So ¿te fuiste a Dallas? (So you went to Dallas?/So you got screwed?): Language, Migration, and the Poetics of Transgression

Abstract

Drawing on recent work on the linguistic production of social markedness, this article explores the cross‐border usage of what I term the “Dallas” chronotope: a form of poetics that critically frames the political‐economic logics that undergird the markedness structure central to the time–space relational construction of migrant illegality. In a community where back‐and‐forth movements between Mexico and the United States result in varying degrees of Spanish–English bilingualism, the Spanish expression “da' las” (to give ‘em)—short for “dar las nalgas” (to give your buttocks; a reference to getting screwed, comparable to the English colloquial expression “to give it up” in reference to a sexual offering)—is invoked as a phonetic equivalent of “Dallas,” the name of the city in Texas, figuratively equating the social violation of migrants with sexual violation of the body. I extend the analytical frame of markedness through an application of the notion of biopolitics to these instances of linguistically mediated spatiotemporality within a U.S.–Mexico transnational context in order to describe how embodied poetics figuratively construct a resilient sense of migrant personhood that undermines its marked status and literally performs resiliency into being.

“Everything Went Boom”: Kinship Narratives of Transfronterizo University Students

“…Chronotopic analysis has been taken up widely in cultural and linguistic anthropology and has featured prominently in recent work on transnational Latina/o experiences. For example, Dick's Mexican participants framed their choices to migrate or not to migrate in terms of a specific modernist chronotope (:277); similarly, Chávez () sketches the circulation of a chronotope having to do with migrant illegality and vulnerability in racialized U.S. spaces. Rosa turns to popular culture for evidence of temporal logics “through which particular American pasts, presents, and futures are imagined and enacted” in contrast to Latina/o racial and linguistic identities (:113).…”

Una Gabacha Sinvergüenza(A Shameless White-Trash Woman): Moral Mobility and Interdiscursivity in a Mexican Migrant Community

“…Imaginaries of moral mobility “flip the script” (Carr ) on these imaginings, positioning the United States, not Mexico, as immoral. So, when Uriangatenses take up the terms of such imaginaries, they are engaged in critiques of their marginalized positioning in the United States (Chávez ; Dick ). In taking up the idea that to be Mexican is to be more moral than one from the United States, as Maria does in saying no to the Britney doll, Uriangatenses positively adopt the notion of moral mobility.…”

“…In the United States, there is a long history of associating “real America” with whiteness, an association legitimated by US immigration law (Balderrama and Rodríguez ; Dick ; Haney‐López ). People in Mexican migrant communities are acutely aware of US racial ideologies that construct the country as white, positioning people of Mexican decent as Other—as criminal and dangerous (Chávez ; De Genova ; Ngai ). Mestizo imaginaries of moral mobility, therefore, are in critical dialogue with such frameworks, as they create alignments between the United States, whiteness, foreignness, imperialism, and immorality.…”

“…Because Uriangatenses are aware of and critically comment on how they are portrayed in US discourse (cf. Chávez ; Mendoza‐Denton ), it is not unreasonable to suggest that Maria was engaging in this sort of critique of the “Other who Others us” when she said no to the doll. This identification obviously put me in a precarious position—one I did not occupy when the mothers rejected Britney in more general terms.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

“…Chronotopic formulations, as Harkness's example suggests, are metasemiotic frameworks that actively construe and shape the temporal and spatial unfolding of social life, making certain kinds of experiences of time, space, and (kinship‐based) sociality and personhood possible. At the same time, they emerge in historical and interactional space and time through social actors’ own reflections on time, space, and social practice (also see Chávez ; Koven and Marques )—for Harkness's informants, through their rationalizations of Korean address terms as mediated by their interpretations of Christian doctrine as well as through their imaginations of the relation between “modern” national development and Christian enlightenment.…”