“Pochas sin identidad”: Raciolinguistic ideologies in the construction of mexicanidad in online spaces

ABSTRACT

This study examines how ideas of Mexicanness are constructed on social media via raciolinguistic indexicals observed in the language practices of racialized individuals. I conducted discourse analysis on data collected from comments posted in four Olympic athletes’ tweets that emphasize different characteristics of Mexican identity. Findings suggest that the practices of alluding to language proficiency, whiteness, and cultural sentiment lead to a “double stigmatization” that racialized the players as “inherently linguistically deficient”. These criticisms, paired with misogynistic language, offended the players’ languages, bodies, sexualities, and intellect. The result of these harmful judgments exposes the raciolinguistic ideologies in the construction of a Mexican identity that perpetuates the myth of a desirable, better Mexican (i.e. Mexican national) and an undesirable, lesser Mexican (i.e. foreign born). This can result in the exclusion and erasure of transnational identities and perpetuate deficit perspectives of marginalized groups in both countries. Recognizing and challenging these raciolinguistic ideologies can help recognize the complexity of multicultural identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Raciolinguistics
• identity
• language ideologies
• Mexicanness
• Mexican-americans
• Twitter

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for their insightful feedback. Their suggestions enhanced the context and impact of this article. As always, any remaining errors are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Throughout the article, I refer to Twitter because the data were collected before X, and I frequently make use of the verb to tweet and the noun a tweet to report data.