accent, film makers find it difficult to imagine Latinos/as as accountants,
copy shop owners, engineers or veterinarians.
The Spanish universe
Some Latinos live in communities of monolingual English speakers,
where a Spanish accent stands out. Others live in communities where
multiple varieties of English co-exist in relative harmony, in which
Spanish, English, and Chicano or other varieties of Latino English each
have a place. Chicano English, Puerto Rican English and Cuban English in
Los Angeles, New York and Miami are distinct from each other, with
distinctive syntactical, morphological and discourse markers (Jenkins
2009; Villa and Rivera-Mills 2009, García and Otheguy 1988; Penfield and
Ornstein-Galicia 1985; Valdés 1988; Zentella 1988).
When Zentella protests the labeling of second-generation Spanish-
language immigrants as semi-lingual or alingual, she is referring to code
switching, the orderly (grammatically structured) alternation between two
or more languages, a subject of great interest to linguists and one which is
widely studied.^6 This complicates the picture of the Spanish-speaking
universe considerably. We have distinct languages, each with its own
stylistic repertoires: Spanish and English. To these we add more recently
developed but distinct varieties of English, for example, Chicano English
and Chicano Spanish as they are spoken in the Southwest and West. Now
we have also the phenomenon of living and working with three languages,
and switching among them as determined by language-internal
(syntactical and morphological) rules as well as social ones. In
comparison, style switching may seem to an unsympathetic outsider
nothing more than a language hodge-podge, one often labeled Spanglish.
I would argue that whether the object of subordination is the act of style
switching, or pressure to use one specific language rather than another, the
ultimate goal remains the same: to devalue and suppress everything
Spanish. To call code-switching Spanglish in a dismissive way is just
another subordination method with a long history: to deny a language and