Language Use and Language Attitudes: A Study of Border Women.

Abstract

Recently, we have seen a plethora of scholarly works across disciplines including literature (Castillo-Speed 1995; Calderon and Saldivar 1991), education (Delgado-Gaitan and Trueba 1991), language/linguistics (Arteaga 1994), and history (Martinez 1994) that have the border, borderlands, or crossing as themes. These can refer to geographic, symbolic, or imaginary boundaries. The role of women between or the U.S-Mexico has also been documented by historians like Del Castillo (1990) and Ruiz and Tiano (1987). The notion of crossing has been popularized by Gloria Anzaldua (1987) in Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. As a Chicana-Tejana raised in the Rio Grande Valley, she is familiar with the geographic and cultural boundaries that divide the United States from Mexico; however, this transcending of borders goes beyond geography and encompasses one's psyche, sexual identity, even spirituality. The border is wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory. As a product of two cultures?Mexican and Anglo?Anzaldua recognizes that one can also cross borders linguistically and demonstrates this by switching from English to Spanish to Tex-Mex and even Nahuatl in her book. This mixture is a new language?the language of the borderlands. Using Anzaldua's notion of borders as a point of departure, I illustrate in this study how women from la frontera of Laredo, Texas, use, describe, and convey attitudes about this lan guage of the borderlands?a hybrid of Spanish and English that is a result of culture and lan guage contact with mexicanos from Nuevo Laredo, Nuevo Leon, and other Mexican regions and with English-speaking tejanos. Grounded in sociolinguistic theory, which is concerned with the examination of language variation and use in social contexts, the aim of this study was to gather descriptions of these varieties and to arrive at patterns of Spanish-English language use across domains (e.g., home, neighborhood, work) based on select interlocutors (e.g., parents, chil dren, classmates, clients). Linguistic introspection into their own dialect or idiolect in addition to border Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Tejano Spanish, calo, and codes witching was another means of gathering and interpreting information regarding varieties that exist not only in their border city but also across Texas and Mexico. Language attitudes toward these varieties add a holistic dimension to this so ciolinguistic description. They serve as a gauge by which to examine positive and negative feel ings toward language choice, taking into account factors like acceptability, prestige, and socioeconomic status of the speakers. These feelings lead to observations regarding linguistic security, linguistic insecurity, and language loyalty. I have categorized these attitudes in two broad classifications that reflect the ethnicities being discussed: (1) intraethnic?within the same ethnic group (Mexicano-Americano/Mexicano Americano) and (2) interethnic?across ethnic groups (Mexicano-Americano/Mexicano or Mexi cano/Mexicano-Americano).

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