census indicates that there were 59.3 million Hispanics in the United States, representing 18.2% of the total US population. The

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TABLE 13.1 Change in Spanish-speaking population by state in US West, 2000 to 2020

State

5+ years, speak Spanish, 2000 Census

5+ years, speak Spanish, 2010 ACS

5+ years, speak Spanish, 2020 ACS

% increase 2000–2010

% increase or decrease, 2010–2020

California Texas Arizona Colorado Washington Nevada New Mexico Oregon Utah Oklahoma Kansas Nebraska Idaho Wyoming Total

8,105,505 5,985,182 927,395 421,670 321,490 299,947 485,681 217,614 150,244 141,060 137,247 77,655 80,241 18,606 17,369,537

10,059,973 6,899,506 1,214,905 573,076 512,354 503,220 563,380 310,236 239,545 213,194 191,156 115,300 115,071 24,174 21,535,090

10,462,968 7,666,020 1,358,980 602,273 602,058 593,610 514,071 349,549 297,926 269,433 207,181 137,352 131,145 25,717 23,218,283

24.1% 15.3% 31.0% 35.9% 59.4% 67.8% 16.0% 42.6% 59.4% 51.1% 39.3% 48.5% 43.4% 29.9% 24.0%

4.0% 11.1% 11.9% 5.1% 17.5% 18.0% -8.8% 12.7% 24.4% 26.4% 8.4% 19.1% 14.0% 6.4% 7.8%

Source: 2000 Census, 2010, 2020 ACS.

2020 Census also shows that 34.2 million (or 57.7% of all Hispanics) live in western states. Jenkins (2022) goes on to point out that 28.1 million of those speakers are Mexican and make up 82% of Hispanics in those same western states. He further notes that the Census Bureau states that the Hispanic undercount rate for the 2020 Census was 4.99%, indicating that for any counts of Hispanics from this Census we should add about 5% to the total for a more accurate estimate. Therefore, 59.3 million total Hispanics becomes 62.3 million, and the 34.2 million living in western states becomes 37.6 million. Thus, the number of Spanish-speaking Hispanics would also be higher. In Chapter 2, we note that economic factors play a large part in peoples’ decision to migrate. At the same time, how much money you can earn in one place or another does not solely determine that decision. In terms of anyone’s choice to relocate from one state to another, California should be the ideal destination. It has the largest economy of any state in the Union (https://worldpopulationreview.com/ state-rankings/gdp-by-state), and jobs are plentiful there. However, changes in the percentage of California’s overall population growth for the 2010–2020 period are the smallest for any southwestern state, with the exception of New Mexico, both for the general population and Spanish speakers. Figures 13.1 and 13.2 present these shifts in the two populations from 2000 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2020. Regarding the general population, California has had a lower percentage of growth of any of its immediate neighbors over both time periods. The state with

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2000-2010 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% or lif Ca

ni

a

s a a n do xico gon xa zon gto vad ra e e i Te M Or Ne Colo Ar shin w a e W N

% Increase SpanSpk 2000-2010

FIGURE 13.1

Ut

a

ah

m

ho

a kl

O

a l o g as ta sk ah min ns ra To Id o Ka eb y N W

% Increase GenPop 2000-2010

Percentage of growth by state, 2000–2010.

Source: 2000 Census, 2010 ACS. Note: SpanSpk, “Spanish speakers”; GenPop, “general population.”

2010-2020 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% -5% -10% -15% % Increase/Decrease SpanSpk 2010-2020

FIGURE 13.2

% Increase GenPop 2010-2020

Percentage of growth or decrease by state, 2010–2020.

Source: 2010 and 2020 ACS. Note: SpanSpk, “Spanish speakers”; GenPop, “general population.”

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the largest GDP after California is Texas; the latter has seen double the percentage of growth rate over the former’s. In general terms, in spite of California’s enormous economy, it would not appear to be the most desirable destination for migration in the greater region. At the same time, if the Southwest remains an attractive destination for Spanish speakers, other regions of the West are more so. As seen in Figures 13.1 and 13.2, the greatest growth in population percentages has been in those states where traditionally there were small Spanish-speaking populations. This is true for both time periods we examine here. The greatest growth outside the Southwest occurred in the decade 2000 to 2010; that growth did drop of in the following decade but remained higher for those states than for the Southwest. The growth in the percentages of the population to the north of California and Texas bears witness to the fact that it is not only economic factors that drive movement. The environmental factors discussed at the beginning of this chapter may play a role in the growth that we are currently witnessing. For example, Eastern Texas is not subject to the same water shortages as its neighbors to the west, as it does not draw water from the same drainages as does West Texas, Arizona, California, and Colorado. However, the fact that much of eastern Texas is low-lying and borders on the Gulf of Mexico makes it susceptible to flooding during the tropical storms in that region. This is all to say that environmental factors may be impacting Spanish speakers’ decisions on where they wish to relocate if indeed they do move. In contrast with other areas, the Pacific Northwest currently does not face the aridification process as in Southwest or the flooding found in, for example, the Houston area. To underscore these diferences, Washington State saw an increase of 11% in the total number of its residents, principally in its central counties, a growth rate on par with those of Texas and Arizona. It also has the eighth largest economy of any state in the union, ranking it third in the West after California and Texas. At present, it does not face the same type of water issues found in the Southwestern states. This fact, along with the robust nature of its economy, may contribute to the growth of the Spanish-speaking population there. In sum, the data presented in Figures 13.1 and 13.2 indicate that it is not only economics that drives growth in the percentage of population change in the western United States. It is for this reason that we suggest monitoring factors other than economics will ofer insight into the growth of the Spanish-speaking populations west of the Mississippi. We ofer some final comments on New Mexico and Wyoming, the only two states to lose Spanish speakers in the last decade. In the former, the lack of natural resources that discouraged a large influx of English speakers after 1848 translates into a relative dearth of employment today. Aridification is particularly evident in southern New Mexico. As mentioned earlier, the once-mighty Rio Grande south of the Elephant Butte dam is now bone-dry from bank to bank most of the year. The river has been reduced to the status of an irrigation ditch. Wyoming’s agricultural sector is also sustained by irrigation; hence, aridification impacts it as well. Both New Mexico and Wyoming derive significant portions of their state budgets from

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fossil fuels, particularly natural gas and oil. The ups and downs of the value of those resources rival those of the scariest roller coaster you can find. In short, both states sufer from a lack of water and an uncertain job market. The outflow of Spanish speakers is an indication these factors have on economic and environmental wellbeing of these two states. External migration

In Chapter 2, we discuss continued migration from south of the US–Mexico border. As noted there, the environment also plays a role in the movements of Spanish speakers to the north. The same storms that batter the Gulf Coast also greatly afect Mexico and Central America. Climate change is also impacting the ability of people to be able to sustain themselves in their homelands. This has resulted in large numbers of migrants, particularly family groups, arriving at the southern border of the United States. Gramlich and Scheller (2021) write that “[m]ost of the encounters with non-Mexicans in fiscal 2021 involved people from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador” (www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/). Migration from Mexico continues as well. From 2005 to 2014, more Mexicans returned to Mexico than migrated to the United States. However, Gonzalez-Barrera (2021) observes that “[m]ore Mexican migrants came to the United States than left the United States for Mexico between 2013 and 2018 – a reversal of the trend in much of the prior decade” (www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2021/07/09/). We may reasonably suspect that the efects of climate change, economic disparities, and violence south of our border will not change anytime soon. In Chapter 6, we discuss language policy and planning as it impacts USMS. What we add to that mix is US migration policy. Orrenius and Zavodny (2017: 180) state that: US immigration policy has serious limitations, particularly when viewed from an economic perspective. Some shortcomings arise from faulty initial design, others from the inability of the system to adapt to changing circumstances. In either case, a reluctance to confront politically difcult decisions is often a contributing factor to the failure to craft laws that can stand the test of time. They continue, “Although there is widespread consensus that US immigration policy is broken, there is little agreement on how it is broken” (180, emphasis in original). Presidents from both major political parties have attempted to create immigration policies that “stand the test of time,” with little success. While the majority of USMS speakers are native-born, the arrival of new Spanish-speaking migrants and their subsequent integration into US society in general and the USMS-speaking population in particular present open questions answered only by monitoring data such as those gathered by the US Census and organizations such as the Pew Research Center. Orrenius and Zavodny (2017: 181) assert that:

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A key failure of US immigration policy is that it is not forward looking or flexible. It too often fails to look ahead and consider the ramifications of current laws and regulations. Addressing these future consequences may be politically challenging, giving policymakers an incentive to put of action, but the failure to enact coherent, consistent policies has resulted in large-scale unauthorized immigration, long backlogs for permanent resident visas, and widespread dissatisfaction with the nation’s immigration policy. We will see if our legislators can muster the political will to resolve this issue in the 21st century, or if that proverbial can will continue to be kicked down the road. Migration, language policy, and our educational system

The preceding sections outline a number of questions to which we do not currently have answers. A well-worn phrase in our literature is “future research will paint a clearer picture . . .,” or something to that efect. With the preceding paragraphs we can do little else but to invoke that truism. At the same time, we can comment on how those issues currently afect USMS speakers without waiting for any future studies. As noted in Chapter 4, there are some 23.8 million Spanish speakers in the US West, with the majority of Mexican origin. There is also some undetermined number of individuals that the Census was unable to count, adding to that total. As noted earlier, this is not a static population but rather a highly dynamic one, flowing restlessly from state to state and from region to region. With regard to policing the language of these widely dispersed speech communities, the ANLE has ofered itself as the arbiter of correctness, in conjunction with the RAE, as seen in Chapter 6. The ANLE currently lists 35 individuals as “académicos de número,” those who together make decisions on the acceptability of a word or phrase for use by Spanish speakers in the United States, not just the West. The possibility of 35 individuals monitoring and changing the language of USMS speakers, let alone that of the US Spanish–speaking populations in general, hovers around an absolute zero. The ANLE has assigned itself a truly Sisyphean task. Given its complete lack of coercive power and its cultural disconnect with deeply embedded language normalization processes in this country, it is doomed to roll that boulder up the hill, unless it fundamentally rethinks its mission. The other normative group that could possibly have an impact on USMS usage consists of those scholars and pedagogues dedicated to changing USMS vocabulary. Barker (1972) represents an early proponent of this approach. She divided Spanish vocabulary into a classical binary Aristotelian category: se dice “you say” and no se dice “you do not say.” Such a categorization results in the following: se dice: traje

no se dice: truje “I brought”

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(yo) traía almuerzo camioneta te devuelvo la llamada etc.

traiba “I was bringing” lonche “lunch” troca “truck” te llamo patrás “I’ll call you back”

In current approaches to language pedagogy, such a methodology is deemed unnecessarily heavy-handed, that is, openly criticizing community language norms represents a non-productive stance. Hence, as noted in Chapter 6, scholars such as Porras (2016) have decided it is okay to keep saying the forms in the second column, but that US Spanish speakers need to learn the forms in the first column in order to speak well. Other pedagogues have adopted this point of view. For example, Fairclough (2016: 152) posits a “lexical learning” of supposedly standard forms in addition to regional norms that speakers use, a sugarcoated version of the se dice/no se dice dichotomy. She ofers the example of brecas “brakes” as a regional form (dialect 1) and frenos “brakes” as the standard form (dialect 2). The issue lies in that, at least in New Mexican Spanish, the form brecas is much more commonly used than frenos (Bills and Vigil 2008: 290). In other words, knowledge of the word frenos is of minimal use when communicating in these Spanish dialects, especially when purchasing automotive parts. The acquisition of such technical vocabulary tends to be carried out in the “real world,” not in a classroom. For example, a few trips to the local parts store will determine if balancín or caballete, or perhaps some other variant, is employed for “rocker arm.” Establishing either one or the other of these terms as “standard” would be highly arbitrary and depends more on who is establishing the standard rather than on any objective measure of standardness. Earlier we assert that the ANLE’s prescriptive approach to Spanish language usage in the United States runs counter to deep-seated cultural norms. To illustrate this, consider the following. Fifth-grade monolingual US English–speaking students studying their native tongue are given a vocabulary list in preparation for an upcoming English-language exam. The list reads as follows: You say: lorry spanner tap boot flat jumper crisps biscuit chemist’s

You don’t say: truck wrench faucet trunk apartment sweater potato chips cookie drugstore

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Our hypothetical fifth graders, somewhat confused by the list, ask their parents for help. The parents, upon seeing these items, might well schedule a conference with the teacher. The teacher then gently explains that it is okay to say “truck,” “cookie,” “sweater,” etcetera at home, but that the children need to learn standard English if they are to be successful in life. Then comes the meeting with the principal to take the teacher to task. We suspect that such a pedagogical approach, on a national level here, would go over like a lead balloon. Anecdotally, the authors, as fathers, watched their children progress through the intricacies of learning to write the English language. We never did witness any approach to vocabulary acquisition, such as the hypothetical one we just described. Regarding educational systems here, we do not look to other countries for language norms. The ANLE and pedagogues such as Porras (2016) and Fairclough (2016) face huge obstacles, both linguistic and cultural, in trying to modify the course that USMS and other varieties of Spanish in the United States take in this nation. The question arises: If they cannot, then who can? Our answer: Nobody. Those of us who conduct research on USMS can comment on its structure or its functions in our society, but we have no power to change its course, as the US Army Corps of Engineers has done with the Rio Grande. As English is the principal national language of the United States, there appears to be little governmental interest in normalizing Spanish language instruction and usage. Cultural values reject the imposition of norms from foreign countries on language usage here. We refer those who would claim that USMS speakers do not have the same powers of cultural rejection as do English speakers to Chapter 4, which describes the battles that USMS speakers have waged to secure social and legal liberties. Many books such as ours conclude with predictions for the future, which we assert is unknowable. How, then, to theorize about the direction we are heading as Spanish-speaking communities? In our case, we look to the past. Remembering the past

There are historic precedents for the current status of USMS, in particular with regard to its loss among Hispanic populations here. In the West, Spanish became a subordinate language in 1848. In much of the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish became a subordinate language in 711 CE. In the former case, English is the dominant language, and in the latter, Arabic. For better or worse, the label “Spanglish” has gained national currency for the varieties of Spanish spoken here. The name for the Spanish varieties that emerged as a result of Spanish/Arabic contact is mozárabe, “Mozarabic.” In the United States, English is the language of astronomy, mathematics, science, and medicine. In Al-Andalus, Andalusia, Arabic was the norm for those fields of study. In the United States, English speakers hold the highest positions of political power. In what is now southern Spain, Arabic speakers filled those positions.

202

Linguistic perspectives

It has now been over 170 years since what was northern Mexico became part of the United States. Imagine that you are living in Al-Andalus in 885, approximately the same length of time after the Arab conquest. What schooling exists is conducted in Arabic. Any interactions you have with government ofcials are conducted in Arabic. Much of what you eat has an Arabic name. Your immediate ancestors were born into an Arab-dominated world. As we do now, you did not have a crystal ball then to foresee that that dominance was destined to remain in place for some six centuries. That is, even your distant descendants would grow up in an Arabdominant society. Regarding the Arab presence in Al-Andaluz, Menocal (2002: 67) quotes the lament of Paul Alvarus, “outspoken and widely respected Christian luminary of Cordoba, in the mid-ninth century”: The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their own language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves. If you were to replace “Latin” (as Spanish was sometimes referred to in that era), with “Spanish,” this could be a modern plaint of 21st-century scholars about young Hispanics who have abandoned their ancestors’ language in preference to English. In the 9th century, little might you suspect that, in an unimaginably distant future, the subordinated Spanish you speak at home, in the marketplace buying vegetables, in religious services (if you are a Christian), or hanging out with your friends will become the language of the community, not Arabic. Scholars who study Spanish language loss in this country frequently point out that a central indicator of its eventual disappearance in the United States is the general tendency of new generations not to speak it. It is the case that currently Spanish tends to be lost over multiple generations. Given the short arc of the human life span, we can easily interpret our reality as being eternal. History shows us that that reality is not necessarily permanent. The Spanish/Arabic relationship is not the only story of a language’s changing status. The English language we speak has also undergone its own cycles of power and subordination. As we briefly mentioned earlier, in 1066, William the Conqueror and his forces seized England, and the Norman French they spoke became the language of power. The conquered English were relegated to tending fields, herding livestock, preparing food for their French rulers, and emptying their chamber pots as well. The language of the royal court was to be French for some 300 years

Concluding remarks

203

until the ascent of Henry IV, whose first language was English. Although Norman French made significant contributions to our modern vocabulary, it did not greatly afect the English grammar. The English language we speak is still classified as a Germanic language. Regarding migration, the past has important lessons for us as well. Currently, the movement between the United States and its southern neighbors has been criminalized in the sense that those lacking certain documents are detained if found and returned to their country of origin. The tensions caused by international south-tonorth migration in this country became so intense that a former president embarked on a quixotic crusade to build a big, beautiful wall that would purportedly protect us from the bad hombres seeking to invade our country. Regarding the tensions caused by these kinds of fears, the last century witnessed the bloodiest conflicts in human history. French and Germans slaughtered each other, soldiers and civilians, by the millions during World War I. After a brief respite, they returned to that slaughter during World War II. We suspect that, if in 1946 any French or German individuals were informed that one day they or their children would be able to easily travel between the two countries, they would have found such an idea impossible to believe. Yet the emergence of the European Union (EU) has made that impossibility a reality. Possessing an EU passport, French and German citizens can freely travel between their two countries with no other documentation. The future of USMS in the United States waits to be seen. In discussing these issues with our students, we have caused no small amount of mirth in suggesting we hold a class reunion in 600 years to see what comes of it all. Since our life arcs are so relatively short, some ideas seem impossible. A United States with open borders? Never. Another language alongside English as a national language? Never. Racial diversity widely accepted in this country? Never. Groups of people with difering opinions sharing power? Never. Yet the past looks over our shoulder, whispering in our ear that sometimes impossible things are indeed possible.  Discussion questions and activities for Chapter 13

1 Select any population figure for Hispanics in this book drawn from Census data, for example, those presented in Table 3.1 in Chapter 3. Choose one statistic, say, the Hispanic population in Utah as compared to the total population. Check the most current population data from the Census (www.census.gov) for that state and compare it to the information listed in the table. Has it changed? If so, where does Utah now rank with regard to its Hispanic population? 2 The efects of climate change are being felt around the globe. What are recent natural events that have negatively impacted the greater region in which you live? These would include floods, drought or aridification, hurricanes, tornadoes, and rising sea levels, among others. Do these have any efect on the immigration or emigration of populations in your area?

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3 Are there new population migrations from south to north currently occurring? (Remember, your present is the authors’ future.) For example, in Chapter 3 we mention recent migrations originating in Central America. As we type these lines, Venezuelans are now arriving at the US–Mexico border, many seeking refugee status. What possible impact on Spanish language use here might such immigrations have? 4 Are there any immigration issues currently in the news, either local or national? For example, a Southern governor caused an uproar in 2022 when he sent legal migrants from another Southern state to Massachusetts. Have there been any advances in establishing a coherent migration policy for the United States? 5 After looking through the information presented in this book, what are some of your takeaways?  References Barker, Marie E. 1972. Español para el bilingüe. Skokie, IL: National Textbook Co. Bills, Garland, and Neddy Vigil. 2008. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Fairclough, Marta. 2016. Incorporating additional varieties to the linguistic repertoires of heritage language learners: A multidialectal model. Heritage language teaching: A practical guide for the classroom, Marta Fairclough and Sara M. Beaudrie (eds.), 143–165. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana. 2021. Before COVID-19, more Mexicans came to the United States than left for Mexico for the first time in years. Pew Research Center. Internet: www.pew research.org/fact-tank/2021/07/09/. Gramlich, John, and Alissa Scheller. 2021. What’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border in 7 charts. Pew Research Center. Internet: www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/. Jenkins, Devin. 2022. Defining “Spanish of the Southwest”: What it is vs. what it was. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, Cleveland. Menocal, María Rosa. 2002. The ornament of the world: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain. New York: Little Brown and Company. Orrenius, Pia M., and Madeline Zavodny. 2017. Creating cohesive, coherent immigration policy. Journal on Migration and Human Security 5: 180–193. Overpeck, Jonathan T., and Bradley Udall. 2020. Climate change and the aridification of North America.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117. Internet: www.pnas. org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2006323117. Porras, Jorge E. 2016. A proposal for teaching Spanish to heritage students in the US. Academic Exchange Quarterly 20: 68–75. Seo, Hannah. 2021. 40 million Americans depend on two reservoirs that just hit record lows. Popular Science. Internet: www.popsci.com/science/lake-mead-lake-powell-drought/.

INDEX

abstracted idealized homogenous spoken language, imposition/maintenance 26, 123 abstracted standard Spanish, change (problem) 124 Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE): books, purposes 88; language policy, resistance 87; legislative/ military/economic power, absence 87; mission 85; normative institution 58; normative mission 86; word/phrases, use guidance 88 Academias, USMS (connection) 85 academically elevated terms myth 27 académicos de número (list) 199 accent discrimination 129 acceptance (formal language planning stage) 82 africates 165 African ancestry, “Black” label 65 agency 75–79 Al-Andaluz, Arab presence 202 Albuquerque, establishment 33 Alfonso X the Learned 125 allophone 169–170 [a], location 167 alternative facts, term (introduction) 8 Alvarus, Paul 202 Amador, Gregoria Rodela de 149 Amador, Martín/Refugio 149 Amador papers 149, 152–154 American Community Survey (ACS) data, usage 7, 52, 57, 76

American English (label) 20, 22 American GI Forum (GIF) 71 American Nations (Woodard) 17, 125 Americans of Spanish origin or descent (ethnic group), data collection (U.S. Congress mandate) 51 Ancón de Doña Ana/Doña Ana Bend Colony documents 148, 151 Ancón de Doña Ana land grant (issue) 68, 76 Andalusian Spanish 23 anglicismos (anglicisms) 111 aphasia 104 Arawakan languages 135 Aristotelian logic 117–118 Aristotle 117 Atlas (Bills/Vigil) 86, 137 Australian English (label) 22 Aztecs, conquest 32 Badajoz, Joaquín 87 Baregas, Manuel 68 Barncastle, John D. 68–69 Barncastle, Josefa 68 Bell, Katie 67 berry busses, usage 40 bilingual continuum 100–101 bilingual dynamics, discussion questions/ activities 112 bilingualism 152 bilingual, perception 101 biological gender, binary male/female view (abandonment) 49–50

206

Index

Black Legend 66 blacks, American cultural definition 65 block institutions, spoken language imposition/maintenance 26, 123 borders, concept 14–15 Border Spanish 19 borrowing 105; Espinosa identification 153; motivations 106 boundaries, importance 18–19 Bracero Program (1942) 39 British English (label) 20, 22 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 70 [b]/[v] variation 168 Calhoun, John C.: annexation warning 54–55; segregationist status 65; white race/colored races, equality error (perception) 55 California, Hispanics (origin) 5 California vernacular 19 Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (Royal Road of the Middle Country) 33, 151 Canadian English (label) 22 Caramelo (Cisneros) 72, 74 Carib languages 135 castellano drecho rules, correction 125 Castilian language: Spanish Crown introduction 87 Castilian language, selection 83 categories (human creations) 119 categorization 117; linguistic categorization 23, 117; process 60 Cela, Camilo José 105 Celtic languages, words (origination) 134 Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), nonEnglish languages eradication research 90 Central American migration 44 Central American population, documentation 60 Chávez, César 56 Chicano English (ChcE): Spanish-accented English, idea 172; speakers, social solidarity 172; US Mexican Spanish (USMS) (relationship) 171–173 Chicano Movement 56; emergence/ longevity 71–72 Chicano Spanish 19 Chicano students, English dialects (usage) 172 Chicano, term (origin) 56 Chicano, USMS usage requirement 58–60 Cien años de soledad (García Márquez) 92 Cisneros, Sandra 72

Civil War: cessation 68–69; eruption 56; impact 67 class (label), usage 49 climate change, challenges 194 Cobos, Rubén 26 code mixing 102 code-switching 102 codification (USMS) 86; formal language planning stage 82 colonies, direct communication (absence) 34 Columbus, Christopher 31 Confederate States of America, slavery codification 66 conquest: Southwest conquest/resistance 66–70 conquest, cycles 64 conquistadores, impact 33 consonants 163–164; sound chart 163 constructed geographic boundaries 15–16 contact generation 24–25 contamination narrative 141 Corominas, Joan 133 corpora (label) 20 Corpus of Spanish in Washington and Montana (Shin) 150 Cortés, Hernán 32 COVID pandemic, results (monitoring) 41–42 CSWM data 150, 155–156, 158 cultural norms 200; evolution 61 dar patrás construction 181 Davies, Mark 132 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés 92 demographic fluidity 128 demographic US Census data, usage 24 dialect 21–23, 119; commonality 21–22; term, usage 180; variety 21, 22 dialectal variations, sampling 167–171 dialect complex 24 dialect family 24 dialect leveling 24 Diccionario de anglicismos (Dictionary of Anglicisms) 140 Diccionario de Anglicismos del Español Estadounidense (DAEE) 157 Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE) (RAE) 89, 108 Diccionario de mejicanismos (Dictionary of Mexicanisms) 135 Diccionario panhispánico de dudas 85

Index

dictionaries: consultation issues 119–120; production 123–124 Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, A (Cobos) 26 diphthongs 170; [i] formation 167 discrimination 129; accent discrimination 129; rejection 70 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 92 dual-language programs, emergence 91 [d] unvoiced (occlusive) 164 early colonial period (1492-1598), migration 32–33 Eastern Texas (water shortages) 197 economic variables, monitoring 44 educational system, migration (relationship) 199–201 elaboration (USMS) 87; formal language planning stage 82 electronic resources 12 El español de los Estados Unidos (Escobar/ Potowski) 4 El libro de los recuerdos (Shua) 92 El Paso de Norte, establishment 33 English (language): dialects, Chicano student usage 172; evolution 110; impact 111; influence, absence 153; particle, translation (example) 181; words, borrowing (motivations) 105–108 English-as-a-second-language learner interlanguage, phonological features 172 English (language), borrowings 139–143; reasons 106 English-language instruction, participation 95 English language learner (ELL) speech 172 English-origin words: absence, examples 142–143; use, impact 193 English (people), Spanish (contact) 98, 139 entradas (entries), occurrence 33–34 [e], occurrence 167 [ε] variant 169–170 Equal Protection Clause 70–71 Espanglish, example 109 espanglish, term (usage) 99 español chicano (USMS form) 147 Español hablado en el Suroeste de los Estados Unidos (Blanch) 12 Espinosa, Aurelio Macedonio (study) 146, 148, 151–152 “essential worker” (reference) 42 ethnic identification, social phenomenon 60

207

ethnic identity, social process 60 ethnicity labels, self-identification 53 ethnic labels, fluidity 61 ethnic slurs, impact 53–55 European descent, “White” definition 65 European-origin immigrants, inland push 4 external migration 198–199 Fair Housing Act (1968) 74 “Far West” (nomenclature) 17 femininity, cultural concepts 50 fluent bilinguals 102–103; grammar, existence 104 foreign influence, subordination (sign) 141 foreign language, implication 15 formal registers, inclusion 91–92 free/slave states (balance), Southern slaveholder attempt 327 free white race 55 Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (Davies) 132, 137 frequently asked questions (FAQs) 192; discussion questions/activities 203–204 fricatives 165 [f] unvoiced (fricative) 165 Gadsden Purchase 38, 146 Gaelic (ofcial language designation) 81 García Márquez, Gabriel 92 gender (label), avoidance 49 gendered marker, replacement 50 general Spanish, concept 161–162 geographically determination isolation, reduction 126 geographic barriers, impact 126 geographic boundaries 15–16 geography, Spanish colonists (impact) 1 German speakers, persecution 90 Gorras Blancas (White Caps) 69 Gramatica de la lengua castellana (Nebrija) 85, 121–123 grammars, production 123–124 grammatical detail, difculties 49–50 Grosjean, François 101 Guerra Cristera (1926) 38 [g] unvoiced (occlusive) 164–165 HabCult: corpus 177, 179; frequency groups, comparison (USMS/MexPop/ HabCult) 179; USMS, similarity 180 Hablando bien se entiende la gente (Badajoz) 87 Hablando bien se entiende la gente 2 (PiñaRosales) 88

208

Index

Heritage language teaching (Beaudrie) 92 heritage Spanish (HS) speakers, dialect acquisition 92 heritage speakers, linguistic experience 92 Hernandez v. Texas 70–71 Herrera, Pentón 27 Hidalgo, Guadalupe 66, 69, 74, 137; disruption 37 high back [u], occurrence 167 high-frequency lexical chunks, usage 153 high front [i], realization 167 Hispanic: etymology 51; label, adoption (government motivation) 51; meaning, cultural norms (evolution) 61; term, usage (problem) 51–52 Hispanic ethnicity, US Census question 54 Hispanic origin, umbrella question 52–53 Hispanics: demographic distribution (West) 77; demographic factors (Northwestern U.S.), absence 24; oppression/ discrimination 78 Hispanics and the Future of America (Tienda/ Mitchell) 41 Hispanic self-identity labels 56–58 Hispanics, origin: California 5; LA County (CA) 57; Seward County (KS) 57 History of America (Weber) 66 homeownership, American dream 74 homogenous spoken language, imposition/ maintenance 26, 123 human communication, means (identification) 9 human migration, limitations 99 [h] variant 169 hypernyms 48–49 Iberian Peninsula: languages, presence 121; Vulgar Latin speakers, arrival 64 identity: discussion questions/activities 61–62; ethnic identity, social process 60; Hispanic self-identity labels 56–58; importance 47; language variety, intersection 58; self-identification 53; shift 60–61 ideology, Spanglish/power (relationship) 109 idiolect 21–23, 119; concept 21 Iguvine Tablets 133 implementation (formal language planning stage) 82 Indian English (label) 22 Indian race, incorporation 55 in-group ethnic label, fluidity 61 in-group labels 48

insufcient diferentiation 107 interlanguaging 102 inter nal migration 194–198 Inter national Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), norms 163 involuntary servitude, abolishment 69 [i], realization 167 Jim Crow laws 95–96 [j] unvoiced (fricative) 165 [j] variation 168 Kino, Eusebio 34 koineization 32–33 Ku Klux Klansmen, black cultural definition perspective 65 [k] unvoiced (occlusive) 164–165 [l] (lateral) 166 Labov, William 119 LA County (CA), Hispanics (origin) 57 language: ANLE policy, resistance 87; attitudes, examples 88–89; behavior, description 23; borders 16, 98–99; categorization 117–120; characteristic, perception 52–53; clarification, learner request 119; commonalities 21–22; correctness, notions 88; difusion, example 127; dynamic, impact 104, 108; external features 6; inherent variability 124; issue 139–143; linguistic notion 22; loss 108; naming 21, 22–23; physical realities 19–21; prestige 141; programs, political hostility 78; race/power, relationship 64; regional variation 125–128; sex, relationship 49–50; shift 108; sounds, establishment (difculties) 162; Spanish language planning/policy (New Mexico) 93–96; speaking style, suppression 129; standard language construct 124; status, variety reification (selection) 85–86; structural aspects 11–12; subordination, social class (relationship) 128–129; term, problem 102; term, usage 119, 180; theory, rejection 23; use, protection (absence) 128; variety, identity (intersection) 58 language ideology 19–21; adherence 88; framework 124; problem 120; standard language ideology 26–27, 123–125; standard language ideology, application 128–129 languageness, conceptions 120

Index

language planning: concept 81–82; discussion questions/activities 96; Spanish language planning/policy (New Mexico) 93–96; USMS language planning policy 82–84 language policy 81; antecedents 83; discussion questions/activities 96; migration, relationship 199–201; Spanish language planning/policy (New Mexico) 93–96; USMS language planning policy 82–84 “languages in contact,” phrase (implication) 98 language structure 176; discussion questions/activities 189 language switching 102–104; examples 103–104; representation 153 Lapesa, Rafael 133 Las Cruces: founding 149; Spanish/English contact 153 LA Spanish: research documentation 58; USMS form 147 laterals 166 later colonial period (1598-1821), migration 33–34 later-generation white ethnics, census/ survey data 60 Latino: meaning, cultural norms (evolution) 61; origin, umbrella question 52–53 LA Vernacular Spanish 19 League for United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) 71 “Left Coast” (nomenclature) 17 legal documents (English/Spanish publishing provision) 95 Lemon Grove incident 70–71, 76 lexical borrowing 105 lexical commonalities 137 lexical learning 200 lexicon 132, 146; Amador papers 149, 152–154; Ancón de Doña Ana/Doña Ana Bend Colony documents 148, 151; core lexicon, examination 146; discussion questions/activities 143, 158–159; Espinosa study 148, 151–152; history (200 BCE to 1492 CE) 132–135; history (1492 to 1848) 135–137; history (1848‒present) 146–147; history (pre-1848), empirical analysis 137–139; Mexican revolution period data 149–150, 154–155; Washington Spanish data 150 linguistic abstractions 19–21

209

linguistic boundaries 16–19, 21–23 linguistic categorization 117; rejection 23 linguistic will (imposition), power (usage) 81 llamar patrás construction 181 loanwords: origin 157–158; use 105 Lope Blanch, Juan 12, 124, 177 Los tapatíos (native Guadalajarans) 39 Loving v. Virginia 67 low central [a], location 167 low-fluency bilinguals (L2 speakers), language switching examples 103–104 macro-dialect 24–26; sound system 161–163 mainstreaming 90–91 Martínez, Susana 53 masculinity, cultural concepts 50 Meléndrez, Josefa 69 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 133 mestizaje (label) 32 mestizos (mixed people), bilingualism 32 metalanguages, conceptions 120 Mexican (language): identifier, problems 53–56; USMS usage requirement 58–60 Mexican American (people): children, segregation 70; label 55–56 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MAL-DEF) 71 Mexican American Spanish (MAS), characterization 180 Mexican American (language), USMS usage requirement 58–60 Mexican-American War 75–76 Mexicanness, Cisneros definition 74 Mexican-origin Hispanics, majority (California) 6 Mexican origin population, history (Miami) 6 mexicano, term (usage) 56 Mexican Revolution (1910) 38, 44 Mexican Revolution Period (MRP) 149, 155 Mexican revolution period data 149–150, 154–155 Mexicans: diferences 74; struggle/battles 70–72 Mexican territory, US annexation (Calhoun warning) 54–55 Mexico: battles (20th century) 70–72; colonies, direct communication (absence) 34; formation 35; inflation rate (1970‒present) 39; national period (1821-1848) 35–36; Spanish sovereignty

210

Index

34; territory, United States expansion 37; United States war spoils 55; US period (1912‒present) 38–40; US territorial period (1848-1912) 36–38 MexPop: corpus 177, 179; verb frequency 177–178 mid back [o], appearance 167 mid front [e], occurrence 167 migration: Central American migration 44; discussion questions/activities 45; early colonial period (1492-1598) 32–33; educational system, relationship 199–201; external migration 198–199; HarrisTodaro model 42; historic migrations, perspective 9–10; history 30; human migration, limitations 99; internal migration 194–198; language policy, relationship 199–201; later colonial period (1598-1821) 33–34; roots (200 BCE to 1492 CE) 30–31; US migration policy 198; wage diferential model 42 Migration Policy Institute (MPI), immigrant ranking 44 minimum-wage employment, finding (chance) 43 minority-language speakers, pressure 81 Mississippi: geographic eastern border, establishment 16–17 Mississippi, west boundary 14 [m] nasal 166 mobility (reduction), geographic barriers (impact) 126 monoglossic ideology 23, 120–123; concept 19–20; identification 19 monolingual ideologies, European nationalism (connection) 23 monolinguals, normal speaker-hearer model 101 Montiel, Miguel 149 Moors: changes 134; defeat 64; Spanish presence 31, 135 Moreno Fernández collection 156 Moreno Fernández, Francisco 157 Moro, Bruzos 27 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) 71 Murrieta, Joaquín 69 Nagata, Eva Robles 21 Nahuatl words 135 named languages 22; borders 128; invention/artificiality 23 name, identification 47

nasals 166 national secur ity, referencing 82 nation, concept 16 Nebr ija, Antonio de 31, 85, 87, 121–123 negative stereotypes, presence 88 new American language (label) 139–140 New Mexican, English borrowings (reasons) 106 New Mexican Spanish 19; dialect, location 26; English, influence 151–152; issue 200 New Mexicans, questions (diferences) 152 New Mexico: legal/political systems, participation rights 94; Spanish, constitutional status 8; Spanish/English bilingualism, existence 94; Spanish language planning/policy 93–96 “New Mexico/Colorado Spanish Survey” (NMCOSS) 150, 155 New Mexico Constitution 93; Article VII, Section 3 78, 94; Article XII, Section 8 95; Article XII, Section 10 95 New Mexico, race-based legislation (existence) 69 New Mexico Spanish, data (Clegg) 107 New Mexico Territory, Slave Code (Territorial Legislature enactment) 69 New Spain, society (development) 34 New World, Spaniards (arrival) 66 New York State, Hispanics (origin) 5 Nine Nations of North America (Garreau) 125 [n] nasal 166 non-English languages: eradication, eforts 90; reference 92; theoretical models 9 non-formal additive approach 82 non-gendered marker, usage 50 non-Hispanic, self-identification 59 non-standard, term (usage) 120 normal culta, la 92–93 normal speaker-hearer model 101 Northern Mexican Spanish, USMS: descendance 162; similarity 193 northern Mexican states, Hispanic borderlands (commonality) 17 Northwestern U.S., Hispanics (demographic factors, absence) 24 Northwest Territory 4 Nueva México, La (expansion) 33–34 nuevomexicanos: presence 67–69; US property law problems 69 nuevo peso (new peso) 39

Index

[ɲ] nasal 166 [o], appearance 167 occlusives 164–165 Okhay Owingeh, colonists (arrival) 3, 33 Oñate, Juan de 33 “one country, one language” ideology, reliance 89 one-drop rule 65 “one flag, one country, one tongue” 83 “one nation, one language” ideology (subtractive approach) 82 out-group ethnic label, fluidity 61 out-group labels 48 pagar patrás construction 181 para atrás construction 181–182 para usage, spatial classification system 183 patrás: construction 181–189; diachronic studies 182; non-verbal usage 187; occurrences (analysis), temporal category (usage) 184; pleonastic category 184; qualitative uses 185; regressative category/use 184–185, 188; uses, qualitative study 183; verb usage 186 patriotism, blindness 141 Penny, Ralph 133 pensar patrás construction 181 perceived biological diference 72 peso-dollar exchange rate, usage 43 phoneme 20 phonetic Spanish 152 phonology 161; discussion questions/ activities 173; features 172 physical geographic boundaries 15–16 physical objects, usage 20–21 physical vibrations, production 20 Pimería Alta, colonization 34 Piña-Rosales, Gerardo 87 place-names (English-origin items) 138 pleonastic category (patrás) 184 political/cultural de-colonization 23 population, growth 196 post-secondary system, coherency (absence) 91 power: cycles 64; issue 139–143; race/ language, relationship 64; Spanglish, relationship 109; Spanish language, choice 64; usage 81 pre-Civil War South, legal structure 66 prescriptivist, term (usage) 92 presidios (systems) 33–34 prestige varieties, inclusion 91–92

211

preternatural truth 122 primordial characteristic, automatic labeling 60 prototypical category 118–119 Proudfit, James K. 68 [p] unvoiced (occlusive) 164 pure Spanish, speaker identification 192 purist attitude, historical event (link) 141 race: lines, crossing (marriage) 67; power/ language, relationship 64; social construction 72; US Census short form question 7 (2020) 73 race-based legislation, existence 69 race construct: evolution 72–75; post-1848 Southwest 65–67; White/Black vector 65 racial equality 66 racial order, collapse (precipitation) 55 Real Academia Española (RAE) 85, 87, 93, 154; collection 156; CORPES 127; impact 96; mission 111 regional variation (language) 125–128 regressative category/use (patrás) 184–185, 188 replacement rate 40 Republic of Mexico, borders (1823) 35 Resnick, Melvyn 133 Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz (de la Cruz) 97 Reyes Católicos 121; Castilian language selection 83; domination 31 Reymond, Numa 68 Roman Empire: fall/decline 31, 134; Vulgar Latin, usage 30–31 Rosenblat, Ángel 180 [r]/[ſ] variation 169 [ſ] vibrant tap 166 Sabine River Spanish 136 Salt War (1877) 69 Salvadorans (people), USMS word substitution 25 San Francisco, Fray García de 33 Santiago, Bill 102 schwa [ə] 170 selection: formal language planning stage 82; process 85–86 self-identification 53 semantic domains 101 Serra, Junípero establishment 34 Seward County (KS), Hispanics (origin) 57 sex: category, reconceptualization 50; language, relationship 49–50; multiplicity, ofering 50

212 Index

sexual continuum, implications 49–50 shared language, commonalities 21–22 shared linguistic repertories 22 Shin, Naomi 150 Shua, Ana María 92 Singapore English (label) 22 Slave Code (New Mexico Territory), Territorial Legislature enactment 69 slavery: abolishment 69; Confederate States of America codification 66; legal status, Civil War (impact) 67 slaves, arming (limitation) 69 social class, language subordination (relationship) 128–129 social values, addressing 106 socioeconomic status (SES), increase 84 sound system 161–163 Southern Colorado Spanish, English borrowings (reasons) 106 Southern slaveholders, free/slave state balance 37 Southwest: changes 40; conquest/resistance 67–70; post-1848 Southwest, race (construct) 65–66 Southwest Spanish, Northwestern states (inclusion) 24 Spanglish 171; controversy 99–100; examples 109–110; factors 108–109; ideology/power, relationship 109; label, national currency 201; language, question 192 Spanglish (Stavans) 139 Spanglish-English lexicon 140 Spaniard (label) 56–57 Spanish (label) 57 Spanish (language) 23; academically elevated terms, teaching opportunity 27; colonization, risk 142; core lexicon, examination 146; degradation, cause 11; dialects, communication 200; dignified/cultured form, permanency 27; foreign language learning, example 118; foundations, origin 132–133; fundamental notions 11; general Spanish, concept 161–162; historical development 7; integrity (destruction), USMS (impact) 193; linguistic structures, preservation (avoidance) 110; monoglossic ideology 120–123; monolingual environment 147; non-contact varieties 181–182; nonstandard features 26–27; origin, myth 8; phonetic Spanish 152; pure Spanish, speaker identification 192; words,

borrowing (motivations) 105–108; words, commonness (ranking) 138; words, grammatical function/origin 133 Spanish (people): English, contact (West) 98; English, impact 111 Spanish Amer ican (label) 57 Spanish/Arabic relationship 202–203 Spanish (people), constitutional status 8 Spanish Crown: Castilian introduction 87; eforts 932; Oñate petition 33 Spanish descent, children privileges (New Mexico Constitution) 95 Spanish Empire, Calhoun characterization 55 Spanish/English bilingualism, existence 94 Spanish for Native Speakers (SNS): label 91; pedagogy, strands (emergence) 91–92 Spanish-language instruction, standard (permeation) 27 Spanish native-speaker, phonological features 172 Spanish of the Western United States, discussion 24 Spanish origin, umbrella question 52–53 Spanish speakers: demography (West) 75–79; number (western states ranking) 77; spread 30 Spanish-speaking children, language programs (political hostility) 78 Spanish-speaking population: change 195; study 78 Spanish towns, English language influence (absence) 153 Spanish, USMS (diferences) 25 spatial classification system 183 Speaking Spanish in the US (Fuller/ Leeman) 4 standard: construction, definition 26; idea, permeation 27; term, usage 120 standard language: bias 26; construct 124; label 26 standard language ideology 26–27, 123–125; application 128–129 standard/non-standard, binary distinction 121 Stapleton, Sheryl Williams 53 Stavans, Ilan 139 sub-standard, replacement 27 [s] unvoiced (fricative) 165 Swabians, impact 134 switch metaphor, flaw 102–103 ‘Syntactic Characteristics of Mexican American Spanish’ (Lipski) 181

Index

tejanos (descendants) 36 temporal category (patrás) 184 Texas, secession 56 “Them” 47–49 thinking, process 117; discussion questions/ activities 130 Thirteenth Amendment, addition 69 Tió, Salvador 99 traditional imperialism, impact 141–142 traditional New Mexican Spanish (TNMS): form 127; speakers 125–126 Traditional Spanish 19 transfers, classification 150 Tratado de La Mesilla (Gadsden Purchase) 38 Treaty of Ghent (1814) 4 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) 11, 36, 48, 55, 68, 75; impact 139, 146; Mexican Spanish, USMS emergence 152; rights 83 Treaty of Paris (1783) 4 [tʃ]/[ʃ] variation 170–171 [t] unvoiced (occlusive) 164 umbrella labels 48–49 “un-balanced” bilingual, example 101 United Farm Workers Union (UFW) 71 United States: Census (Hispanic ethnicity question) 54; Central American migration 44; economic expansion 40, 141; expansion (Mexican territory) 37; immigration policy, failure 199; migration policy, limitations 198; Spanish speakers, spread 39; Spanish-speaking nation 3; states, percentage growth/ decrease 196; states, population (growth) 196; West, Spanish-speaking population (change) 195 United States Academy of the Spanish Language, academy name (avoidance) 86 [u], occurrence 167 “Us” 47–49 US Census Bureau: demographic data, usage 7; Hispanics, demographic distribution (West) 77; label changes, history 61; short form question 7 (2020) 73 U.S. Constitution: Fourteenth Amendment, application 70–71; Thirteenth Amendment, addition 69 US educational system, USMS (relationship) 90–93

213

US Mexican Spanish (USMS): Academias, connection 85; acceptance 87–90; africates 165; Chicano English, relationship 171–173; codification 86; consonants 163–164; consonants, sound chart 163; core sound system, bare-bones presentation 163; corpus 185–188; discussion questions/activities 28; elaboration 87; emergence 152; frequency groups, comparison (USMS/ MexPop/HabCult) 179; fricatives 165; future (location), present (usage) 41–45; gray areas 14; HabCult, similarity 180; history (1848‒present) 146–147; implementation 87; items (Washington State Spanish) 156; language planning policy 82–84; laterals 166; lexical arc, tracing 150–151; loanwords, origin 157–158; macro-dialect 24–26; Mississippi (west boundary) 14; morphology, usage (question) 193; Nahuatl terms 135; nasals 166; occlusives 164–165; outside the Southwest 155–157; real Spanish, qualification 192; regressative form, examples 184–186; roots 45; selection 85–86; sound, Northern Mexican Spanish sound (similarity) 193; sound system 161–163; sound system, dialectal variations (sampling) 167–171; Spanish, diferences 25; speakers, discussion questions/ activities 79; speaking, Mexican/ Mexican American/Chicano requirement 58–60; speaking, settings 193; syntax, usage (question) 193; usage, cessation (question) 193; usage, predictions 193; US educational system, relationship 90–93; users, identification 10; venir/ir verbs, preference 187; verbal variants 180; verb frequency 177–178; verb frequency/ preference 177–180; verb selection, comparison 176–177; vibrant taps 166; vibrant trills 166; vowels 166–167; vowels, sound chart 167; Washington Spanish data 150; words, Salvadoran substitution (examples) 25 US Mexican Spanish (USMS) lexicon 132, 146; Amador papers 149, 152–154; Ancón de Doña Ana/Doña Ana Bend Colony documents 148, 151; discussion questions/activities 143, 158–159; English borrowings 139–143; Espinosa study 148, 151–152; history (200 BCE

214

Index

to 1492 CE) 132–135; history (1492 to 1848) 135–137; history (pre-1848), empirical analysis 137–139; Mexican revolution period data 149–150, 154–155 US Mexicans, struggle 70–72 US Mexican vocabulary, development 11 US Spanish/English bilinguals, threat (perception) 111 US ter ritorial period (1848-1912) (Mexico) 36–38 Valdés, Don Francisco Cuervo y 33 Vandals, impact 134 Varieties of Spanish in the United States (Lipski) 4, 19 variety 119–120; reification, selection 85–86; term, usage 21, 22, 180 venir/ir verbs, preference 187 verbs: collocations 188; diferences, discovery 88; frequency (USMS/ MexPop/HabCult) 177–178; frequency/ preference (USMS) 177–180; patrás construction 181–189; patrás, verb usage 186; selection 11; usage, comparison 176–177; USMS selection, comparison 176–177; variants 180; variation 180–181; venir/ir preference (USMS) 187 vibrant taps 166 vibrant tr ills 166 vocabularies: analysis 11; development 11; items, language passage 99; semantic domains 101 Voting Rights Act Amendments (1975) 95 vowels 20, 166–167; reduction 170; sound chart 167

Vulgar Latin 30–31; speakers, arrival 64, 126; words, Spanish borrowing (absence) 132 vulgus, language 31 wage diferential model 42 Washington Spanish 19; data 150 Washington State Spanish, USMS items 156 water shortages (Texas) 197 West: control, reasons 4–6; Hispanics, demographic distribution 77; or iginal inhabitants, presence 5; Spanish/English, contact 98; Spanish speakers, demography (relationship) 75–79; Spanish speakers, social environments 10 western Spanish-speaking United States (map) 18 western states: Hispanic populations (10%+) 41; Spanish speakers, number (population ranking) 77 western United States, development 38 “White” (European descent definition) 65 white race/colored races, equality error (Calhoun perception) 55 words: adoption 152; borrowing, motivations 105–108; grammatical function/origin 133; or igin, determination 137 work, finding (probability) 43 World Englishes (label) 22 [x] unvoiced (fricative) 165 Zacatecas, USMS or igin (issue) 136