Bisbee Deportation, 1917. Courtesy University of Arizona Library web exhibits.
- Racial discrimination in Bisbee, Arizona during the 1950s was so terrible that Mexicans generally earned lower wages reserved for “non-whites.”
- Some rare spaces were reserved in the “white” category for Mexicans who assimilated well¾Mexicans who conformed to the dominant culture which emphasized monolingual English spoken with an American accent, that is, English spoken without a Spanish accent, a pocho English.
- Whether güero (possessing a fair skin complexion) or not, those with the pocho accent were “honorary” white Mexicans in the color-caste.
- My parents, acting out of survival, internalized this model of domination, and as a result of their labors to be integrated and accepted as American, they fully acculturated their children, and at the same time internalized both a resentment and guilt for Spanish-accented English.
- Both my parents spoke about accents at length.
- Despite our family’s English dominance, we still spoke a marked variety of English.
- While Chicano English’s phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon differentiate it from standard English, its features also characterize a language independent of Spanish (Duchnowski).
- Robert and Ana spoke for the notion of selective acculturation, or acceding to the dominant culture.
- My pursuit of a Ph.D. in English had been a multiple migration laterally from a marginal ethnic culture to a mainstream one and vertically from a working-class location to a professional one.
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