“Don’t Be Self-Conchas”: Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture*
*Dedicated to the love we hear in our mothers’ accents. This post is co-authored by Sara V. Hinojos and Dolores Inés Casillas
The Cinco de Mayo season showcases troubling instances of Spanish being mocked. Corporate ‘merica profits from Drinko de Mayo when menus advertise “el happy hour”; words like “fiesta” and “amigo” are overused; and Spanish hyperanglicized for laughs (one of the worst: “COM-PREN-DAY”). These acts of linguistic privilege, according to Jane Hill, elevate whiteness in public spaces. What is heard as playful for the dominant ear is simply an acoustic representation of the racist appropriation of mustaches, sombreros, and sarapes.
CinKO de Mayo(naise)
Fiesta like there’s no mañana
Said no Juan ever
That said, bilennials have struck back.
Last year, the Latino digital platform, we are mitú, published a list that resonated with its young, bicultural readers, those long accustomed to hearing Spanish Accented English (SAE) as part of their everyday speech: 17 Popular Brand Logos If They Looked The Way Your Parents Pronounce Them. This humorous phonetic play in the face of complaints about foreign accents being unintelligible or moral indignation over immigrants who do not learn English with native-like proficiency re-directs our attention to digital, engaged Spanish-English bilingual communities. Like Chicana/o listening practices, these digital memes, gifs, and lists embrace how these accents invoke sounds of survival, solidarity and place making.
Con Fleis (Corn Flakes)
Gualmar (Wal-Mart)
Feisbu (Facebook)
Cosco (Costco)
The witty Buzzfeed-ish list re-spelled English-language global logos in Mexican, immigrant styled phonetics to reflect how said stores, brands, and social media sites are heard within Spanish-dominant or bilingual speaking communities. The absence of letters (Cosco) and/or the substitution of letters (Gualmar) induce an “accented” non-English dominant speech, dislodging standard rules about English-language spelling and pronunciation. Readers chuckled at seeing immigrant, ESL (English as a Second Language), phonetic speech in print – a tactic Sara V. Hinojos refers to in her media writings as a visual accent, or a visual vocabulary based on sound.
In order to “get” the humor behind the wave of memes and gifs that use Spanish Accented English (SAE), Chicana/o readers rely much more on their listening ears than their eyes to understand how these accents are voiced in print. Here, listening to accents operates as a popular form of literacy, one that registers the audible, racialized experiences of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Of course, the use of creative, rasquache forms of humor have long been a hallmark aspect of Chicana/o humor. Yet listening to these digital literacies, especially within the contemporary “build the wall yet eat the taco” era, help make these accents legible.
Estop (Stop)
Eschool (School)
Espray (Sprite)
Certainly, some vocal accents are audibly more patent to select ears than others. Accents work to socially and geographically locate speakers; for instance, often racially indexing Spanish Accented English speakers as Mexican (regardless of nationality), immigrant (regardless of citizenship), and/or poor (regardless of occupation). Sociocultural linguists remind us that accents, word choice, vocal tone and other sound qualities of language are a part of a larger Bourdieu-ian rubric of linguistic capital. Social psychologists consistently demonstrate that listeners make “moral, intellectual, and aesthetic judgments of others based on language use and accent alone.” For scholars of race and sound, accents comprise part of a sonic color line; a socially constructed aural boundary that aligns accented English speech as non-white and non-accented (or Midwestern) English as white. Vocal neutrality, like whiteness itself, operates invisibly as privilege usually does.
Jess (Yes)
Brefas (Breakfast)
Effectively “reading” a visual accent does not privilege a bilingual speaker but rather an accented listener, one raised or surrounded by immigrant speakers. The humorous phonetic play of a visual accent symbolically challenges the capitalist logic that a “neutral accent” or non-accent in English holds immense Western value. For those of us with accented speakers in our families and communities, accents function as emotional markers; vocal or vernacular archives that trace an individual or family’s migration, travels and/or histories. As Denice Forham shares poetically about her Puerto Rican mother’s accent, “even when her lips can barely stress themselves around English, her accent is a stubborn compass, always pointing her towards home.” For our families, accents evince the affective labor entailed in retraining tongues, in learning new idioms, and general struggles to converse in Inglish.
(when your grandmother wants to motivate you)
Using the name of a popular Mexican sweet bread (conchas) as a substitute for “conscious” upsets Western, phonetic understandings of “scious” in favor of a phonetic, Mexican stand-in. Concha, a sea shelled shaped sweet bread, associated with female genitalia and used in digital Latino communities has become a symbol for body positive inclusion; an insistence to not feel “self conchas” when eating (see Nalgona Positivity and SOMAR ATX). These memes privilege an accented listener, a feminist sensibility, as well as a panadería connoisseur.
The mega-for-profit-English-teaching-colonial organization, known as Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), explains that the lack of distinction in the Spanish language between a short and long vowel – for instance ship/sheep – causes miscomprehension for assumed-yet-never-named native English listeners. Those learning English as a Second Language are encouraged to first reorient their own ears to listen to the subtlety between pull/pool before grasping the complexities of yacht/jot. The communicative burden lies on the accented speaker rather than the non-accented listener. The visual accent places the onus on the English-dominant listener, effectively excluding them.
Trico Tri, Japi Jalogüín!
(Trick or Treat, Happy Halloween!)
Despite the fact that the United States represents the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, Spanish maintains a racialized, classed and “second-tiered” status within the United States imaginary (see Bonnie Urciuoli; Jane Hill; Jonathan Rosa; and D. Inés Casillas). These disparaging attitudes are evident when Spanish is prohibited in work places; when bilingual education and English Language Learner (ELL) programs are eliminated at ballot boxes; or when public school teachers are removed from posts based on their “heavy accents.” Institutional efforts to tame bilingual, accented tongues are less about speech and much more about accommodating the dominant, white listening ear.
According to Jennifer Stoever, the listening ear refers to dominant listening practices. Listening, she argues, is an embodied cultural practice that influences one’s position to power. “As the dominant ‘listening ear’ is disciplined to process white male ways of sounding as default—natural, normal, and desirable—alternate ways of listening and sounding are deemed aberrant and, depending upon the historical context, as excessively sensitive, strikingly deficient, or impossibly both.” Therefore the dominant listening ear not only tunes out “other” sounds but also treats them as illegitimate because they deviate from what sounds “normal” (read: white).
Cálmate Carnal, Tey Quirisi
(Relax Friend, Take it easy)
Gail Shuck found that white, native English-speaking college students construct an ideological distinction between Us and Them; gesturing to a sonic color line. Compellingly, she reported how American tourists in Mexico would describe native Spanish speakers as “heavily accented.” Yes. The communicative proficiency of Spanish by Mexicans in Mexico continued to be scrutinized by native English-language listeners.
Cinco de Mayo has versed us too well on the visual markers of racism like oversized sombreros, felt mustaches, and cheap beer pursuits, all a part of the commercial exploitation of Mexican communities in the U.S. But then phrases such as “Grassy Ass” or “No Problem-o” are heard bitterly as recurrent reminders that our language and accents are policed with the same fervor as our bodies. The inventive use of the visual accent archives how we listen, privileging the accented ear. The loving jest that enwraps these digital literacies reminds us to never lose our accents.
—
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Chicana Radio Activists and the Sounds of Chicana Feminisms— Monica De La Torre
Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?— Wanda Alarcon
Speaking “Mexican” and the use of “Mock Spanish” in Children’s Books (or Do Not Read Skippyjon Jones)— Dolores Inés Casillas
Tags: "listening ear", Cinco de Mayo, conchas, Denice Forham, Dolores Inés Casillas, Gail Shuck, Jane Hill, Jennifer Stoever, nalgona positivity, rasquache humor, Sara V. Hinojos, SOMAR ATX, sonic color-line, Spanish Accented English (SAE), TEFL, visual accent, we are mitú
6 responses to ““Don’t Be Self-Conchas”: Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture*”
Trackbacks / Pingbacks
- On “The Dream Life of Voice:” A Rerecording of Bernadette Mayer Reading from The Ethics of Sleep | Sounding Out! - February 25, 2019
- The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2017! | Sounding Out! - January 8, 2018
- Making His Story Their Story: Teaching Hamilton at a Minority-serving Institution | Sounding Out! - December 11, 2017
- “Ich kann nicht”: Hearing Racialized Language in Josh Inocéncio’s Purple Eyes (Ojos Violetas) | Sounding Out! - December 4, 2017
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
ISSN 2333-0309
Recent Posts
- “It’s Time to End the Publishing Gatekeeping!”: SO! stands with RaceB4Race
- Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century
- Black Excellence on the Airwaves: Nora Holt and the American Negro Artist Program
- Blank Space and “Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence”
- Youth, Reverberations, and Detroit’s Most Charismatic Rapper
Archives
Categories
Search for topics. . .
Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!
- RT @SonofBaldwin: This here is a Respectability Politics-Free Zone! ✊🏾 twitter.com/darrylstephens… 5 hours ago
- RT @nyt_diff: nytimes.com/2021/02/17/boo… 5 hours ago
- ithacavoice.com/2021/02/demoli… 19 hours ago
Like us on Facebook!
RSS Feeds
Authors Sounding Out!
-
202smike
-
Tahmahkera
-
aalbin2014
-
abradschwartz
-
abronfman
-
acajc3
-
Adam Craig
-
admiller99
-
afamsound
-
airekb
-
Andy Kelleher Stuhl
-
Wanda Alarcon
-
Alexandrine Lacelle
-
Alexander W. Cowan
-
Alexis Deighton MacIntyre
-
Alexander Russo
-
allisonoyoung1
-
alyxvesey
-
amandakeeler35
-
andré m. carrington Ph.D.
-
Tara Rodgers
-
Andreas Duus Pape
-
Aaron Trammell
-
annafriz
-
Andrew J. Salvati
-
aramsinnreich
-
arenaboy14
-
asamendelsohn
-
ashoncrawley
-
atau20
-
aureliomezavaldez
-
austinthomasrichey
-
awrasmussen
-
badcoverversion
-
Bridget Hoida
-
Benjamin Gold
-
bentausig
-
bighapa75
-
Bill Bahng Boyer
-
bonniesmillar
-
brianedgarhanrahan
-
@unibcarlson
-
brownellcassie
-
caleblazaromoreno
-
lcardoso
-
D. Ines Casillas
-
cbudhaditya
-
celestedaymoore
-
charlesweiselberg
-
chrischienblog
-
clairescooley
-
camscott
-
Colin Black
-
cooksterkc
-
cpastdaboxsoundwordwaves
-
croman2
-
Craig Shank
-
Caitlin Marshall
-
Shawn Higgins
-
cyndaminthia
-
Christie Zwahlen
-
Dan DiPiero
-
danielcavicchi
-
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson
-
davdlee
-
davidbgreenberg
-
davidfontnavarrete
-
davidhendy
-
ddkeane
-
debraraecohen
-
Denise Gill
-
derekvaillant
-
dhad21
-
Monica De La Torre
-
Brittnay Proctor
-
dorothyk98
-
dpettman
-
drdawkins
-
J. Stoever
-
Osvaldo Oyola
-
drtonieshaltaylor
-
Meghan Drury
-
dtraversscott
-
Daniel A. Walzer
-
earlbrooksumbc
-
ecopoetics
-
ehrick2014
-
eleanorkr
-
eleona
-
Elizabeth Newton
-
empetch
-
Emma Leigh
-
encaramarla
-
Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
-
ericweisbard
-
erikgranly
-
erupton
-
Emmanuelle Sonntag
-
estherbourdages
-
ewl4p
-
fallingmountaineering
-
fbridges
-
Feminatronic
-
flipsin77
-
fugikawa
-
gameaudioschool
-
gaylewald1
-
gcornish
-
ghostyblog
-
ginaarnold
-
Gretchen Jude
-
Gus Stadler
-
guestlistener
-
Holger Schulze
-
hystericalblackness
-
iandunham920
-
ianrawes
-
iancoss
-
imanikaijohnson
-
irisviverosavendao
-
jacobsmith1970
-
James Hodges
-
jaymloomis
-
jbraddoc
-
jdowdell
-
jeajou
-
Jeb Middlebrook
-
jeckstein
-
Jentery Sayers
-
jeteague
-
jgabrielaj
-
jhyland0
-
jlzweck
-
jmartinvest
-
Josh Garrett-Davis
-
jnmusser
-
Jonathan Sterne
-
Josh Ottum
-
Joshua Hudelson
-
jstasiowska
-
jtlsty1
-
Juan Sebastian Ferrada
-
juntinghuang
-
justinadamsburton
-
jwernimont
-
Kaj Ahlsved
-
kaitlynliu
-
katbat67
-
kellyhiser
-
Kelly J. Baker
-
kemiadeyemi
-
kevin13allred
-
knw8433
-
kristinmoriah
-
kstedman
-
kswinehart
-
kwjager
-
laorale
-
priscilla peña ovalle
-
liam665
-
Lilian Radovac
-
lindaokeeffe
-
Yun Emily Wang
-
lucrecciaquintanilla4010
-
Mack Hagood
-
madisonianmoore
-
magz hall
-
Maile Colbert
-
maramills
-
marcus3001
-
Maria Sonevytsky
-
maritjmac
-
markadavidson5
-
marlenriosh
-
marycaton
-
mattlaferty
-
mbrantner
-
mcenaney
-
mcmahonmr
-
John Melillo
-
Melle Kromhout
-
mhabellp
-
mhelquist
-
michellecommander
-
mikederrico
-
Milena
-
mlevine24
-
mseth2
-
kgoldschmitt
-
nabeelzuberi
-
napolinjb
-
Michelle M. Sauer
-
Nichole Rustin-Paschal
-
nicolefurlonge
-
nse
-
nkhverma
-
zeitkunst
-
nocoates
-
norieguthrie
-
Nick Mizer
-
obrienmurga
-
Erika
-
Owen Marshall
-
palmerlandon
-
Steven Hammer
-
pavitrasundar
-
Peter DiCola
-
Parker Fishel
-
pinkstoncb
-
pjaikumar
-
Lewis
-
primusluta
-
j.l. stoever
-
qiushixu
-
Robert Ford
-
rajnaswaminathan
-
Ronit Ghosh
-
rkheshti
-
rmjames
-
Regina N. Bradley
-
robertcryan
-
Roger Moseley
-
rsl318
-
ruichaves01
-
ruigomescosta
-
santaperversa
-
Sarah Kessler
-
sbahssin
-
sceraso
-
schedel
-
schizophone
-
sege22
-
shakiraholt
-
shannonkmooney
-
Shantam Goyal
-
shaynamsilverstein
-
Liana M. Silva
-
smayberryscott
-
snpinto
-
sonialidesigns
-
Sphinxy
-
ssepulve588
-
sshorowitz
-
ssmithsoundingout
-
Stuart
-
suhrhcmiamiohedu
-
svancour
-
svhinojos
-
Tara
-
tblake81
-
tedsammons
-
Benjamin Bean
-
theluisgarcia
-
Tim J. Anderson
-
timm750
-
travisgosa
-
trevorboffone
-
valdes23
-
Karen Tongson
-
vincentandrisani
-
Dr. O'C
-
Benjamin Wright
-
wsgershon
-
yessica07garcia
-
yhoward76
-
yvonbonenfant
-
zaf3
-
Carlo Patrão
Blogroll
- A Closer Listen
- A New Theater of Sound
- Acousmata
- Analog Tara
- Antenna
- Anthropology of Sound
- Aquarium Drunkard
- Aram Sinnreich's blog
- Audio Cookbook
- Binaural Diaries
- Binaural/Nodar
- Blackadelic Pop
- Blogging Ethnomusicologists
- Bodies|Sounds|Technologies
- British Library's Sound Recordings
- Bully Bloggers
- Captivating Sound
- Create Digital Music
- Cultural Organology
- Designing Sound
- Diary of a Bad Housewife (Alice Bag)
- Disquiet
- Dr. Guy's MusiQologY
- Ear Room
- Ear to the Ground
- Electra
- European Sound Studies Association
- Everyday Listening
- Fembot
- Feminist Music Geek
- Filmsound.org
- First Sounds
- Girrlsound
- Greg Goodale
- HASTAC Sound Forum
- Hear is Queer
- Her Beats
- Her Noise Archive
- I have synth
- IASPM-US
- Interference
- Journal of Sonic Studies
- Kathleen (Hanna)'s Blog
- Klangschreiber
- Land Recorder
- Listen Party
- Listening 440 (Josh kun)
- London Sound Survey
- Lubricity (Alex W. Rodriguez)
- Luz Maria Sanchez
- Mactrasound (Mack Hagood)
- Mediateletipos
- Mobile Sound
- Mudd Up! (DJ Rupture)
- Museum of Endangered Sounds
- New Black Man (Mark Anthony Neal)
- New York Society for Acoustic Ecology
- noise for airports
- Now Hear This
- Phonographies
- Phonozoic
- Pink Noises
- Preservation Sound
- Radiolab
- ROBOPROF.ORG (Kembrew McLeod)
- SAIC Department of Sound Blog
- Scoping UK Sound Studies
- Scott Topics (Scott Poulson Bryant)
- Sensate
- Sense and the City
- Sensory Studies
- Social Sound Design
- Sociosound
- Sonic Terrain
- Soul Sides
- Sound + Design
- Sound and Music
- Sound Art Text
- Sound Clash
- Sound Effects
- Sound in Media Culture
- Sound is Art
- Sound Studies Lab
- Sound/Unsound
- Soundcities
- Soundlandscapes
- Sounds Like Noise
- Sounds Like Staten Island
- Spooky and the Metronome
- sterneworks.org
- Super Bon! (Jonathan Sterne)
- Televisual
- The Ardent Audience
- The Big City
- The Field Reporter
- The Foley Diaries
- The Incredible Kaleidophone
- The Music of Sound
- The Soundscape
- The Theater of the Mind
- Turbulence
- Video Game Audio
- Wayne and Wax
- Weird Vibrations
- Women's Audio Mission
- World Listening Project
- Zsonics
That “mitu” post immediately reminded me of the often advertised “Ingles Sin Barreras.” As a child hearing Univision blaring in the background, those tapes souned like the Rosetta Stone of Latinx communities.
Their explanations of how to say words like “eagle” was “i-gol” using Latin-spanish alphabetic pronunciations to pronounce English words.
LikeLike
Excellent post!
LikeLike