Banal interculturalism: Latin Americans in Elephant and Castle, London

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses banal interculturalism as produced in an interview situation with migrants of Latin American background in London. Banal interculturalism emerges within discursive semiotic processes that allow the participants to display their (cultural) knowledge about co-ethnics and their practices, to position themselves in opposition to the ‘others’ within diaspora, and to justify their, typically negative, views towards other migrants. Sources of that knowledge can be experiential, though in most cases consist of hearsay evidence. This notion may assist intercultural communication scholars in understanding how intra-group relations are conceived and the consequences for migrants of the discourses they themselves spread within the wider group.

RESUMEN

Este artículo discute la noción interculturalidad banal, producida en una situación de entrevista con migrantes de origen latinoamericano en Londres. La interculturalidad banal emerge a través de procesos semiótico-discursivos que permiten a los participantes desplegar su conocimiento (cultural) sobre otros migrantes de la misma región geográfica y sus prácticas, posicionarse en oposición a los ‘otros’ dentro de la diáspora y justificar sus visiones, normalmente negativas, sobre otros inmigrantes. Las fuentes de esos conocimientos son experienciales o evidencia de segunda mano. Consideramos que esta noción podría ser útil para los investigadores interesados en la comunicación intercultural pues permitiría dar cuenta de cómo se construyen las relaciones internas de los grupos y de las consecuencias de los discursos que circulan entre la misma comunidad para los propios migrantes.

KEYWORDS:

• Banal interculturalism
• Latin Americans in London
• discriminatory discourse
• othering
• positioning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank David Block for his comments on an initial draft of this paper as well as the reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Adriana Patiño-Santos is an Associate Professor at Department of the Modern Languages and Linguistics, University of Southampton. Her research interests include interactional sociolinguistics, language socialisation, conversational storytelling, and multilingualism. Her research has been focused on multilingual local practices as a lens through which to observe complex sociolinguistic situations from a sociolinguistic perspective. She has edited recently the special issue Storytelling in globalized: A linguistic ethnographic perspective (International Journal of Sociology of Language, 2018 with Ana María Relaño Pastor).

Rosina Márquez Reiter specialises in interactional pragmatics and sociolinguistics. She is author of Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay (Benjamins, 2000), Spanish pragmatics (Palgrave, 2005 with M. E. Placencia) and Mediated business interactions. Intercultural communication between speakers of Spanish (EUP, 2011). She has published scholarly papers on indirectness, (im)politeness, pragmatic variation, conversational structure, (mediated) service encounters and communicative practices. She has recently edited A sociolinguistics of diaspora (Routledge, 2015 with L. Martín-Rojo).

Notes

1 The struggle for recognition is still ongoing. Latin Americans have achieved ethnic recognition in some of boroughs in London where they are settled (Southwark, Lambeth, Islington and Hackney) but are still campaigning to make their presence visible in others such as Newham, Brent and Haringey (CLAUK, 7/11/2017) as well as in other cities in the UK (see, for example, Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010). This coupled with the gentrification of deprived areas in London where they have mainly settled offers a grim picture of the future for them as well as for other groups. Their pan-identification as Latinos or Latin Americans partly responds to their struggle for ethnic recognition. Even though SsLAs come from different countries in Central and South America, we consider them as co-ethnics in the sense that they construct themselves discursively as members of the same community (Márquez- Reiter & Patiño-Santos, 2017). Such a community is referred as Latino, South Americans and Latin Americans indistinctively in our ethnographic data, and it is based on historical links, and shared cultural traits from which Spanish language, in their own varieties, appears to be the most relevant.

2 Although Brazilians are the largest group of Latin Americans in London, they do not tend to identify themselves as Latin Americans outside official domains (Martins Junior, 2014). They are also primarily concentrated in the borough of Brent, yet another area of London that will soon be gentrified thus potentially also displacing their many businesses.

3 Similar situations have been reported for Polish migrants in the UK and indeed for other migrant groups, too. Despite their different migration trajectory, Poles are roughly the same size as Latin Americans and have also suffered downward mobility. There seems to be a social division between old groups of Poland exiles, associated to the values of the ‘Poles’ who supported the UK during the WWII, and those who recently arrived as economic migrants after Poland’s entry to the EU. The latter are seen as merely searching for economic opportunities (Garapich, 2007).

4 Most of the retailers and employers in the shopping centre were at the time of our ethnography of Colombian origin.