Heritage language socialization at work: Spanish in Miami

4.1 Alex and Elena: asset value

Born and raised in Miami by his Nicaraguan mother and Cuban father, 27-year-old Alex had always spoken Spanish at home. Because he was an only child and his parents knew little English, Spanish was the sole language of his home environment. Like almost all second-generation Spanish speakers in Miami, however, English quickly became his dominant language during elementary school. He characterized his middle-school years as bilingual and affirmed that by the time he reached high school, he spoke mostly English with his friends: “it was obvious that my Spanish got worse over the years”. Despite the fact that nearly everyone who attended his high school in Hialeah spoke Spanish,^[5] Alex explained that the use of English served to mark an important sociocultural divide between recently arrived immigrants, whom local teenagers sometimes call ‘refs’ (short for ‘refugees’) and those whose families had been in Miami longer:

The refs were ESOL kids.^[6] They were maybe bullied sometimes and kind of looked down upon. They were definitely isolated in their own groups […]. For the most part, people didn’t cross lines. Of course, it wasn’t really because we couldn’t communicate with them. Like 90% of us spoke Spanish well, and we’d talk to them sometimes, so it was more of a cultural thing – the way they dressed and the way they acted […]. They just didn’t act like the rest of us. We all spoke English – or mostly English to each other, and they always spoke Spanish to each other. Some of them really struggled with English, others just didn’t really try, I think, and so we looked down on them. It wasn’t because of their race or where they were from or anything like that, I mean, we were all Cuban or Nicaraguan or Colombian or whatever. They came from the same place we did. We’re all Hispanic and we all speak Spanish. But they don’t really speak English. Now, when they’d learn English after a couple of years or whatever – most of them, then they’d transition into being more like everybody else, like normal. (Lynch 2022: 139)

Asked about the use of Spanish beyond the school setting, however, Alex commented that Spanish was very much a normal part of his life. His observations confirm the particularity of the educational domain versus other spheres of daily life in Miami: school is really the only context in which Spanish is unabashedly marginalized. Despite these reported social divisions along lines of language choice at school, the vast majority of Miami high school students whom I surveyed in a previous study agreed with the statements that “Spanish is necessary to be truly successful in Miami” and “Spanish is necessary for a good job in Miami” (Lynch 2022: 134). Indeed, Alex affirmed that although teenagers might perceive Spanish as a liability of sorts at school, young adults in Miami recognize that bilingual ability is an asset for most jobs in the city. In his current job as a telephone sales representative for a real estate company that assists potential buyers with locating agents and navigating the loan process, he reported using Spanish frequently. Although his hourly wage was the same as that of some co-workers who only spoke English with customers, he emphatically affirmed that his bilingual ability had given him an advantage:

It really has put me ahead of the curve in terms of sales, just because I can take more calls and convince more people to pursue their goal to buy a property. And, you know, I get a commission on each one of those, so it’s just sheer volume. If it’s a call from someone who doesn’t speak English, that’s a customer I would just lose if I didn’t speak Spanish. The fact that I’m able to do calls in Spanish has made me more valuable to the company.^[7]

Because the company Alex worked for did not have a separate line for calls in Spanish, he always began with a standard greeting in English. He explained how some calls would then turn into Spanish-language interactions:

If I hear an accent or notice a struggle to speak, I’ll switch into Spanish. And I’d say that like 90% of the time they’re thankful for that. I notice sometimes they kind of warm up when I switch to Spanish. Their personality comes out. And there are times when I switch to Spanish and they say they appreciate it, but then they tell me they would prefer to continue in English because they want to practice. That’s not usually the case, though. Other customers will just go back and forth once they know I’m bilingual.^[8]

Alex explained that his company had no policy regarding language use nor any formal guideline about switching to Spanish – or back to English – with customers:

We just go with the flow and play it by ear. We have a script for the calls but it’s only in English, so for Spanish we’re just translating it in our own way. The English calls are more uniform than the Spanish calls precisely because of that. When I started at this company I didn’t know much about real estate or loans in Spanish – the terminology, I mean. There are words that as a Spanish speaker in Miami I would never use, like the word for realtor in Spanish. Before this job, I just said [reálto], and I know that’s Spanglish. So, I’ve learned all kinds of vocabulary, like red de referencias or hipotecario. The improvement has been specific to my industry, but it’s improvement nonetheless, and the practice means my fluency has improved, just because I’m speaking it more frequently now. Because of work, a greater percentage of my day is spent speaking Spanish.

Alex explained that one of his co-workers, whose desk is located directly beside his, had been instrumental to his linguistic improvement: “I’d be on a call and my co-worker would hear me trip up on words or say something wrong, and she’d just come whisper a word in my ear or turn and correct me. Her Spanish is much better than mine, and she’s been super helpful”.

That co-worker, Elena, is also a second-generation speaker of Spanish of Cuban background. Born and raised in New York City, Elena’s childhood experience with bilingualism was asymmetrical, i.e. her mother and grandmother spoke to her in Spanish and she spoke to them in English. Despite her ability to understand Spanish, she only spoke English until age 13. When she began to study Spanish in middle and high school, she started speaking the language more and then continued taking Spanish courses in college. She told me that, as a young adult, she realized she was “good at Spanish” and began to write poetry in Spanish (cf. Callahan 2010). As an elementary school teacher in New York City for seven years, she taught ESOL students. Afterwards, she moved to Miami and entered the real estate business; she had been a realtor for more than 30 years. Now in her sixties, Elena’s greater proficiency in Spanish in comparison with Alex – as he affirmed above – could thus be attributed to the many years that she had spent working in Miami. After all, Alex had always spoken Spanish growing up, and did not learn English until he entered elementary school; Elena had not begun to speak Spanish actively until her teenage years. Elena stated that her son had followed a similar trajectory, having spoken mostly English until after high school, when he joined the police force. She observed: “As an officer, he pretty much had to start speaking it more, and now that he’s a lieutenant, it means he’s better at his job. It obviously gives him more credibility and authority because we live in a bilingual city”.

Like Alex, Elena asserted without hesitation that her ability to speak Spanish had benefitted her economically. She estimated using Spanish with 70–80% of her clients as a part-time realtor, which occupied her time beyond the hours at the company where she worked with Alex. Unlike Alex, she stated that she did not have any difficulties expressing herself in Spanish for workplace purposes, given her lifelong experience in the real estate and home sales industry in Miami. She remarked that because Spanish-speaking customers “require more handholding than English-speaking ones” as they navigate the market and the process of buying a home in the U.S., she had gone about developing a stylistically careful and discursively extensive linguistic repertoire specific to the job in Spanish: “Spanish was always necessary for my work in South Florida. Not just being able to speak it but speak it well, and also read and write it. That’s been a huge asset to my career”.

These two second-generation speakers thus evidence the outcome of Spanish language socialization in the workplace in their relationship to each other, with Alex as newcomer and Elena as old-timer in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) terms. Because of the relationship that had developed between them on sociolinguistic grounds, despite their nearly forty-year age difference, they had become friends. “We almost always speak to each other in English, though”, Alex said, “unless it’s something about work or about some customer. Then we’ll speak Spanish”.

4.2 Felipe: all about anatomy

Different than Alex and Elena, Felipe did not speak much Spanish with his parents. Because Felipe’s mother was born in New Jersey to Cuban immigrant parents and his father had arrived in Miami from Cuba at the age of 2, the predominant language at home with them was English; Spanish input came principally through his grandparents. His parents were nonetheless adamant about his learning the language:

My parents tried with us. They really did. They even tried this odd thing where they forced us to speak in Spanish, but it didn’t stick. And it was actually because my grades in Spanish class were really bad. The only ‘D’ that I’ve ever received on a report card in my life was in Spanish.^[9] And my dad was furious about it – furious to the point that I came back with a B+ the following semester. That was kind of the turning point for me in understanding the importance of Spanish.

Felipe continued studying Spanish through high school but stated that he never spoke it with friends for the same reason that Alex explained:

Anybody who was primarily a Spanish speaker or was struggling with English, we’d call them ‘refs’ or we’d say that they ‘just got off the boat’ […] so that was definitely a point of divide among people, for sure. And you did not want to be referred to as a ‘ref’ […]. That was the sentiment in high school about being a Spanish speaker.^[10]

It was not until his college years as a theater major that he began to perceive the benefit of being bilingual. Afterwards, when he took an acting job with a regional theater company in the U.S. Midwest, his bilingual ability seemed to bring him more roles during a time when, according to him, there was a push for Hispanic diversity in the industry, referring to the 2000s:

It was the first time in my life that I felt the minority thing, not being in Miami, but it was kind of empowering. Spanish was definitely a plus […]. I think that was kind of the point when I started to lean into that part of myself with a greater understanding of how all my experiences with the Spanish language had led me there.

This perceived advantage of speaking Spanish was heightened after Felipe returned to Miami and began to work as a personal fitness trainer. Now at age 36, Felipe reflected upon the impetus for developing stronger Spanish language skills at that time, in his 20s: “In Miami, it’s like anybody can do it [i.e. speak Spanish], and I also think it’s the only place in the United States where you can kind of demand to speak only Spanish. That served me a great deal when I became a personal trainer, because there were a lot of clients who wanted sessions in Spanish. What set me apart when I first started was that I was the cheapest trainer, but I was also one of the few that could speak about anatomy in fluent Spanish”. Just as Alex described how he had developed a fluent repertoire of speaking about real estate and the financial lending process in Spanish, Felipe explained that he cultivated a full inventory of anatomical vocabulary in the language, in addition to pragmatic-discourse skills relative to command forms and bodily movements. With a morning block of training sessions all in Spanish during his first three years working at an upscale fitness center in Coral Gables – one of the wealthiest areas of Miami (see Table 1), Felipe’s linguistic finesse proved to be lucrative: “That was like a hundred sessions per month, all done in Spanish, in addition to another hundred or so that I did in English, so that ended up putting me among the top trainers in the company […]. I recognize that being bilingual allowed me to find a niche in a new career and, financially, turn my life around in those three years […]. I went from ‘I don’t want to be a ref’ when I was in high school to ‘no, I speak it, I own it, and it makes me money’ a few years later”.

Starting out as a personal fitness trainer in his mid 20s, Felipe committed himself to learning about anatomy in Spanish, because he wanted to sound more professional with his clients:

I needed to appear like I knew what I was talking about, so for example, you have “hamstring.” Hmmm, I’m not gonna say [xanstríŋ], and I’m sure as hell not gonna say hilo de jamón. So, I literally started looking up all this vocabulary and memorizing: it’s músculo isquiotibial. I thought, these people are paying $140 per session, and I need to knock those Spanish sessions out of the park […]. I got really good at names of muscles, but I was not so great at joints. I knew hombro and codo and rodilla, but then I might not remember muñeca or tobillo or something like that, so I would just ask the client, and I would learn the words from them. But the funny thing was that I had taught myself all those terms for muscles in Spanish that even they didn’t know. I would say el músculo isquiotibial, and they would say, “¿el qué?” [the what?] So, I would show them a diagram and teach them those words, and they were impressed that I knew all that.

Felipe explained that he was mostly unable to rely on fellow trainers in linguistic terms because of the face-to-face nature of the work and the fact that there was usually substantial background noise in the facility (i.e. weights, music, people talking), so he could not hear their dialogues with other clients nor could he easily ask them for help.

However, Felipe recounted learning a series of essential command forms and specialized discourse from a Colombian co-worker who was an expert in a mobility practice called “Animal Flow”. That co-worker was the head trainer for Animal Flow throughout South America. Learning the language of the practice in Spanish, Felipe was surprised by the many Anglicisms that were considered normative from a monolingual South American perspective: “I’ve found it funny that they’re using and understanding all these English words just with a Spanish accent. They don’t call Animal Flow anything special. It’s just like [ánimalflo] with a Spanish pronunciation, which to me is very funny, but I’m like okay, whatever, you guys made it up. I’m not gonna question it”. Felipe’s reaction echoes a tendency that I have previously documented among bilinguals in Miami: second- and third-generation English-dominant bilinguals deem English-origin loanwords as unacceptable or incorrect significantly more than their Spanish monolingual or near-monolingual counterparts (Lynch 2017, 2022) – a pattern already noted by Otheguy and García (1988) among Miami Cubans during the 1980s. This tendency is owed to the general appeal and social cachet of English-origin words in the speech of middle- and upper-class Latin Americans versus the social stigmatization of those same words in the speech of U.S. Latinx bilinguals (Lynch 2022). Felipe affirmed that he felt highly reluctant to borrow words from English in his training sessions and felt odd about having to say terms like [ánimalflo] in Spanish, even when his clients received them positively and used them also.

Moreover, Felipe pointed out what he regarded as a general cultural difference between his Spanish-speaking and English-speaking clients, which he characterized in terms of their motivations and desired outcomes. He remarked that discovering and understanding these two rather different cultural codes, in his terms, had helped him become a more effective trainer. He explained the codes as, on one hand, more aesthetically oriented for Spanish speakers and, on the other hand, more physiologically oriented for English speakers: “I think Latin American culture in terms of the gym is far more concerned with the look and the body and the aesthetic aspect of things. When I’m working with English speakers, and I also mean like Hispanics from Miami, they’re oftentimes more concerned like with their longevity, or dealing with shoulder pain or something like that. I feel like I have to take a more clinical approach with the English speakers than I do with the Spanish speakers”. Felipe explained that this differential orientation affected his discursive delivery in the two languages. He recalled that, with one of his first Spanish-speaking clients, he realized how emphasizing the effect on her appearance would boost her motivation the most: “I remember I would say to her Faja, faja para que no necesites faja (‘Fight, fight so you won’t need a girdle’),^[11] and that would really get her moving. She thought it was hilarious”. Felipe affirmed that he typically did not say such playful things to English speakers, because he felt like they would be offended. “Although the English speakers are surely thinking those things, too, it’s not what they want to hear from their trainer. You don’t comment on their appearance”, he said. “I feel like for people in Spanish, it’s usually about not sounding so clinical and having a little more fun with the delivery, because they respond to that better”.

4.3 Cristina: corporate culture

Cristina was born in Guatemala City to a Puerto Rican father and Spanish mother. When she was 5 years old, her father’s work required that they move from Guatemala to Miami; from there, they moved to Puerto Rico when she was 7; a year later they went to Mexico City, and then returned to Guatemala City. When she was 16, the family returned to Florida, where she had lived ever since. Although she had lived in various Spanish-speaking countries – Guatemala being her favorite – and despite speaking only Spanish with her parents and older siblings, English had been the language of literacy and formal education for her because she had always attended American schools everywhere she had lived. She regarded English as her dominant language, not only in terms of control but also frequency of use; she explained that she typically “processed things” in English. Cristina characterized her mother as “the enforcer of proper Spanish” as she grew up: “I’ve always translated things from English in my head because I think in English. When I would say them in Spanish, my mom would correct me”.

Cristina explained that although her comfort level in Spanish depended upon the topic at hand, she was always confident and articulate about work-related topics, because work was a realm of discourse that she had developed over the years. Now 38 years old, Cristina had been working for a multinational corporate chain of coffeeshops since her college years, when she took a part-time job as a barista. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture, she continued in that job while she worked to establish herself as an interior designer. Although steady work in her chosen field proved hard to find, work at the coffeeshop chain presented ongoing pay raises and promotions: she was soon asked to be a shift supervisor, then later an assistant manager, then store manager, and finally a district manager for the company. She ultimately gave up on trying to make a living as an interior designer in Miami’s highly competitive market when she realized, a few years later, that her salary and benefits as a manager at the coffeeshop were more than what most firms were offering.

Having worked for the company at various stores throughout Miami, some of them in predominantly Spanish-speaking areas, she had acquired what she considered to be a multi-dialectal repertoire in Spanish for all things related to her workplace. She remarked:

Before leveraging it at work, my Spanish was limited to family interactions. Once I started working in stores where the customer base was more in Spanish than English, I had to hone my work-specific Spanish craft. Because we get customers from all over Latin America, I started learning a lot of vocabulary used in particular countries. So, like a straw: for Cubans, it’s an absorbente; Argentines say sorbete; Mexicans say popote; in Guatemala, they say pajilla and of course in Spain, it’s pajita. I wanted to make sure that whatever word I was using was the right word for them, meaning they would not only understand me but also not be potentially offended. If you want to have happy customers, you can’t create a negative moment out of pure miscommunication. So, a lot of it was just figuring out different ways to speak about products in different dialects of my customer base.

Cristina explained that speaking about the products had proven more challenging – and more consequential for her Spanish language ability – than learning dialect differences. In a city with a vast Hispanic majority, half of whom are Cuban-origin, local coffee culture does not easily translate to the products of mainstream US corporate coffee culture, especially with names or terms that are specific to the company: “The names of drink sizes cause confusion, as do types of drinks. People will come in and order a cortadito, because they’re used to getting the Cuban window coffee.^[12] We don’t have that, so we have to translate that into the most similar thing we have. A café con leche in most Cuban restaurants is made with condensed milk, which is why it’s so sweet. Again, we don’t have that, so we have to describe for them the most similar thing we can make. It’s figuring out how to accommodate their request and explain it to them in a way they’ll understand and in a dialect of Spanish they speak”. Because of Cristina’s expertise, or craft as she called it, the company made her a trainer for marketing and sales teams sent from Latin America to Miami for product training. That aspect of her work drove acquisition of more formal registers of the language, according to her:

That’s the sort of conversational Spanish that was for me the hardest to keep going. I think that was the big moment for me with Spanish. I can have a conversation with anyone in my family just fine, but these are conversations where I have to talk technically and talk about materials. So, at first it was clunky, because I could carry on the conversation, but I didn’t know many technical words or phrases for things in Spanish […]. Getting in front of groups of people, sometimes bigger groups of like fifty people, I had to be prepared to have that kind of conversation, which also involves written Spanish.

When asked if she thought that her Spanish language ability had benefitted her professionally, she emphasized that it had been a workplace asset, just as Alex and Felipe did. She remarked that, because of the pervasiveness of bilingualism in Miami, she sometimes had to remind herself of the value of Spanish:

Because we live in Miami, Spanish just seems like a given, so we tend to forget that it’s an asset. When I’ve looked for different positions within the company elsewhere in the U.S., sometimes I forget to even put language skills on my resume, just because pretty much everyone here speaks Spanish and English to some degree. A lot of mentors were looking at my resume and asking, “Why don’t you put that?” But in my head that was just a given.

In light of the language skills that she had acquired in her job, Cristina commented that she considered the possibility of moving to Latin America: “If an opportunity in the company comes up in Guatemala, I’m there”. In the meantime, her expertise continued to be tapped in Miami. Three weeks after her interview with me, she was charged with overseeing the opening of the company’s first store with a walk-up coffee window, modeled on the local Latin American concept found across the city. Thus, viewed in terms of social trajectory, Cristina’s experiences reflect the tension highlighted by Roberts (2010: 214) between corporate discourses or regimes, on one hand, and personal or creative dimensions of workplace language use on the other, i.e. “the gradual process of becoming a full participant in the workplace where there is not only one overarching community of practice but also multiple local communities depending on the particular sites of engagement that employees are subject to or contribute to creating”.

4.4 Diego: not a necessity

Born and raised in Miami, 23-year-old Diego stated that he did not speak much Spanish until he moved in with his grandparents at the age of 11. Although he understood conversational Spanish as a small child, he did not begin to speak it actively until his teenage years while living with his grandparents. He affirmed that he felt very comfortable speaking Spanish with most people and emphasized the importance of Spanish in his everyday life in Miami. He studied Spanish in elementary school but later opted for other languages in middle and high school: “I was already dealing with Spanish at home, so I had the best practice you can get there. I felt tired of Spanish and wanted to learn something new”. He chose to study Italian, inspired by the Italian origin of his Cuban family surname. Like Cristina and Felipe, he emphasized that “Spanish is just a given in Miami. Pretty much everyone speaks it”. But unlike the previous individuals, Diego had not found himself in the position of speaking much Spanish in the workplace.

In his current job as a service technician for a large automobile dealership, he reported using very little Spanish. Although several of his co-workers were primarily Spanish speakers, he attributed the pattern of speaking mostly English with them to the fact that the industry-specific technical terms used at the facility were in English, and the manuals and online resources that everyone consulted for repairs were in English. According to Diego, then, although some of his co-workers spoke Spanish, he had no need to learn the terminology in Spanish nor speak to anyone in Spanish, especially since he never interacted with customers. In two of his previous jobs, he had spoken Spanish to some extent. As a delivery driver for a major U.S. shipping and receiving company, he often had to communicate with customers and co-workers in Spanish and, thus, found himself learning words with which he was unfamiliar: “Sometimes there were customers who didn’t speak English, and there was one co-worker who pretty much didn’t know any English, so the only way I could communicate with him was in Spanish. And sometimes he would use words that I didn’t know – not technical or work-related words but just like in conversation”. Diego also reported working for the U.S. Census in 2020, going door to door in areas of Miami where most people did not know much English. In that capacity, he learned some question-specific terminology but considered that he already knew the language used in the Census, e.g. household, income, residence, etc. “We had a script we would follow in English, but the questions were all simple, so it was easy for me to translate. I never needed to look words up or anything”.

Diego nonetheless affirmed that he had difficulties speaking Spanish at times, even at home with his grandparents. “Ironically, one example was trying to describe a problem that I had with my truck. I know how to describe it perfectly in English but translating it all to Spanish in a fluent way was difficult. It wasn’t like the simple types of conversation that I usually have with them”. Diego’s comments about the importance of Spanish in Miami seemed rather disconnected from his own personal account of using it – and even attempting to use it – with people at work. Although he indicated having opportunities to speak it with coworkers, he rarely did so. “Diego is like really American”, said Alex, who had been friends with Diego since they worked together on a local political campaign in Hialeah the previous year. The apparent contradiction between overtly positive attitudes toward Spanish on one hand, and not actively speaking the language despite opportunities to do so, on the other hand, is commonly attested among U.S. heritage speakers (Silva-Corvalán and Enrique-Arias 2017: 95–97). Data of my recent survey study of Miami Latinx high school students revealed that despite highly positive attitudes toward Spanish, English was by far the dominant language of interaction among siblings and peers, as well as in mass media consumption (Lynch 2022). Diego asserted that: “Spanish is one of the skills you need to have if you live in Miami. Knowing both languages is a key skill. It helps you get a job and communicate with so many people here who don’t know English at all or just prefer to speak Spanish. If you want to speak only Spanish here, you can do it”. At a later point in the interview, however, when asked if he might study Spanish formally in the future, he explained: “I already have a lot of access to Spanish. And I’ve seen the extent of the necessity of Spanish, and it’s not enough to warrant any more studying. If something is that important, they’re gonna have a translation for it or someone at work is gonna know. Everyone here knows both languages, so I just ask”.