Acceso usuarios
David Divita
In this article I analyze artifacts that teach domestic Spanish, a register of the language meant to facilitate communication between Anglo employers and their Spanish-speaking employees. Comprising a limited range of features, including imperatives, second-person pronouns, and lexical items, domestic Spanish provides its users with a means to overcome the “language barrier” that often characterizes relationships in the domestic sphere. Drawing on the concepts of raciolinguistic ideologies and indexical field, I show how domestic Spanish ultimately works to maintain asymmetrical relationships by constricting the range of social meanings that its use can activate; I also shed light on the ambivalent and often conflicting notions among employers about the Spanish language and its speakers. My analysis lays bare the possible disjuncture between the intention of those who use domestic Spanish and the effect it may have on the relationships that it mediates – a disjuncture that enables its speakers to misrecognize their efforts as benevolent, ignoring the ways that language functions in practices of racial discrimination and social control.
