By Associate Professor Anna Babel, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

This summer, the Migration, Mobility and Immobility Project helped fund an exploratory research trip to Barcelona to build research contacts among the Bolivian migrant community, as well as academic contacts at the Universitàt de Barcelona. Barcelona is home to one of the largest Bolivian migrant communities in the world, with the population of that community estimated at 45,000. The Bolivian community grew exponentially in the first decade of the 2000s, followed by return migration during and after the Spanish economic crisis of 2008-2010. Today, the migrant population has stabilized, and many of the migrants I met had lived in Spain for fifteen to twenty years.

As a sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, my research to date has focused on Quechua-Spanish contact in the central valleys of Bolivia. I am interested primarily in the relationship between social categories and language use, and I have written about the relationship between language and political stances, styles of dress and ethnic positioning, among other factors. Over the past several years, I have been drawn to the question of how we become aware of linguistic features and practices, and how this awareness affects our use of language. Migration presents a perfect context in which to observe changes in linguistic awareness among people who encounter different dialects, and perhaps different attitudes towards their own dialect, as adults.

While I had previously interviewed migrants who traveled from my rural field site in Bolivia to the urban center of Santa Cruz, including a few who had lived in Spain, this was the first time I had the opportunity to meet international migrants in their host country. I had no idea whether I would be successful in contacting migrants in one short month, particularly given that July is often a vacation month in Europe.  As it turned out, acquaintances and friends-of-friends were happy to give me a helping hand, and I enjoyed their generous hospitality throughout the month that I spent in Spain, along with my two children. I was even pleasantly surprised to find a Bolivian restaurant just a few steps away from the apartment I rented in Barcelona!

This trip represents the starting point for a new line of research focusing on linguistic awareness among international migrants, and I am currently in the process of applying for more funding to take me back to Barcelona. The MMI grant helped immeasurably in allowing me to lay the groundwork for this exciting new project.