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Presentation
Spanish as a marker of ‘collective identity’ in Mexican Agricultural Workers in Canada
Spanish in Socierty (SIS)/Birbeck, University of London (2013)
  • Maria Eugenia De Luna Villalón, Wilfrid Laurier University
Abstract
Following an ethnographic methodology and approach, I investigated different aspects related to language and migration of Mexican Temporary Agricultural Workers (MTAW) in Canada. One of the research areas of my work is the relationship among biographical backgrounds and the negotiation of identity in a new social and linguistics environment that positions MTAW as precarious migrants. Some of my results are that MTAW in Canada are perceived as a homogenous ethnic group that is primarily identified with their national identity (i.e. Mexicans, even if they have different ethnic origins) and with one language (i.e. Spanish, even if they also may have other languages as mother tongue) that indexes who they are. As Urciuoli (1995) explains, languages are mapped onto individuals and ethnicities (and I will add nations); thus, language indexes individual and group differences that become identity markers of linguistic communities because language, nation and ethnicity are fundamentally related. In this way, even if identities can be negotiated, constructed, altered, renewed, recreated, competed with, defeated and challenged in different time dimensions, MTAW nationality and language use (i.e. language practices) identify them as a social collective (Jupp et al, 1982; Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001) that hinders their capacity of renegotiating their individual identities. Thus, MTAW have been through the deterritorialization and reterritorialization process in a specific TimeSpace in history, which consequently helped them to form a reified shared, imagined, identity with multiple voices (Jacquemet, 2005) –i.e. a collective identity with Spanish as identity marker.
Keywords
  • identity,
  • sociolinguistics,
  • language,
  • migration
Disciplines
Publication Date
Summer July 5, 2013
Citation Information
Maria Eugenia De Luna Villalón. "Spanish as a marker of ‘collective identity’ in Mexican Agricultural Workers in Canada" Spanish in Socierty (SIS)/Birbeck, University of London (2013)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/maria_eugenia_de_luna/44/