Unveiling Spanish language attitudes in a Los Angeles school and a third-generation multigenerational Mexican-American family

Authors

Eric ALVAREZ, Université Sorbonne NouvelleFollow

Abstract

This chapter unearths some of the diverse attitudes towards Spanish of a third-generation child in Los Angeles (L.A.), California, her family members, and school personnel. L.A. is a tension-ridden contact zone (Pratt, 1991) where Spanish has traditionally been subjugated and is still a lesser-taught language (LTL) despite decades of research showing that bilingual education positively impacts student attitudes (Potowski & Muñoz-Basols, 2020). Lack of continuity (Caloi & Torregrossa, 2021) in formal instruction and inconsistent heritage Spanish use in the home may entail divergent attitudes towards Spanish, possibly hindering multigenerational transmission. Decades-long turbulent California language policies (CLP) (Macias, 2001) have consistently interrupted Spanish language instruction (discontinuity) and may thus likely contribute to the construction of various attitudes towards Spanish. Erratic state-level language policies have also played a role in heritage Spanish speakers’ variable linguistic outcomes (Valdés & Figueroa, 1994), often leading to language death (Harrison, 2007) by the third-generation (3G) (Bustamante-López, 2008; Silva-Corvalán, 2014). This socio-political reality may influence a 3G child’s reluctant attitude towards Spanish transmission in an L.A.-based Mexican-American family, and the multifaceted attitudes of different school and community members. Ethnographic fieldwork in a public school and a private home over one year allowed to collect nearly 20,000 words of field observations and 24 hours of video data yielding nearly 30,000 Spanish, English, and language mixed utterances transcribed on CLAN and coded on Excel. The data are analyzed qualitatively. We first show an inconsistent use of heritage Spanish in the home longitudinally, second that not all school and family members display divergent attitudes towards Spanish, and finally that the 3G target-child sometimes affirms speaking Spanish in an ecology where bilingual practices are the norm. Indeed, bilingual practices may help harmonious (De Houwer, 2015) bilingual (Gorter, 2013) development. We explore the potential impact of turbulent CLP on attitudes towards Spanish in the school, and the bilingual practices of a well-established multigenerational family in multicultural California. Our findings lend insight into the construction of attitudes in a tension-ridden contact zone where Spanish is an LTL that emerges through negotiations of bilingual and bicultural identities (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004).

Recommended Citation

ALVAREZ, Eric (2024) "Unveiling Spanish language attitudes in a Los Angeles school and a third-generation multigenerational Mexican-American family," International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest: Vol. 43: No. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/ijlasw/vol43/iss1/4