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Abstract
This paper reports the results of an analysis of the use of metaphors, metonyms, referential strategies, and expressions of deixis used by a group of middle-class bilinguals in the border city of El Paso, Texas, when speaking about use of Spanish and English in their city and in their home. A total of 234 metaphors referencing processes, institutions, and ethnic groups related to Spanish/English use were included. The goal of this study was to analyse how speakers conceptualized language use and language users in their community, and to examine if and how individual discourses map onto larger linguistic ideologies. The study of language ideologies and individual discourse as related to language maintenance and shift in El Paso illustrates the tensions between ideologies of language pride and language panic that are central to the Mexican American language experience. Examples of internalization of linguistic prejudice prevalent in public discourse about Latinos were found together with examples of the contestation of language panic discourse through the positioning of bilingualism as the key to economic mobility and local identity.
Notes
Bilingüe entre líneas – Bilingual between the lines, is a composite of the idiomatic expressions ‘entre comillas’ – between quotation marks, and ‘(leer) entre líneas’ – (reading) between the lines. Both involve conventional metaphors, but precisely because they are a part of everyday language, their metaphoric potential is weak to non-existent.
In Spanish, the word puro has an adjectival value when placed after the noun – e.g. chocolate puro (pure chocolate), and an adverbial value when it precedes the noun – puro chocolate (only chocolate).
It's sticking to me, as if you were degenerating the language a little [El Paso Spanish] is so spoiled.
The expression ‘hablar mocho’ which was found twice in the corpus, and is somewhat common in El Paso to refer to MexAm Spanish. It is most likely a metaphorical extension of the verb mochar – in Mexican Spanish: to amputate or chop off. This use involves the conceptualization of language as a living organism, such as a tree or a body. The online version of El Diccionario del español en México defines the adjective mocho as: ‘Missing a part, generally because it was broken; missing a tip or an edge ( … ) In reference to people, missing an arm or a leg or a portion of them; missing a limb’ (El Colegio de México, n.d.).
All names are pseudonyms.
The online version of Guido Gómez de Silva's Diccionario breve de mexicanismos defines pocho as: ‘A Mexican that has adopted American manners and speech ( … ) (generally because he/she lives near the Mexico-United States border, on either side)’ (Gómez de Silva, 2012).
The three references to African Americans found in the corpus are metonyms: negros, gente de color, and morenos.
The identifiers mexa, and fronchi were not included in analysis because they were not used by any of the respondents, but will be discussed here because of their relevance to local identity formations. At the time of data collection, mexa was a term used by middle-class first-generation immigrants from Juárez as a semantic counterpart to pocho: a quintessentially Mexican individual who refuses to acculturate to Anglo norms. In the following example, taken from the transcript of the first interview with Tere Rosales, the term is used by her husband:I: And in the Bassett [Mall] area, who lives there?
TR: There it can be more of an American type area. [ … ]
I: Just arrived, or a long time there?
Husband: No, they've been there a long time. Around here? Only Americans. Over there where my jefa and my B live [Referring to his mother and grandmother], only Mexas!A related term used in the 1990s, but no longer popular at the time of the interviews, was fronchi, used in reference to a Mexican national who lived on the Ciudad Juárez side of the border but commuted to El Paso to work, study or shop. The term is a clipping of Frontera Chihuahua, which during the 1990s was stamped on the license plates issued by the Chihuahua state government to owners of used cars that had been imported from the USA to Mexico for restricted use in the 30-kilometre border zone (Hill, Citation2009).
Compare three metaphors included in this table – LANGUAGE IS A PATH, TRUTH/LANGUAGE IS INSIDE, and LANGUAGE/CULTURE IS A SUBSTANCE, with two metaphorical representations of language and education discussed in chapter 6 of Santa Ana (Citation2002): EDUCATION AS A PATH – and Spanish use as a barrier on this path (p. 207), and LANGUAGE AS WATER (p. 201). Indeed, it could be argued that TRUTH/LANGUAGE IS INSIDE, and LANGUAGE/CULTURE IS A SUBSTANCE are instances of the LANGUAGE AS WATER metaphor, which Santa Ana understands as a conceptualization of language as fluid, dynamic medium that can be suffused, absorbed, dispensed, and ‘poured out’ onto an external space (p. 202).
In Mexican popular culture, chistes de Pepito are lewd jokes in which the character of Pepito, a precocious child, accidentally sets off the action, usually hinging on ambiguity in meaning. The adjective malinchista, from the historical Malinalli, Malintzin or Malinche, Hernán Cortés' interpreter and concubine, is recorded in the online version of Guido Gómez de Silva's Diccionario Breve de Mexicanismos as: ‘Someone who suffers the complex of loving that which is foreign and looking down on that which belongs to oneself’.