Project overview

 

Mexico City has been home to diverse languages and cultures for many centuries. More than ever before, it is a globalized, internationalized city where people from around the world pursue their dreams of finding economic and educational opportunities (Cave 2013).  It is a place where tens of thousands of rural migrants, international refugees, and foreign born immigrants (both documented and undocumented) temporarily and permanently reside.  Groups ranging from Nahua peasants to Korean entrepreneurs introduce their languages, foods, religions, popular culture, and educational practices to the ever-changing Mexico City landscape.  Chinese, Americans, Spaniards, Lebanese, Mixtecs, to name a few, have developed language schools, businesses, religious sites of worship, and cultural centers across the city.  These diverse inhabitants are carving out a place for themselves around the city, while negotiating their position as minorities in Spanish language-dominant and Mestizo-majority contexts.  Despite decades of migration to Mexico City, the myths of a shared Mexican national identity and racial homogeneity remains in tact in popular Mexican discourse.  One journalist, Cesar Fernando Zapata, has critiqued his fellow Mexicans for forgetting that Mexico is also home to many immigrants: “¿Quién se acuerda, por ejemplo, de los inmigrantes que viven en México? Ni siquiera nos acordamos que México también tiene agentes de inmigración” (Zapata 2013).  

 

There are many signs of linguistic and cultural diversity in Mexico City, although they are often ignored and misunderstood. I plan to study the signs of linguistic and cultural diversity in Mexico City using data collected from 3 weeks of fieldwork in Mexico City.  During fieldwork, I will use a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyze the meaning and context of various signs, the ways they mark the presence of diverse inhabitants, and how they play a role in place-making in Mexico City.  I will employ the principles of ethnographic linguistic landscaping (Blommaert 2013, Pan Lin 2009) and geosemiotics (Backhaus 2007) to document and analyze language on signs in public space.  Signs are complex semiotic systems that vary in appearance, function, visibility, and placement, and also convey a great deal of information about a city and its inhabitants.  A linguistic landscape refers to “the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region” including “public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings” that combine to “form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration” (Landry & Bourhis 1997:25). 

           

This study focuses on signs because they “bear the traces of worldwide migration flows and their specific demographic, social and cultural dynamics” (Blommaert & Rampton 2012:3).  Migration has numerous impacts on the linguistic landscape of cities; it has made “communicative resources like language varieties and scripts globally mobile, and this affects neighborhoods in very different corners of the world” (ibid).  Thus, signs help us answer questions about cities such as: Who lives here? What languages do inhabitants speak? Which languages are visible and dominant, and which are hidden from view? It is important to note that not all languages and cultures carry similar status; for example, Spanish and English are considered much more prestigious than indigenous languages in many language education programs. What does this say about the status of various minority segments within Mexican society? What are diverse residents communicating through the production of signs, and to whom? What does the placement of signs reveal about minorities' residential patterns and business activities? Do signs demonstrate evidence of linguistic and cultural mixing (e.g. culinary fusions)?

 

Linguistic landscaping (LL) offers insight into the frequency and density of multilingual signs around the city.  Using Backhaus' (2007) LL study of Tokyo and Blommaert's (2013) analysis of Antwerp as guiding examples, I will first focus on locating and photographing publicly visible signs of linguistic and cultural diversity.  I will visit neighborhoods which have the highest reported number of immigrants: Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juárez, and Cuauhtémoc, D.F. (Censo 2010).  Combined, there are more than 35,000 reported foreign born residents living in these 3 municipalities (ibid).  I will also visit and photograph signs in well-known “ethnic” neighborhoods such as El Barrio Chino and La Pequeña Corea, as well as established language and cultural centers, including embassies, places of worship, and schools.  While photographing signs around the city, I will also interview and survey individuals in these different settings about their linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as well as their interpretations of photographed signs.  I will also record field notes during participant observation to understand how residents interact with these signs. Popular online forums where Mexico City's foreign-born populations communicate will also be studied to understand their experiences and perspectives.

           

This ethnographic component of this research will provide important qualitative data about how people produce and understand signs, which languages are valued over others and why.  This qualitative research on aims to be inclusive of Spanish-speaking immigrants from Central and South America, and those who speak Spanish as a second or third language but who still choose to use Spanish, such as indigenous groups from rural Mexico. Sample survey and interview questions for Mexico City residents include: Where you born in Mexico City? If not, where are you from? Are your parents/grandparents from Mexico City? If not, where are they from? What do you think about immigrant communities in Mexico City? Do you believe immigrant communities have a visible presence in Mexico City? Why or why not? Can you list languages you have seen or heard in the city? What is your impression of this sample sign found in Mexico City? I will also attempt to capture audio of diverse languages spoken in the city, and link these to the geographic points around the city.

           

Additionally, I will utilize concepts from the field of geosemiotics to guide my analysis of signs.  Geosemiotics refers to the context-dependence of signs and the relationship between sign and place; it is “the study of the social meaning of the material placement of signs” (Backhaus 2007).  It is the knowledge that signs have the ability to transform spaces into places.  Thus, this geosemiotic perspective on signs will allow insight into the transformation of Mexico City spaces over time. When did the signs emerge?  What is the meaning of their geographical positioning and distribution? How have diverse groups played a role in the construction of place of the city? To answer these questions I will create an inventory of signs and a photo map (Collier 1986, Lou 2007) which links these signs to places around the city and demonstrates their geographical distribution.  Images and audio on the map will be accompanied by written analyses of the type, function, and placement of these signs, how diverse residents produce and interact with theses signs, and the role of signs in the historical production of place in Mexico City.  Therefore, this project will result in a holistic map that includes both quantitative and qualitative approach to multimodal (Kress 2011) data and explores evidence of cultural and linguistic diversity.