Mexican Immigrant Women's Narratives of Language Experience: Defendiendose in Southern California. Working Paper.

This paper describes the communicative situation of 17 Mexican immigrant women in San Diego County (California), focusing on a set of narratives of personal language experiences in everyday life. Data collection included intensive fieldwork in an adult computer literacy project serving predominantly Mexican immigrants and interviews with seven project coordinators, seven participants, and four nonparticipants. Subjects' English language proficiency ranged from none to full bilingualism. To exemplify how events involving communicative challenges took place, the women reported on dialogues that occurred in different situations. By quoting others' words, the women were not only reporting speech, but also assessing the problematic nature of the incident. Analyses of these dialogues include setting, unexpected event, psychological response, attempt to resolve the challenge, and consequences. Examples presented in detail involve the women's interactions with doctors, other medical staff, school personnel, their own child in a school situation, and a priest. In monolingual U.S. institutions, the women experienced "invisibility" (exclusion) responses from the people they interacted with. The examples show that the invisibility responses occurred when the women did not have enough English to defend themselves, when language judgments were mapped onto Mexican ethnicity, and when Spanish was underprivileged in institutions. (Contains 84 references.) (SV)