[lingtalks] Wortham: Mexican Immigrant Language, April 13

[Kathryn Woolard]

 Linguistic Anthropology Laboratory Workshop series
Spring 2009
Linguistic Anthropology Laboratory, 340 Social Sciences Research Bldg.
 
Mon., April 13, 12:30-2pm.
Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant Language in the New Latino Diaspora
Stanton Wortham, University of Pennsylvania
www.gse.upenn.edu/~stantonw <http://www.gse.upenn.edu/~stantonw>
 
Stanton Wortham is Judy & Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education at  the
University of Pennsylvania and author of Narratives in Action (2001),
Learning Identity (2006) and Bullish on Uncertainty; How Organizational
Cultures Transform Participants (with Alexandra Michel, 2008) and co-editor
of Education in the New Latin Diaspora (2001).

Abstract 

Attracted by regional labor opportunities, almost ten thousand Mexican
immigrants have come to the Mid Atlantic suburban town of Marshall over the
past fifteen years. The immigrants, plus the continued movement of wealthier
people to surrounding suburbs, have significantly changed the look and feel
of this town of 30,000, once inhabited mostly by English-speaking whites and
blacks. Long-time residents must make sense of their new neighbors in this
changing landscape. At the same time, immigrants must adjust to hosts¹ ideas
about them and form their own opinions about an unfamiliar social context.
How immigrants are viewed impacts their experiences and futures in a
community.  In particular, the ways in which teachers, administrators and
other host community members understand immigrants can influence the
experiences of immigrant students in schools. Long-time residents draw upon
many resources as they form perceptions of their new neighbors. Many attend
to external characteristics of the newcomers:  the way they look, where they
work, how they speak. While generalizations overtly based on race or
ethnicity have become taboo in many places, oversimplifications about the
language that immigrants speak or how they speak it do not carry the same
stigma. Yet value judgments about newcomers are often hidden in local
discourse about language use, in talk about immigrants¹ English proficiency,
for example, or about the language they speak in public and how they speak
it. Beliefs and attitudes ostensibly about language can act as a proxy for
beliefs about individuals or groups of people who speak a language and can
influence how these individuals or groups are treated. In this paper we
conceptualize these beliefs and attitudes as language ideologies,
culturally-situated theories about the relationship between language and the
social world.  We examine how language ideologies circulated by residents
and educators in New Marshall, as well as by immigrant students themselves,
help both hosts and immigrants understand students¹ place in the social
order of the community and their concomitant rights and responsibilities.
In particular, we examine how the concept of an ³educated person² is
constructed in part through language ideologies in this community and how
this concept influences Mexican immigrant students.

Our analysis draws on ethnographic data collected in New Marshall over the
past four years, including recorded interviews with townspeople, school
staff, and students, as well as videotaped classroom interaction. The data
show how people often interpret low English proficiency‹and uses of language
characterized as such‹as deficit, disability, lack of ambition, or even
outright resistance, while Spanish proficiency is regularly erased.  At the
same time, we find that Mexican students develop both analogous and
antithetical accounts about the meanings and connotations of English use and
proficiency. We argue that these language ideologies play an important role
in the constitution of social relations between immigrant students at New
Marshall High School, the educators who teach them and the community that
surrounds them.  As taken-for-granted ideas that often work under the
surface of social interactions, these ideologies about language shape the
experiences of young Mexican immigrants in New Marshall, the organization
and quality of the services that are provided for them, and their
post-secondary options.
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