MexiRicans: Interethnic Language and Identity

Demographic Categories in Sociolinguistic Studies of US Latino Communities

“…Potowski and Matts' () work in Chicago with speakers of mixed Mexican and Puerto Rican parentage provides a further example of the complexities of Latino identities. Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish differ markedly on a number of dimensions including the extent to which pronouns are expressed overtly and variable aspiration and deletion of final /s/, a characteristic of most Caribbean Spanish dialects (Zamora and Guitart ).…”

Recent Research on Latinos in the USA and Canada, Part 2: Spanish Varieties1

“…Recently some researchers have moved away from grouping participations into static demographic categories such as age, sex, and socioeconomic status, and are increasingly considering the regional cultural origins and social identities of those they study. Potowski and Matts (2008), for example, illustrate the complex dynamics of identity formation among 24 adolescents and young adults of mixed Puerto Rican and Mexican parentage in Chicago. Their results, based on ratings of speech samples by laypersons and trained phonologists, show that the Spanish dialect of the largest number of participants most closely resembled the dialect spoken by their mother, whether Mexican or Puerto Rican.…”

“…Studies of contact between Spanish dialects outside of NYC are also necessary. Work in this area is underway, as represented by the studies of Amastae and Satcher (1993) of Hondurans in El Paso, TX, Aaron and Hernández (2007) and Hernández (2002) on Salvadorans in Houston, Potowski (2008) and Potowski and Matts (2008) on children of mixed Puerto Rican and Mexican parentage in Chicago, and Vélez‐Salas et al. (in press) of Puerto Ricans in San Antonio.…”

“…Likewise, Herrick (2005) examines the issues that arise in a workplace setting when Spanish speakers of the same national origin are perceived as a uniform group. Recent work by Potowski (2008; Potowski and Matts 2008) that examines the dialect features of children of mixed Mexican and Puerto Rican parentage in Chicago provides additional evidence showing that simply grouping speakers by national origin oversimplifies the nature of Latino communities in the USA and Canada.…”

Maternal Perceptions of Agency in Intergenerational Transmission of Spanish: The case of Latinos in the U.S. Midwest

“…This understanding has been called here a perception of agency. Previous studies have pointed to the centrality of the mother in intergenerational minority language transmission (Okita, 2002;Potowski & Matts, 2008;Touminen, 1999;Velázquez, 2009). 1 Other authors, such as Moll (2005), highlight the role of women in the formation of household and community networks and funds of knowledge.…”