The Community, the Individual

An explosion of Mexican immigration^9.1began in this century with the exodus of refugees from the Mexican Revolution (1910) and the linkage of Mexican railroads to the U.S.(Santa Ana, 1991). The Hispanic population is one of the largest and fastest-growing ethnic groups in America. In the Los Angeles area alone, they form 40% of the population (roughly 1.4 out of 3.5 million, in the 1990 Census). The result of this migration, and the segregated social conditions the immigrants found in California, is an ethnic community that is only partly assimilated to the matrix ``Anglo'' (that is, European-American) community. It retains symbolic links with Hispanic culture (as well as real links through continuing immigration), but linguistically is mostly an English-speaking rather than a Spanish-speaking community, though its members have a distinctive accent. The phonological inventory appears to be identical to that of the local Anglo community. For example, the long and short vowels (/i:/ vs. //, /u:/ vs. //, etc.^9.2) are clearly distinguished, as are the relatively rare English vowel classes /æ/ and //^9.3 (for confirming evidence, see Figure ). Speculatively, it seems that the main differences between the Chicano accent and the local Anglo accent are first, that the Chicanos are not participating in the ongoing phonetic changes in the Anglo communities (the raising of /æ/); and second, that there are distinctively Chicano elements in the prosodic system. Santa Ana (1991) discusses phonetic variation across the Chicano community.

The sole subject of this chapter's phonetic investigation of the Los Angeles Chicano English dialect (henceforth LACE) is a 30-year-old working class Chicano male who we will call Vince. While Vince claims to have spoken Spanish natively as a child, and may have some passive Spanish competence, he is now a monolingual speaker of English. Santa Ana observes that he cannot speak even a few words or phrases of Spanish, though Spanish does carry considerable symbolic significance for him. Vince's mother is a native English speaker, as was her father (according to his statements), so he is a third-generation English-speaking American.^9.4

This reiterates the point that the Chicano community is not, as may be naively supposed, a Spanish-speaking community of second-language English learners. While immigration of Spanish speakers from Latin America continues unabated, the great majority of the children of immigrants in the barrios (Chicano neighborhoods) of the Los Angeles area are monolinguals, including Vince and his age-cohort. Thus Vince grew up a native speaker among native speakers.

Vince lived in East Los Angeles until the age of six, and afterwards in South San Gabriel, a town even farther to the east. The typical pattern of settlement for Mexican immigrants is to initially live in a ``port of entry'', such as East Los Angeles. Mexicans and Chicanos find it preferable to maintain frequent (daily, or at minimum weekly) contact with kin. Since nearby housing enables more frequent contacts, the most desirable place to live is next door to one's parents. This preference for close familial ties, in addition to limited housing opportunities,^9.5and the constant influx of new immigrants results in a very crowded housing situation, since there are only so many places close to the ports of entry. When children of immigrants grow up, then, they look for the nearest available housing -- which is no longer in crowded East L.A. Instead they move, typically towards the east (away from the ocean, into less crowded and less expensive housing areas), to nearby towns where housing is available. Thus the lower-working-class neighborhood where Vince was raised is not coincidentally in the town of South San Gabriel, a few miles east of East Los Angeles. This migration pattern is continuing, as the area gets increasingly crowded, with people moving as far as Riverside (50 miles away) or Antelope Valley (70 miles away). Vince grew up in a neighborhood in South San Gabriel that was a mixed Anglo and Chicano area in his youth, but which has gradually lost whites and gained Hispanics (as well as Asians) over the last 15 years.

Vince is a respected member of the social group to which he belongs, a circle of Chicano friends and associates that live in the same neighborhood. He is married, with children, and is settled in the community. This speaker was chosen as a core member of the English-speaking Chicano speech community, which in a single family has resided for generations in Southern California. The interview is one of a corpus of 150 interviews done by my colleague, Otto Santa Ana, as part of his dissertation research on the Los Angeles Chicano speech community.^9.6 See also the description of Vince in Santa Ana (1991, Chapter 5).