ˈgusɑme kɑˈlɑtɑ!: Faux Spanish in the New Latino Diaspora

Many schools across the US have experienced rapid increases in Spanish-speaking students over the past decade. These schools, along with media and policymakers, attend closely to whether and how well Spanish speakers are learning English, but they pay little attention to how English-speaking students respond to the increasing prevalence of Spanish. Drawing on ethnographic research in one American elementary school, we investigate how a group of young English-speaking students react to the increasing presence of Spanish in their school and community. We draw on Rampton’s (1995, 2006) notions of language crossing and stylization, exploring how English-speaking students employ stylization or crossing by adopting Spanish phonology and lexis. We also investigate how these practices allow children to inhabit and evaluate certain identities while serving a variety of interactional functions. We describe crossing and stylization practices that run counter to familiar hegemonic language ideologies in which English is the language of status and power. These practices do not remove the dominant status of English in the school, but they do expose interesting counterhegemonic action. We focus on how students from English-speaking backgrounds use basic Spanish words and phrases, speaking what we refer to as “faux Spanish,” as they imitate their Spanish-speaking peers, participate in interaction rituals, seek attention, and playfully mock their peers. We also examine instances in which students from English-speaking backgrounds talk about Spanish and claim knowledge or inheritance of Mexican identity and culture. We describe how these instances show children making sense of difference, and we argue that they also show children assigning value and high status to language practices and social identities often marginalized in school settings. Our findings suggest that, regardless of the Standard English variety taught and required for academic endeavors at school, children are busy expanding their linguistic repertoires, playing with positioning and footing, and laying claim to and negotiating multiple social identities. We argue that attention to these processes may help educators see them as resources for learning that can inform practice. References Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. New York, NY: Longman. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.