Speaking Spanish Like a Mexican:
Mexicanization, Language Ideologies, and Identity Negotiation Among Salvadorans in San Antonio, Texas
About the Project
In contexts where a particular variety of Spanish is regarded as normative, the act of speaking Spanish acquires complex social significance. For Salvadorans in Mexican-majority contexts, language serves as a resource for establishing belonging, a marker of difference, and a site where competing conceptions of Latinidad emerge.
This dissertation examines Mexicanization, defined as the often invisible social and linguistic pressures that encourage Salvadorans and other non-Mexican Latinos to accommodate Mexican cultural practices and linguistic norms in predominantly Mexican-origin environments. Focusing on Salvadorans in San Antonio, a city characterized by a longstanding Mexican and Mexican-American presence, this study investigates how speakers navigate the relationship between language, identity, and belonging within Latino communities.
Utilizing qualitative sociolinguistic methods, this project analyzes how Salvadorans interpret and respond to expectations regarding Spanish. These processes of negotiation are complex and multidirectional. Speakers may adopt dominant linguistic norms to facilitate social integration or avoid discrimination, while also expressing pride in Salvadoran Spanish and maintaining distinctive linguistic practices. These experiences demonstrate that linguistic accommodation can coexist with resistance, and that belonging often requires negotiating the very differences that confer meaning to specific identities.
Language, Power, and Identity
Discussions of Latino communities frequently assume that shared language and cultural affiliation produce a unified experience. However, Latinidad encompasses diverse national, racial, linguistic, and historical trajectories, and the internal social hierarchies within Latino communities remain insufficiently examined.
By centering Salvadoran experiences within a Mexican-majority context, Speaking Spanish Like a Mexican challenges prevailing accounts of Latino identity that overlook differences in power and belonging within the community. The project examines how specific varieties of Spanish attain social dominance, how speakers interpret the expectations associated with these varieties, and how national identity is negotiated through everyday linguistic practices.
This project contributes to sociolinguistic research on language ideologies, identity, and racialization by foregrounding Central American experiences. More broadly, it explores how minoritized communities navigate intersecting structures of marginalization, negotiating belonging both in relation to the English-dominant United States and within Latino spaces shaped by internal linguistic and cultural hierarchies.