‘I'm Mexican, remember?’ Constructing ethnic identities via authenticating discourse 1

Abstract

This paper examines how an ideology of cultural authenticity emerges in the casual but playful conversations of a bilingual Mexican American friendship group. Authenticating discourse, as illustrated here, is part of an ongoing, ordinary interactional routine through which speakers take overt (authentication) stances, which I call authenticating moves , to display, impugn, vie for, and enact forms of ethnic identity. In the data, issues of authenticity in relation to Mexicanness emerge as a result of the interactional exploitation of three ideological constructs: purity of bloodline, purity of nationality, and Spanish linguistic fluency.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 67 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.