scholarly journals Discourse as a language contact phenomenon: evidence from Mexican-American bilinguals

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Judyta Pawliszko
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
English Language ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Ethnography Of Communication ◽  
Contact Phenomenon ◽  
Linguistic System ◽  
Discourse Strategies ◽  
American Society

This article is the result of a study conducted within the theoretical framework of ethnography of communication. One of the main purposes of this study was to examine discourse strategies among Mexican-American bilinguals residing in the Los Angeles area. The examination of strategies used in oral and written conversations demonstrates the existence of numerous stylistic features. Mexican-American bilingual discourse is characterized by the use of code-switching, culturally-motivated borrowings from English and, in general, the dominance of the English language in conversation. Undoubtedly, these discursive phenomena stem from socioeconomic and cultural forces and the prestige of English as the dominant linguistic system of the American society.

Early Chinese-American Society as Portrayed in Chinese Letters of the Ah Louis Family of San Luis Obispo, California, usa早期美国华侨社会：美国加州,圣路易斯-奥比 斯波市-黄安家族的中文信件

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-215
Author(s):  
Joel Fetzer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
English Language ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Report ◽  
San Luis ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Society

This research report presents the English-language translations of several hand-written, Chinese-language letters from the overseas-Chinese Ah Louis family of San Luis Obispo, California. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, when these letters were written, this medium-sized town on the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles was home to hundreds of Cantonese immigrants. As unofficial “mayor” of San Luis Obispo’s Chinatown, the Guangdong-born Ah Louis interacted with a wide variety of merchants, employees, friends, family members, and officials. These documents discuss commerce in Chinatown, a legal case about local Chumash Indians, migration between China and the United States, family life in rural Guangdong Province, and labor relations in California, providing a near-unique window into ordinary Chinese-American life around the turn of the twentieth century. Extensive footnotes also place the letters in their historical and cultural context.

scholarly journals Playing Across Borders: Transnational Sports and Identities in Southern California and Mexico, 1930––1945

2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joséé M. Alamillo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Southern California ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Transnational Ties ◽  
Mexican Community ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
American Society ◽  
Mexican American Identity

This article examines the local and transnational dimensions of sports in Southern California through the activities of the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California (MAASC) from the Great Depression to the end of World War II. This amateur athletic organization promoted sports in the barrios and colonias throughout Southern California and forged transnational ties with the Mexican government and its sports federation. MAASC and its related activities reflected two competing historical trajectories that have been subjects of debate in Chicano historiography. MAASC sports simultaneously reinvigorated transnational ties with Mexico that emphasized a Mééxico de afuera identity and contributed to the making of a Mexican American identity that connected immigrants to Southern California and American society in general. Ultimately, both impulses helped to instill a new political confidence among MAASC members to challenge the Los Angeles Department of Playground and Recreation's paternalistic approach toward the Mexican community.

The gradual loss of mood distinctions in Los Angeles Spanish

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Silva-Corvalán
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Gradual Loss ◽  
Diachronic Development

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a change affecting Spanish in contact with English in the United States: namely, simplification and loss of Subjunctive (Sub) mood morphology. Conversational data from 17 Mexican-American bilinguals living in the eastern section of Los Angeles are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The speakers represent three different immigrant groups, according to length of family stay in the United States. The variation between Indicative (Ind) and Sub usage attested in the Spanish-speaking world results from the continuing modifications which have affected the distribution of Ind and Sub forms through the diachronic development of Spanish: previously obligatory contexts for the use of Sub are now categorically Ind or allow both Sub and Ind to different degrees across social and geographic parameters. In the Spanish of Los Angeles, the internal tendencies toward a reduction of the obligatory use of the Sub are strengthened, as may be expected in a situation of language contact in which obligatory contexts for the use of a form are more resistant to change than those that allow a selection between two or more forms with closely related meanings.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Forging Aztecness: Twentieth-Century Mexican Musical Nationalism in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
KRISTINA F. NIELSEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Siglo Xx

Abstract (Spanish/English)Forjando el Aztecanismo: Nacionalismo Musical Mexicano del Siglo XX en el siglo XXI en Los ÁngelesHoy en día, un creciente número de músicos mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos tocan instrumentos indígenas mesoamericanos y réplicas arqueológicas, lo que se conoce como “Música Azteca.” En este artículo, doy a conocer cómo los músicos contemporáneos de Los Ángeles, California, recurren a los legados de la investigación musical nacionalista mexicana e integran modelos antropológicos y arqueológicos aplicados. Al combinar el trabajo de campo etnográfico con el análisis histórico, sugiero que los marcos musicales y culturales que alguna vez sirvieron para unir al México pos-revolucionario han adquirido una nuevo significado para contrarrestar la desaparición del legado indígena mexicano en los Estados Unidos.Today a growing number of Mexican-American musicians in the United States perform on Indigenous Mesoamerican instruments and archaeological replicas in what is widely referred to as “Aztec music.” In this article, I explore how contemporary musicians in Los Angeles, California, draw on legacies of Mexican nationalist music research and integrate applied anthropological and archeological models. Pairing ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I suggest that musical and cultural frameworks that once served to unite post-revolutionary Mexico have gained new significance in countering Mexican Indigenous erasure in the United States.

Educational Meaning Making and Language Learning: Understanding the Educational Incorporation of Unaccompanied, Undocumented Latinx Youth Workers in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 003804072199600
Author(s):  
Stephanie L. Canizales
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
English Language ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Immigrant Youth ◽  
The United States ◽  
English Language Learning ◽  
Youth Workers ◽  
K 12

Immigration scholars agree that educational attainment is essential for the success of immigrant youth in U.S. society and functions as a key indicator of how youth will fare in their transition into adulthood. Research warns of downward or stagnant mobility for people with lower levels of educational attainment. Yet much existing research takes for granted that immigrant youth have access to a normative parent-led household, K–12 schools, and community resources. Drawing on four years of ethnographic observations and interviews with undocumented Latinx young adults (ages 18 to 31) who arrived in Los Angeles, California, as unaccompanied youth, I examine the educational meaning making and language learning of Latinx individuals coming of age as workers without parents and legal status. Findings show that Latinx immigrant youth growing up outside of Western-normative parent-led households and K–12 schools and who remain tied to left-behind families across transnational geographies tend to equate education with English language learning. Education—as English language learning—is essential to sobrevivencia, or survival, during their transition to young adulthood as workers and transnational community participants.

The Ambivalent Minority: Mexican Americans and the Voting Rights Act

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Skerry
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
San Antonio ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
News Magazine ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Rich History

In the countless conversations about U.S. immigration policy that I have had with Mexican Americans of varied backgrounds and political orientations, seldom have my interlocutors failed to remind me that “We were here first,” or that “This was our land and you stole it from us.” Even a moderate Mexican American politician like former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros sounds the same theme in a national news magazine:It is no accident that these regions have the names they do—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Colorado, Montana.…It is a rich history that Americans have been led to believe is an immigrant story when, in fact, the people who built this area in the first place were Hispanics.

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