By PhD Student Shawntel Barreiro, Department of Linguistics

Over the past year, my research has focused on first- and second-generation Salvadorans who currently reside in Los Angeles and use Salvadoran Spanish. I am particularly interested in this community’s use of Spanish amongst other Spanish-speaking groups who also reside in the city, in particular Mexican migrants or people of Mexican descent. The major focus of my research is whether an interlocutor’s ethnicity or degree of familiarity with the interlocutor makes a difference in terms of what words Salvadorans will use. 

Salvadoran migration to Los Angeles is a recent phenomenon, relative to the long-established and larger Mexican community. The recent migration of Salvadorans to L.A. has not only brought these inhabitants into a new place, but it has also brought them into contact with the Mexican community. Though these ethnic communities share many of the same cultural resources, including the Spanish language, competition for economic opportunities has created tensions between the two groups (Acuña 1996; Arias 2003; Olivia-Alvarado 2013). These tensions manifest through a linguistic hierarchy where characteristics of Salvadoran Spanish are thought of as inferior to their Mexican Spanish equivalents (Parodi 2004; Raymond 2012; Osuna 2015). Because language is integral to most forms of interaction, linguistic features that are salient to Salvadoran Spanish are often difficult to hide. This linguistic saliency, in turn, affects the way Salvadorans can express their ethnic identity amongst Mexican communities. 

In order to get at some of these issues, I designed an online picture-naming survey that was distributed to Salvadorans residing in Los Angeles. Participants were presented with pictures of items or food objects that are referred to differently in Salvadoran and Mexican Spanish. For each of these pictures, participants were asked to select what word(s) they would use and whether they would use the word(s) amongst Salvadoran and/or Mexican family, friends or strangers. Preliminary results reveal that an interlocutor’s ethnicity (i.e. Salvadoran or Mexican) affected what words were likely used. The results demonstrate that while Mexican words were used with Mexican interlocutors, Salvadoran words were still used more amongst both Mexican and Salvadoran interlocutors. Comparatively, the context in which these words were used (i.e. family, friends or strangers) did not have a significant effect on which words participants were likely to employ. The participants predominately used Salvadoran words across all three contexts. 

These results are quite surprising given that previous scholarship would hypothesize that the Salvadoran participants would be less likely to use Salvadoran words with the Mexican interlocutors. The results only further my interest in Salvadoran Spanish and the diasporic communities themselves. In the future, I would like to develop this study in other Salvadoran-diasporic communities outside of L.A., such as those that reside in rural Arkansas and Washington D.C. — areas in which Salvadorans are the largest Latinx communities.