Devin Grammon
Spanish & Portuguese, University of Colorado
 
 

Spanish of the U.S. Southwest: A Language in Transition is an edited collection of essays that showcases an assortment of innovative contemporary research about Spanish in the American Southwest among contemporary scholars of language, culture, and society. Though Spanish has endured in the Southwest region of the United States for over 400 years, many scholars have questioned its long-term viability at the dawn of the 21st century. The popular understanding of SW Spanish as a corrupt and deficient language of the poor has subsided in recent decades, and only now are many Spanish-speaking communities beginning to fully understand the value of their speech for both preservation and scientific inquiry. Following the lead of earlier scholars such as Aurelio Espinosa, Eduardo Hernández-Chávez, Andrew Cohen, Anthony Beltramo and others, the authors of this collection offer a detailed glimpse at the present reality of SW Spanish within the ever-evolving linguistic and political confines that both encourage and threaten its existence. This volume, buttressed by the wealth of research on the Spanish that continues to disseminate throughout the Southwest and beyond, demonstrates that research on SW Spanish forms an important segment of the general body of investigative literature on Spanish throughout the world.

Riviera-Mills and Villa divide this work into five parts, each containing an introduction that helps outline current trends within the field. The first section, “Historical Aspects of Southwest Spanish,” is opened by Glenn Martínez, who develops the complex sociohistorical backdrop that helps inform how linguists have traditionally approached SW Spanish dialects. The three chapters that follow illustrate how linguists are currently reconstructing bygone varieties of SW Spanish through advancements in corpus linguistics and innovative historical sociolinguistic approaches. The investigations by María Irene Moya and Arturo Fernández-Gilbert specifically illuminate how textual analyses can shed light on the relationship between language and social change and confront many of the long-held assumptions about Spanish language evolution and maintenance in the Southwest. On the other hand, Juan Antonio Trujillo’s article analyzes New Mexican archaisms with innovative computer assisted methodologies and ultimately contests many of the traditional folk language histories of New Mexican Spanish related to archaic lexical items, variant preterit morphology, and the productive use of contractions. While Trujillo challenges scholars to think beyond the traditional views that relate SW Spanish distinctiveness to impervious linguistic environments, he also rightfully highlights social identity formation as a powerful force that can help explain how both conscious and unconscious linguistic decisions across time reinforce societal opposition to neighboring communities.

Garland Bills begins the second section, “Loss and Maintenance of Southwest Spanish,” by addressing bilingualism and general anxieties about SW Spanish abandonment. The chapters by Marie Mora and Susana Riviera-Mills elaborate on topics relating to Spanish language abandonment, such as acculturation, communicative necessity and gender. As such, they offer new insights into many of the social factors and ideologies associated with language loss in bilingual communities. Conversely, the chapter by Tonya Wolford and Phillip Carter displays the sociocultural context of the ‘Spanish-as-threat’ ideology in south Texas, outlining some of the consequences of language loss in traditional Spanish language communities. In addition, Devin Jenkins engages the rapidly changing demographics of SW Spanish through a comparison of language maintenance and socioeconomic factors. Together, these articles delineate many of the central sources of Spanish loss and maintenance in the Southwest and offer a glimpse of the work that still needs to be compiled regarding the viability of SW Spanish in the coming decades.

‘Descriptive Studies’ organize the third section of this book, which places the dialectical diversity of SW Spanish at the center of linguistic inquiry. The introduction to this section, written by John Lipski, expands on previous chapters concerning the diversity and uniqueness of SW Spanish varieties and invites its continued research to help advance language theories relating to topics such as code-switching, typologies of language contact, and the psycholinguistic intricacies of language acquisition. The chapters by Daniel Villa, Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine Travis question the long purported influence of English constructions on Spanish by looking at variable ‘yo’ expressions and uses of ‘patrás’ in New Mexican oral corpora. Their findings, based on new approaches to language variation, upend many of the traditional assumptions that various SW Spanish constructions reflect underlying English language structures. Patricia Gubitosi’s chapter investigates the evolution of passive expressions in New Mexican and Californian varieties and, like Trujillo’s chapter on New Mexican Spanish archaisms, contests the traditional position that isolation alone has largely influenced dialectical difference in the Southwest. Finally, Jens Clegg considers motivations for lexical borrowing in New Mexican Spanish, highlighting that lexical need does indeed play an important role in the borrowing process. This conclusion further compliments many of the other findings of this section, which view SW Spanish dialects as structured varieties not casually affected by English. In this way, SW Spanish speakers emerge as an important link between scholars and recent advances in linguistic subfields at a time when the many unique facets of SW Spanish rapidly continue to evolve.

The book’s fourth unit, opened by Almeida Jaqueline Toribio, focuses on the intersection of language and identity in the Southwest, emphasizing the ideologies that underlie ethnic labels and attitudes toward Spanish language forms. Julie Dowling and María Dolores Gonzales offer chapters on identity labels as well as the complex social and linguistic realities through which SW Spanish speakers often assert multiple identities. Through an analysis of speaker self-identification with terms such as Mexican, mexicano, and chicano, they are able to highlight the ways in which talk-in-interaction is fundamental to the practice of racial and ethnic labeling in everyday conversation. The final chapter of this section, written by Tyler Anderson, develops the complex relationship between identity and an individual’s own linguistic practice. Through an ethnographic approach, Anderson reveals how one’s attitude toward Spanish is intrinsically tied to the importance of that language to the speaker’s identity. Given the performative nature of language in the expression of identity and the rapidly expanding demographics of Spanish in the Southwest, this chapter suggests a need for future research in reference to Spanish speaking children and adolescents as they learn English, engage in bilingual language play, and ultimately become English-dominant.

The book concludes with a section in which various authors explore language politics and issues relating to Spanish heritage pedagogy. The introduction, written by Jennifer Leeman, develops the socio-politics of heritage language education in the Southwest with a special emphasis in the language ideology and linguistic hierarchies that have long permeated Spanish language education. A chapter by Holly R. Cashman surveys anti-bilingualism in Arizona and challenges those who research SW Spanish to do more to combat the ignorance that has impoverished bilingual education programs across the region. Ana Sánchez-Muñoz, who looks at what words heritage speakers are using and when, investigates intra-speaker and register variation in social contexts. The book concludes with a chapter by Robert W. Train on historical perspectives on ideologies and ecologies of language education, focusing on Sonoma County, California. In this analysis, Spanish surfaces within systems characterized by ideologies, policies and practices in changing ecologies. Train rightfully highlights that there is much left to investigate as societal paradigms slowly shift toward more ecological and critical understandings of Spanish in American society.

This anthology is unquestionably crucial for those concerned with the past, present and future of Spanish in the U.S. Southwest at an important moment in its evolution. Reflecting this conjecture, Riviera-Mills and Villa have skillfully compiled a collection of investigative work that adds to the extant research on SW Spanish and underlies its importance as a language of linguistic investigation on its own terms. As such, this book will likely be of interest to many, such as Spanish language educators, those working with heritage language learners, and students and researchers of language contact, language and identity, or Spanish in the United States.

Spanish of the U.S. Southwest offers more than an insightful glimpse into the Spanish variation of the Southwest past and present. As an extraordinary culmination of years of academic research, this work is a celebration of the distinctiveness and survival of SW Spanish and will serve as an invaluable reference for studies in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and language variation and change.