Language ideology and racial inequality: Competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis article examines the influence of language ideology on interactions between English-speakingAnglo and monolingual Spanish-speaking employees in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant in Texas. In directives to Spanishspeaking employees, Anglo managers typically use English with elements of Mock Spanish. Because theAnglo managers fail to question whether their limited use of Spanish is sufficient for communicative success, Spanish speakers are almost always held responsible for incidents resulting from miscommunication. For Latino workers, Spanish provides an alternative linguistic market in which Spanish operates as a form of solidarity and resistance. The competing functions of Spanish serve to reinforce racial segregation and inequality in the workplace. (Latinos, English0Spanish bilingualism, Mock Spanish, miscommunication, resistance, segregation, workplace.)* I N T R O D U C T I O NThis article examines the ways in which language ideology influences interactions between monolingual Spanish-speaking workers and Anglo (U.S. English speakers of European ancestry) managers and workers in a Mexican restaurant in Texas. Because of the widespread acceptability of "grossly non-standard and ungrammatical" Mock Spanish (Hill 1998:682), Anglo directives in Spanish (or in English with Mock Spanish elements) are often misinterpreted by Spanish speakers. The Anglos' disregard for producing grammatical (or even understandable) forms in Spanish shifts the communicative burden almost entirely to the Spanish speaker, who is often left with insufficient semantic content for interpreting Anglo speech. Anglo managers typically do not question whether their limited use of Spanish is sufficient for communicative success, and Anglos typically assume that the Spanish speakers are responsible for incidents resulting from miscommunication. A directive that fails (in that the requested act is done incorrectly or not done at all) is almost always interpreted on the

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