Their language, our Spanish

Introducing public discourses of ‘Gringoism’ as racializing linguistic and cultural reappropriation

Adam Schwartz

This study exposes ‘gringo Spanish’ as a discursive site for the reproduction of privilege, racism and social order in White public spaces. I begin my arguments by exploring Whiteness, doing so by unpacking what I term ‘Gringoism’, which involves the active celebration of a White, monolingual (un)consciousness through particular linguistic and cultural performance. Brief analysis of one particular educational text (Harvey 1990/2003) supports greater discussions of indexicality, intersubjectivity, the elevation of Whiteness and discourses of ‘making sense’ of Spanish-speaking Others. The study closes with implications for the field of Mexican American studies, which in turn offers considerations for scholars studying Spanish within greater educational, anthropological and socio-cultural contexts.

Keywords: Mexican American studies, privilege, Gringoism, Whiteness, reappropriation, identity, racism, language education, culture, space, discourse, intersubjectivity, indexicality

Published online: 03 November 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.5.2.05sch

Cited by

Cited by 11 other publications

Callahan, Laura

2010. Speaking with (dis)respect: a study of reactions to Mock Spanish. Language and Intercultural Communication 10:4 ► pp. 299 ff.

Callahan, Laura

2014. The importance of being earnest. Spanish in Context 11:2 ► pp. 202 ff.

Cole, Debbie & Régine Pellicer

2012. Uptake (un)limited: The mediatization of register shifting in US public discourse. Language in Society 41:4 ► pp. 449 ff.

Helmer, Kimberly Adilia

2013. A Twice-Told Tale: Voices of Resistance in a Borderlands Spanish Heritage Language Class. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 44:3 ► pp. 269 ff.

Kirschen, Bryan

2020. Spanish in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Spanish in Context 17:1 ► pp. 131 ff.

Loureiro-Rodríguez, Verónica, María Irene Moyna & Damián Robles

2018. Hey, baby, ¿Qué Pasó?: Performing bilingual identities in Texan popular music. Language & Communication 60 ► pp. 120 ff.

Pomerantz, Anne & Adam Schwartz

2011. Border talk: narratives of Spanish language encounters in the United States. Language and Intercultural Communication 11:3 ► pp. 176 ff.

Potowski, Kim

2011. Linguistic and cultural authenticity of ‘Spanglish’ greeting cards. International Journal of Multilingualism 8:4 ► pp. 324 ff.

Roth-Gordon, Jennifer

2011. Discipline and Disorder in the Whiteness of Mock Spanish1. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21:2 ► pp. 211 ff.

Schwartz, Adam

2011. In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 646 ff.

Woschitz, Johannes & Emre Yağlı

2019. The meaning change of hayır during the Turkish constitutional referendum 2017. Language Sciences 72 ► pp. 116 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.