Language, Immigration and Labor - Negotiating Work in the U.s.-Mexico Borderlands

"Language, Immigration, and Labor explores dominant ideologies about citizenship, nation, and language that frame the everyday lives of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Focussing its ethnographic research on Arizona, a state that intensely regulates transnational migrants and Spanish speakers through its immigration and language policies, this book examines the realities of intercultural communication in fast-paced job negotiations between undocumented workers and their employers. The research reveals the ways that dominant discourses reverberate down to localized social and language practices and how day laborers respond by legitimating their participation in society--a kind of cultural citizenship--and constructing identities as language learners and productive workers. "--

List of contents

1. The Social Context of Language Contact in the Informal Economy 2. Globalization, Immigrant Labor, and Language 3. 'If I knew the language, don't think I would be here': Shifting Understandings of the Linguistic Capital of English 4. Solidarity, Rapport, and Co-membership: Employers' Hiring Practices 5. Performing the Good Worker 6. Conceptualizing Intercultural Contact in the Borderlands

About the author

Elise DuBord is Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Northern Iowa, USA. Her research interests include intercultural language contact, critical race theory, language policy, and community-based learning.

Product details

• Authors: E DuBord, E. DuBord, Elise M. Dubord
• Publisher: Palgrave UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 28.10.2014
• EAN: 9781137301017
• ISBN: 978-1-137-30101-7
• No. of pages: 195
• Series: Language and Globalization; Language and Globalization
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics; Non-fiction book > Dictionaries, reference works > Foreign-language dictionaries; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); Migration, B, Cultural Studies, Sociolinguistics, Migration, immigration & emigration, Applied Linguistics, Historical & comparative linguistics, Latin America – Mexico, Central America, South America, Emigration and immigration, Latin American Culture, Ethnology—Latin America, Comparative Linguistics, Palgrave Language & Linguistics Collection, Historical and comparative linguistics, Human Migration