Despite the rich societal multilingualism of the United States, the ideological construction of English dominance continues to cast a shadow over other languages. Among the mechanisms that contribute to this state of affairs (e.g. educational policy and conservative language activism), visual language use in public spaces plays a salient role. A growing body of linguistic landscape research highlights the centrality of visual environments in the discursive construction of multilingual settings. Drawing upon nexus analysis together with principles of geosemiotics, the present study explores the discursive processes through which a particular image of San Antonio’s linguistic sense of place, one of English dominance despite its demographic bilingualism, is constructed. Visual data were collected on San Antonio’s highway system, an extensive network that traverses the city and is lined with billboard signs and commercial establishments. Data analysis shows that a confluence of (trans)national, cultural and economic discourses mediates language choices on signs. English is normalized as an unmarked language for all aspects of the linguistic landscape, reproducing national language ideologies about the status of English in the United States. Spanish, in turn, is associated with transnational migration as well as limited community and family domains.

Drive-thru linguistic landscaping: Constructing a linguistically dominant place in a bilingual space

By the 1920s, anti-Mexican campaigns in the United States had become a major liability for US interests in the Americas, as rival imperial powers attempted to exploit growing anti-American sentiments in Mexico and Latin America against American imperialism. The U.S. State Department sought to curtail animosity in Latin America by contesting discriminatory domestic practices that angered elite Mexicans and Mexican-American leaders who identified as white. After blocking eastern and southern European and Japanese immigration in the 1924 National Origins Act, the eugenics movement turned its attention to excluding Mexicans from entering the US. When legislative attempts at restriction failed because they conflicted with national and international commercial interests, non-legislative avenues were sought, including the Census and the courts. The 1930 Census was the only census that categorized Mexicans as a separate “race.” In the context of a changing racial formation in the United States, this unique category was reversed in 1936 due to Mexican-American leaders leveraging the fragility of the “Good Neighbor Policy” to force the Federal government into action.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/msem.2011.27.2.325.pdf

Debated Whiteness amid World Events: Mexican and Mexican American Subjectivity and the U.S.' Relationship with the Americas, 1924–1936

Recent scholarship on Mexican Americans in the United States, relying largely on qualitative evidence, sees racism and exploitation as the major explanatory factors in their history. Using representative samples of persons of Mexican origin, we argue that immigration is fundamental to their historical experience. A small, beleaguered community in 1850, the Mexican-origin population grew during the late nineteenth century due to greater security under US jurisdiction. However, immigration between 1900 and 1930 created a Southwest broadly identified with persons of Mexican origin. Economic development in Mexico, restriction of European immigration to the United States, and extreme cross-border wage differentials prompted extensive emigration. Despite low human capital, circular migration, and discrimination, immigrant Mexicans earned substantially higher wages than workers in Mexico or native-born Hispanics in the United States. They followed typical immigrant paths toward urban areas with high wages. Prior to 1930, their marked tendency to repatriate was not “constructed” or compelled by the state or employers, but fit a conventional immigrant strategy. During the Depression, many persons of Mexican origin migrated to Mexico; some were deported or coerced, but others followed this well-established repatriation strategy. The remaining Mexican-origin population, increasingly native born, enjoyed extraordinary socioeconomic gains in the 1940s; upward mobility, their family forms, and rising political activity resembled those of previous immigrant-origin communities. In the same decade, however, the Bracero Program prompted mass illegal immigration and mass deportation, a pattern replicated throughout the late twentieth century. These conditions repeatedly replenished ethnicity and reignited nativism, presenting a challenge not faced by any other immigrant group in US history.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S014555321500070X

An Immigrant's Tale: The Mexican American Southwest 1850 to 1950

Access to public spaces played an important role in constructing and defining racial boundaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1883, San Antonio’s Mexican American elites protested an order permanently barring them from using the dance pavilion in San Pedro Springs Park, resulting in the public censure of the park manager who gave the order and affirmations of Tejano elites’ right to equal access to public spaces. The author analyzes this historical case to show the importance of the race-class intersection, specifically racialized class identities, as a resource in racial boundary shifting: the movement of racial boundaries across people. Public exchanges in the “San Pedro Park incident” either challenged or defended Mexican Americans’ equal access to a white public space by drawing on competing racial narratives about their fitness for middle-class identity. The author argues that analyses of racial boundary shifting must give careful consideration to how social actors use understandings of class to...

“We Have in This City Many Good Mexican Citizens” The Race-class Intersection and Racial Boundary Shifting in Late Nineteenth-century San Antonio

This study explores the articulation of a popular political identity by the US Senator Bernie Sanders and the political coalition he communicates The analysis part is conducted on two levels: the 

John R. Chavez

Papers

Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929-1941 Richard A. García