SPANISH WITHIN A POLARIZING ANGLO-AMERICAN RACIOLINGUISTIC BINARY: APPLYING RACIOLINGUISTIC THEORY TO UNDERSTAND LINGUISTIC TREATMENT OF RACIALIZED SPANISH SPEAKERS IN THE UNITED STATES
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Firestone, Danya Jeanne
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Abstract
Dialogue around conceptualizations of race in the United States deploy the “violent cultural imposition” (Deliovsky & Kitossa, 2013) of a western black/white race dualism that polarizes these two groups. Some scholars argue that this binary conceptualization excludes Latinxs and other minoritized groups (Perea, 1997). Racialized Spanish speakers’ positionality is constructed by the western imaginary of a non-white “other” category and maintained by Anglo-Americans linguistically and culturally. Their place is indexically localized as paralleling a corresponding language prism distancing the Spanish language from the socially valued “white,” “American,” and “English-speaking” pole of the binary (Leeman, 2004).
Raciolinguistic theory (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2017), which articulates the “remapping of race from biology onto language” (Urciuoli, 2001), is used to conceptualize rejection and abuse of Spanish and Spanglish in American “white public space” (Hill, 2008) as a control mechanism for limiting Spanish and Latinx influence in the United States and asserting their racial “otherness” from white America and English. Institutional and interpersonal reverence for an Anglo-American raciolinguistic binary through discriminatory linguistic practices towards racialized Spanish speakers in the United States reinforces discrimination and stereotyping against the group and perpetuates its socially “othered” status.
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Raciolinguistics, Mock Spanish, Linguistic Discrimination