Space, signs, and legitimate workers’ identities: an ethnography of a Beijing “urban village”

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the linguistic landscape (LL) signs of an “urban village” inhabited by rural–urban migrant workers in suburban Beijing. Migrant workers have moved to urban centers for low-skill low-income jobs on a massive scale over past decades as China has undergone rapid economic changes. Some of them start to invest their time and energy in building a new workers’ community and in constructing urban workers’ identities through linguistic and semiotic practices. Producing and displaying LL signage is part of this identity construction process. In this study, I present three examples to analyze the relationship between space, LL signs and identity construction. Ethnography allows me not only to observe the LL signs as semiotic resources but also to approach the authors and the audience and to find out their uptake of the signs. The results show that the LL signs shape social meanings of the space and the space in turn is agentive in constructing its inhabitants’ identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant worker
• semiotic resources
• linguistic landscapes
• space
• identity construction
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Jie Dong is Associate Professor at Tsinghua University, China. Her research interests include migrant study, ethnography, language and globalization, language, and the new media.

Notes

1 Baicun is a pseudonym.

2 The first item of the 1954 Constitution said that “the People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the workers class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.” 1954宪法第一条规定 中华人民共和国是工人阶级领导的、以工农联盟为基础的人民民主国家。

3 Village of 6000 residents is considered huge in China; a usual village has a size of a few hundred residents. The demographic information is obtained by talking to the local villagers and migrant residents （fieldnote_2016_07_22）.

4 The employment information is obtained by talking to the local villagers and migrant residents （fieldnote_2016_07_27）.