SMILE NOW CRY LATER: ACTING HARDCORE IN A CHICANO ENGLISH ANTI-LANGUAGE
Prof. Norma Mendoza-Denton
Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona
4PM, Thursday, March 9, 2006
Lucy Ellis Lounge, FLB
In his work on anti-languages, Halliday (1976) describes an anti-language as equivalent in function to the language proper: both languages and anti-languages have reality-generating properties, but anti-languages are structured to support and maintain the anti-societies from which they spring. Just as an anti-society is a conscious alternative to society proper, an anti-language is a conscious, marked alternative to the mainstream language.
Here I explore the relationship between anti-languages, subcultures, materiality and the body. My arguments are based on fieldwork I conducted from 1994-1997 in and around a Northern California High School that I have named Sor Juana High School. Here I engaged in participant observation, working with Latina and Latino youth involved centrally and peripherally in gangs.
In previous work I have outlined how expectation-violating gestures; practices such as makeup, fighting, transgressions of space, of the voice, and the body, combine to create a textured style that distinguishes Latina girls involved in gang activity from other Latina girls in Foxbury, Northern California at the time of th03/05/2006ing far beyond the categories with which society is equipped to handle girls in general. Many of the things the gang girls do then are transgressions of normative categories for what is a child, what is a woman, for what to do with one’s body as a woman/child, for how to carry out one’s will, and how to protect and defend oneself. Gang girls argue for the necessity of acting hardcore (lit., hard of heart), the embodied practice of being tough for both self-protection and self-preservation. In this economy of affect, close metalinguistic attention is paid to the management of emotional responses, crucially this economy acts in concert with sociophonetic and discourse variation.
Here I present an argument tracing the embodiment of signs as literally deriving from the performative use of signs, and the literal incorporation (entering into the body) of a pragmatic imaginary. I investigate what some scholars (Linde 1999) have called institutional memory in the community of practice of these adolescent gangs. Institutions such as a church, a nation-state or a corporation are socially sanctioned institutions, and their processes of memorialization might involve setting up a cathedral, an archaeological museum, commissioning history books, or decorating the lobby of the company with original artifacts. Because a gang is an organization that is not sanctioned and operates under persecution, and furthermore it is not located in a single place, gangs operate under different constraints and affordances for memory, crucially invoking language and what Williams (1973) has called structures of feeling.