¿Habilidad o identidad?: tensiones entre las ideologías neoliberales y las raciolingüísticas en el trabajo de los y las jóvenes bilingües de origen latino en EEUU

Appendix

Ability or identity: tensions between neoliberal and raciolinguistic ideologies at work for young bilingual Latinxs in the US

1 Introduction

Within this special issue on how the co-naturalization of race and language impacts the sphere of work in the Americas, this article studies labor practices that affect bilingual young professionals of Latinx origin in New York City that make visible the tension between neoliberal language ideologies (Duchêne and Heller 2012) and raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa 2015). In particular, we examine the uneasy encounter between the trope that values languages as economic resources in the globalized world and the disdain for racialized people, whose language skills are often perceived as deficient or inadequate by the white listening subject.

What undergirds these tensions are enduring and intertwining historical processes. On the one hand, European colonization of the Americas and the consequent establishment of a slave economy on the continent was based on the discursive construction of racial differentiation and the subjugation of the Black African population and Indigenous communities^[4] (Allen 1994, 1997). On the other hand, the formation of liberal nation-states in a post-colonial world which, in the name of economic progress and the defense of territory and patriotic values, defined their national subjects on the basis of the exclusion and marginalization of Black, Indigenous and Mestizo populations as well as of migrants and displaced persons. These definitions were built upon forms of discrimination and racializing discourses, practices, and categories that were characteristic of colonial times. Another more recent historical process that is also key to our research is the contemporary advance of neoliberalism, marked by its reduction of public services (and consequent worsening of the living conditions of marginalized populations), its systematic attack on labor unions (which implies a reduced capacity to negotiate favorable work conditions), and its growing individualism (which normalizes competition and naturalizes social inequalities).

The material we use in this article was collected between 2017 and 2018 and is part of a qualitative research project conducted with students of Latinx origin who were attending college or had recently graduated, and who used Spanish in their jobs. The term “Latino/a” refers to an identity category that in the United States is constructed in relation to a common origin (Latin America), a shared experience of migration and belonging to the largest demographic minority in the country (and one of the most economically disadvantaged). It is also a cultural identity associated with certain cultural and linguistic practices (speaking Spanish or translingualism). This identity category has become ubiquitous in the daily experience of the population through media discourse or institutional processes such as census surveys. Despite the diversity of Latinx communities and the tensions that exist between groups of different national origins, the “Latinx” identity construct was mobilized in the country starting in the 1970s to forge an alliance across national origin that focused on achieving common social, political, and cultural objectives in the US (Gutiérrez 2013; Ricourt and Danta 2003).

In our first article analyzing this data corpus (Alonso and Villa 2020), we contrasted the experiences narrated by the people who participated in the study with the prevailing discourse of the economic value of bilingualism that in the United States, which has been gaining traction in recent years, both in the sphere of the business world (New American Economy 2017) and in the field of education (Callahan and Gándara 2014). Consistent with previous research on this topic (Alarcón et al. 2014; Chiswick and Miller 2016; Fry and Lowell 2003; Shin and Alba 2009; Subtirelu 2017; Villa and Villa 2005), we found that bilingual Latinas and Latinos did not, for the most part, obtain profitability from any of their language skills. We argue that, although their bilingualism was highly profitable and often exploited by their employers, their class position and racialized status resulted in a decapitalization of their language skills (Bourdieu 1977, 2002). It is worth noting the intersectionality of race and class here (Block 2015; Block and Corona 2016), since most of the Latinas and Latinos in our study who did not see their bilingualism rewarded were in low-paying jobs, primarily in the service sector.

Based on the conclusions of that work, in this article we delve into the analysis of some of the labor practices that illustrate the tension between neoliberal and raciolinguistic ideologies. To do so, we have taken up the same corpus and analyze how the participants discursively construct their labor practices. In the following sections we offer an overview of the role of language in neoliberalism (Section 2) and on raciolinguistic ideologies in the United States (Section 3). We then present our methodological approach (Section 4) and go on to examine two processes that visibly mark the tensions between, on the one hand, the conceptualization of linguistic knowledge as a value in the labor market, and on the other, the essentialization of the languages of racialized and working-class subjects. The first process is the corroboration of the Spanish language skills of Latino and Latina workers during the hiring process (Section 5.1). The second of the processes studied is the recurrent practice of assigning them extra tasks involving translation, interpretation, and bilingual communication (Section 5.2). We conclude that while neoliberalism emphasizes the economic value of languages, racialized working-class people do not benefit from this because linguistic authority and racial hierarchies remain unchallenged.

2 Language and neoliberalism

We situate our study in a context of expanding neoliberalism, which we understand as the current stage of global capitalism characterized, among other factors, by the deregulation of economic, social and labor policies; the free movement of capital and the tertiarization of the economy; and by the expansion of a market metaphor that dominates all areas of public and private life (Block 2018; Duchêne and Heller 2012; Harvey 2010; Martín Rojo and Del Percio 2019). However, the apparent abolition of borders (and nation states) in the globalized world fades when it comes to displaced populations migrating to richer countries (whether for political, economic reasons, or as a product of the environmental crisis). In this case, both the administrative obstacles to obtaining legal status in the receiving country and patriotic discourses that criminalize and discriminate against foreign and other racialized workers persist (and are even intensified). This hierarchization of people, also constitutive of previous stages of capitalism, is exploited by companies to cut wages, benefits and labor rights, as well as to pit workers against each other and thus undermine class solidarity.

The metaphor of the market has invaded all areas of our lives, both public and private, and the neoliberal logic and its associated vocabulary (investment, risk, experience, profitability, productivity, personal growth, entrepreneurship…) has permeated everything from our personal relationships to our conceptualization of time, from essential services (such as health and education) to our leisure. We perceive ourselves (and project ourselves) as subjects that embody the ideals of consumption and individualism that we assume as the pinnacle of our civilization’s progress. And, in the labor context, we assume a neoliberal responsibility by thinking of ourselves through a business logic as enterprising people whose success depends on our ability, on the wisdom of our investments (in education, in public image) and our decisions (which implies speculating and assuming risks in working life). Among these requirements an emphasis is placed on our expertise to promote ourselves (literally, to reify and sell ourselves) and to update ourselves (that is, to continue investing in training and in image for the benefit of the company) (Martín Rojo and Del Percio 2019). We present ourselves, then, as a “bundles of skills” (Urciuoli 2008) that can be evaluated and that have value in the labor market because they make us, in the eyes of those who employ us, more productive than the people with whom we compete to get or keep a job.

Linguistic knowledge becomes one such skill, which can be acquired on the basis of investment (of money and time), which can be measured, and which acquires great market value in the new global economy because languages not only generate direct and indirect profits (industries associated with language teaching and tourism, for example), but also facilitate commercial relations and open new market niches in minority language communities both locally and internationally (Duchêne and Del Percio 2014; Duchêne and Heller 2012; Heller 2010; Urciuoli and LaDousa 2013).

Languages are thus conceptualized as part of the labor power of people. This puts the responsibility on speakers to choose the languages they speak (and those they do not), to accumulate linguistic knowledge, to develop communicative competencies, and to invest in learning new languages (Dlaske et al. 2016; Duchêne 2016; Urciuoli 2016). Workers take on this responsibility to become, in short, self-made speakers (Martín Rojo 2019) hoping to capitalize on their investment: a stance consistent with the neoliberal discourse on the value of languages. However, linguistic knowledge, according to recent literature, is often not only unprofitable for speakers but also becomes the object of a new form of exploitation: unpaid or poorly paid linguistic work (Boutet 2012; Duchêne 2011; Mahili 2014).

3 Raciolinguistic ideologies in the US

The conceptualization of languages as resources that generate profit in the market prevails as a perspective today. That being said, this neoliberal take on language has not totally replaced previous linguistic ideologies that associate language to national identity (Duchêne and Heller 2012) and to the reification of races, both of which are a product of modernity and the colonial project (Veronelli 2015). The concept of raciolinguistic ideologies has been proposed by linguistic anthropologists in the US, precisely to refer to the co-naturalization between race and language that has resulted from the historical processes mentioned above (Rosa and Flores 2017: 623–627; Flores and Rosa 2015). This perspective seeks to reflect the process of iconization (Irvine and Gal 2000) through which a supposedly natural relationship is established between a way of speaking and a racial or ethnic category (Flores and Rosa 2015; Urciuoli 2022). It also further analyzes how the dominant ideological positioning of the listener (“white listening subject”) leads to negatively judging the linguistic practices of racialized people not by how they actually sound but by the ethno-racial position of the subjects who produce them (Rosa 2015: 108). This concept has been particularly illuminating in visualizing how language contributes to perpetuating racial hierarchies and unequal treatment of racialized people.

Based on this co-naturalization between language and race, Latinas and Latinos living in the United States are seen, in an essentialist way, as “Spanish speakers”, which implies an ideological erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000) not only of the fact that US Latinx communities are largely bilingual while many primarily use English, but also of the linguistic diversity of Latin America. This association has been strengthened by the country’s official classification processes, such as the Census, where the ethnic category “Hispanic or Latino” has traditionally been defined in connection to language as “person with origin in a Spanish-speaking country” (Leeman 2016: 373). Spanish is thus represented as a foreign element and a mark of ethnoracial otherness in the United States; a country whose identity is linked to English monolingualism in the variety used by white middle and upper class speakers (Pavlenko 2002; Ricento 2003; Urciuoli 1996, 2022).

This representation of the Spanish language and the intertwined racialization of the Latinx population are the result of historical dynamics (themselves complex and disintegrated) resulting from the incorporation of different territories with a Spanish-speaking population into the United States, as well as the US political intervention in various countries of the Americas. Among these processes are the annexation of a vast territory in the Southwest (the current states of California, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, among others) after the war with Mexico in 1848 (DuBord 2013; Fernández-Gibert 2013; Lozano 2018) and the annexation of the colonial territories of Puerto Rico and the Philippines after the war with Spain in 1898 (Lozano 2018; Urciuoli 1996).

The use of Spanish to classify Latinxs as “racial others” and to index racist stereotypes about them has been a historical constant and continues to be a regular occurrence. Attacking Spanish, or mocking it (Hill 1999), has become a veiled form of discrimination against Latinos and Latinas. Now that racist insults based on phenotype or other biological characteristics are socially frowned upon in the public sphere, language has come to function as a “smokescreen” for racial prejudices, resituating race in language (Urciuoli 1996; Zentella 2014). From institutional initiatives (such as Donald Trump’s closure of the Spanish version of the White House website [Mena 2020]), organized movements (such as English Only, which fights for the imposition of English as the official language of the US), as well as the repeated verbal and physical attacks suffered by Spanish speakers for using Spanish in public, there is a type of harassment that insists that English must be spoken in the United States and that relegates other languages only to the private space (Pavlenko 2002; Urciuoli 1996, 2022).

These processes of discrimination and perpetuation of inequality that arise as a result of raciolinguistic ideologies (and that, in turn, reproduce them) have consequences for speakers, both in terms of identity and psychologically (by generating feelings of inferiority [Martín Rojo 2020]), and materially (by hindering access to employment, housing or social mobility [Alonso and Villa 2020; Baugh 2003; Duchêne 2016]). Moreover, raciolinguistic hierarchies, which keep the racialized populations in a position of oppression and limit their possibilities of social mobility, remain invisible given their naturalization. This leads to the majority of the population not recognizing them as a political problem and as processes of discrimination and perpetuation of inequalities.

4 Methodology

Between September 2017 and May 2018, we conducted a qualitative study in New York with the objective of exploring how Latinas and Latinos respond to discourses about the economic profit of languages that is promoted by the business and educational world, and to what extent these discourses correspond to their reality at work. To this end, we designed a questionnaire focused on the use, valuation and economic compensation of Spanish at work. We recruited 18 young Latinos and Latinas from a previous project carried out at Queens College (CUNY) on heritage language education, inviting those who reported using Spanish at work to participate in the questionnaire. Following the completion and analysis of the results obtained from the questionnaire, we also prepared a semi-structured interview that we conducted with five additional people, representing a diverse range of work experiences and chosen from personal contacts. In total, 20 women and three men between the ages of 18 and 38 participated in this work. At the time of the study all were university students or recent graduates, most were in low-waged jobs they were doing while studying or entry-level jobs in their professional field; however, two participants were already in high-paying senior positions in international companies, and three others were in senior but low-paying positions (Table 1).

The purpose of these questionnaires and interviews was to hear firsthand their experiences of being bilingual in the US labor market. The semi-structured interviews especially were a privileged space to analyze how racialized and bilingual Latinx youth understand their position in the US labor market and manage hegemonic discourses. As social practices, interviews allow us to co-construct narratives between the person interviewing and the interviewee and give rise to expose the contradictions we all have as plural and heterogeneous subjects (Martín Criado 2014; Talmy 2010). In addition, experiential and first-person narratives allow the research to start from the lived and felt experiences of the community. With this, emotions (traditionally excluded from academic narratives in the Western tradition) are repositioned and recognized as embodied knowledge that is equally as valuable as empirical knowledge (Million 2009).

The data collected were then analyzed thematically around categories such as “language hierarchy”, “legitimization”, or “capitalization”. After a first study focused on the correlation between the neoliberal discourse of languages and the working conditions of the participants (Alonso and Villa 2020), this time we revised our data to explore in greater depth the tension between this neoliberal discourse of the economic value of languages and the raciolinguistic processes that affect Latinx communities in the US. From its initial conception, we have approached this research as a pilot project that may encourage other researchers to continue exploring these tensions beyond the limits of our corpus.

5 Tensions between raciolinguistic and neoliberal ideologies

In this section, we analyze how neoliberal and raciolinguistic ideologies (presented in Sections 2 and 3 of this article) intersect in the employment context of the young Latinas and Latinos who participated in our study. First, we examine the corroboration of workers’ Spanish language skills during the hiring process (Section 5.1), asking whether their language knowledge is seen as a professional skill that requires verification and deserves compensation. Then, we study the recurrent practice of assigning Latinas and Latinos extra tasks of translation, interpretation and bilingual communication (Section 5.2), arguing that these instances that highlight how, instead of being a profitable and beneficial resource for workers, their knowledge of Spanish places them in the position of having to accept uncompensated and unpaid tasks.

6 Conclusion

In the previous section, we analyzed the process of evaluating language knowledge in job interviews and the practices of linguistic exploitation experienced by the participants in our study. These cases show how the tension between neoliberal language ideologies and raciolinguistic ideologies plays out in the US work environment. Neoliberal ideologies insistently promote the economic value of languages in the globalized world, moving workers to conceptualize linguistic knowledge as part of their professional skill set (Urciuoli 2008). Raciolinguistic ideologies are grounded on an essentialist view of the languages of racialized subjects whose linguistic skills are not perceived as personal and academic merits, but instead as an inalienable part of their identity (Alonso 2020; Flores and Rosa 2015; Rosa and Flores 2017).

The experiences of the young workers that we have presented show that their linguistic knowledge, so profitable for companies, is not seen as a professional skill that requires formal verification and deserves economic compensation, but as an identity attribute that they simply possess because they are of Latinx origin. Thus, we found that their bilingualism is rarely verified during job interviews or that, when it is, the evaluation takes an informal and spontaneous manner, even in positions where writing, and not just oral communication, has a central role (as in Adriana’s case, for example). Similarly, we also explained that the participants in the study do not receive financial compensation, although they all make use of their language skills on a regular basis, even performing extra tasks that are not remunerated (as Maia, Manuela and Magaly explained). The two processes analyzed (the absence of a formal evaluation of the workers’ language skills, and the practices of exploitation through assignment of extra work due to their bilingualism) account for an essentialization that justifies the lack of compensation. In Monica Heller’s (2011) words: “Some workplaces continue to treat [language] as a talent people just happen to have; handling it this way makes it possible to avoid paying for it” (p. 166).

The examples analyzed above show that neoliberal and raciolinguistic ideologies are mobilized at different times and in different ways, but always in the interests of the most privileged groups. Rosa (2018) also accounts for this tension when presenting the case of a young bilingual Latina who was studying on a minority scholarship at a private university where, while failing Spanish, was hired to promote the institution to other Latinx families. In other words, the same language ability that the university considered incorrect in the Spanish class was very much appropriate and profitable in the institution’s search for prospective students. Similarly, Baugh (2003: 156–160) shows how raciolinguistic ideologies are activated in different ways but always affecting racialized populations. In his research, several judges validated as convicting evidence the alleged ability of a witness to aurally identify the race of the defendant, thereby perpetuating the racial inequalities embedded in the American prison system. In contrast, a group of real estate entrepreneurs accused of discriminating against racialized people who, after initial phone calls, were prevented access to housing, argued in their defense that the ability to aurally identify someone’s race was impossible.

Our participants’ narratives showed that the companies also take advantage of a view of language as an element that connects workers to the Latinx community. From this perspective on language, a discourse of community responsibility is constructed. Accordingly, tasks such as translation and interpretation are seen as a form of help to those members of the community who, because of their lack of English proficiency and their class positioning, are in a more vulnerable situation. This common practice usually carries with it positive feelings of satisfaction for the assistance offered, but it also conceals the structural material inequalities that affect workers. The emphasis on the social and affective aspects of linguistic interaction that underlie the discourse on community responsibility moves away from the instrumentalization of languages under neoliberalism, that is, from the representation of language as a skill with market value. At the same time, it engages neoliberal discourse on pleasure and self-fulfillment through work. In any case, this conceptualization of the bilingual as a mediator with the Spanish-speaking community again plays in favor of the companies, since it naturalizes the linguistic exploitation of the workers who, far from resisting or demanding compensation for their bilingual skills, gladly consent to help other people in their community in this way.

The scenario we have presented in this article places young Latinas and Latinos at a difficult crossroads: embodying the neoliberal subject, reproducing the discourse on the value of bilingualism and developing a technical and professional linguistic knowledge, while also maintaining and using Spanish as an identity marker and as an element of connection with the Latinx community. It seems to us that the key to overcoming this apparent contradiction, thus resisting linguistic exploitation and its naturalization in US society, is to promote a critical view of how both discourses underpin the practices and views of the Latinx community that emerge in the experiences narrated by this study’s participants. On the one hand, this requires an approach that questions the essentialization of identity attributes (in particular, language and race), the hierarchical structures that perpetuate inequality based on this essentialization (with racialized subjects in the lowest social spectrum) and the discourses that reproduce it (ultimately linked to the constitution of a national and colonial subject). On the other hand, this invites a critical exploration of the discourse on language as an economic resource and on the value of bilingualism – so prevalent nowadays – that at least considers the conditions under which languages acquire (or do not acquire) an economic value under neoliberalism and that, far from accepting the autonomy of the market, problematizes the current conditions by linking them to structural inequalities resulting from the long history of class discrimination of racialized populations.