Otto Santa Ana

Modeling the speech community: Configuration and variable types in the Mexican Spanish setting

This article proposes a comprehensive model of the speech community in sociolinguistics that reworks Labov’s model, which has been criticized as being restrictive. Fieldwork in non-metropolitan Mexico demonstrates the utility of our model, which can be applied across both urban and non-urban domains. It is compatible with the Milroys’ central mechanism for the description of individual speech usage and group cohesion or susceptibility to change in terms of the social network. Based on linguistic variable types, this model has a hierarchy of four nested fields (speech community configurations) into which each individual is placed, according to his/her demonstrated recognition of the social evaluation associated with the variables. At the most local configuration, speakers demonstrate no knowledge of generally stigmatized variables; in the second, speakers register an awareness of stigmatized variables; in the third, an awareness of stigmatized and regional variables; and in the fourth, speakers model standard variants over regional ones. This model classifies the kinds of sociolinguistic variables that are pertinent in this social setting and also provides a structured manner for dealing with dialect contact dynamics. (Speech community, social network, Spanish, Mexico, dialect, diffusion, variables.)* We present here a model of dialect contact in order to capture Spanish dialect distribution in contemporary Mexico, as this ranges from provincial and regional Mexican Spanish to standard Mexican Spanish. To account for the principal finding of our fieldwork ‐ that a subset of members of the same community do not share crucial aspects of the evaluation of language variation with the majority ‐

Did you call in Mexican? The racial politics of Jay Leno immigrant jokes

This article analyzes a set of anti-immigrant jokes with which Jay Leno entertained his national television audience in 2006, when the U.S. public was focused on unprecedented demonstrations urging justice for immigrants. Leno adroitly mocks immigrants and their cause to give his audience emotional release by distancing them from immigrants. It is argued that political comedy can be an insidious discursive practice that reduces its audience’s critical judgment as it signifies social boundaries. It should be carefully scrutinized because, with a few laughs, Leno can steer sentiment about public policy and instantiate divisiveness for an audience of 6 million who, in the words of Leno’s official website, “are drifting off to dreamland.” (Humor, political comedy, late-night television, immigrant rights marches) *

The cowboy and the goddess: Television news mythmaking about immigrants

This is an empirical examination of contemporary US network television news stories about immigrants that is informed by myth and film genre scholarship. A review of a full year (2004) of network news programs determined that two age-old story-types constituted the base narrative of all the news reports regarding immigrant voyages and apprehensions. One ancient story-type, currently manifest as the American Western, occurs when the news story protagonist border patrol agent portrays the American cowboy archetype. A US foundational myth is based on this story-type. The second story-type derives from a journey myth of Inanna, a Sumerian goddess. These two millennia-old story-types accounted for all the network evening news stories immigrant reports. Western news stories rearticulate nationalism, while the Inanna news story contests the nation’s foundational myth. Thus, on this topic, journalists write about immigration to entertain and indoctrinate, as much as to edify. Language: enThis is an empirical examination of contemporary US network television news stories about immigrants that is informed by myth and film genre scholarship. A review of a full year (2004) of network news programs determined that two age-old story-types constituted the base narrative of all the news reports regarding immigrant voyages and apprehensions. One ancient story-type, currently manifest as the American Western, occurs when the news story protagonist border patrol agent portrays the American cowboy archetype. A US foundational myth is based on this story-type. The second story-type derives from a journey myth of Inanna, a Sumerian goddess. These two millennia-old story-types accounted for all the network evening news stories immigrant reports. Western news stories rearticulate nationalism, while the Inanna news story contests the nation’s foundational myth. Thus, on this topic, journalists write about immigration to entertain and indoctrinate, as much as to edify.

A Fleeting Moment of Balanced Immigration Coverage

a public maelstrom in January 2004, when he proposed a new temporary worker program and a road to citizenship for millions of unauthorized immigrants. By 2006, immigration had become the major issue on the nation’s political agenda. The last time this happened was in 1994, when California voters passed Proposition 187, which would have denied unauthorized immigrants many public benefits and required state employees (including health care workers and school teachers) to point authorities to “apparently illegal aliens.” As gauged by old-fashioned journalistic content analysis—which simply counts the number of words, headline size, and other plainly observable elements of newspaper copy—the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of Prop. 187 was balanced. But such analysis is limited. According to recent research in cognitive science, common metaphor appears to be the key element of language that people use to make sense of their social world. In brief, what you say (or read) is what you get. For this reason, the everyday metaphors for political notions like CITIZEN, IMMIGRANT, and NATION that are sprinkled through news copy are fundamental to understanding on what basis newspaper readers (hence voters) make political decisions. In Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (2002), Otto Santa Ana reported on the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of Prop. 187 using a research design that linked the insights of cognitive metaphor theory to a rigorous scientific protocol designed to avoid tainting the investigation with his own political bias. Cataloging the metaphors used in 1994 by the Times to represent immigrants, he found that although the paper strongly opposed Prop. 187 (its editorials repeatedly condemned the referendum as fiscally unsound and mean-spirited), it inadvertently supported the referendum at the level of metaphor. Indeed, Santa Ana’s findings were chilling. The most frequent (34%) and powerful metaphor the Times projected was IMMIGRANT AS ANIMAL. The Times repeatedly depicted immigrants as animals in various ways, including as prey being drawn into a trap or chased down and eaten: “The truth is, employers hungering for really cheap labor hunt out the foreign workers” (italics added). The paper also depicted them as invading soldiers, flooding tides, and weeds. Thus at this fundamental level of language, at which readers make sense of political concepts, the Times did not promote a balanced debate of the issue. Instead, its readership was provided only a single discourse about immigrants, one that depicted them as subhuman. Californians voted accordingly. The Times was not alone; all mainstream U.S. national news sources used such politically biased language in the 1990s. Apparently only one discourse was then acceptable for the U.S. news media to articulate—a decidedly antiimmigrant one. Thus, when Bush made his 2004 proposal, he Media Accuracy on Latin America m a l a NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007

Framing Peace as Violence: TV Coverage of L.A.’s May Day 2007

52 O n may 1, 2007, thousands of los Angeles residents took to the streets to reprise the massive immigrant rights march that captured the nation’s attention a year earlier. The day began with a peaceful march of about 25,000 people in downtown Los Angeles, followed by a smaller afternoon march to MacArthur Park. Sadly, violent police misconduct abruptly ended this second rally. In half an hour, more than 450 police officers forcibly broke up the rally of 6,000 to 7,000 people, according to the Los Angeles Police Department’s own report. The LAPD reported that no marcher was arrested for fomenting this violence. At the same time, it accepted responsibility for having injured 246 people with “more than 100 baton strikes” and at least 146 “less-than-lethal impact munitions” (i.e., hard rubber bullets). The LAPD report stated that the police attack was “unprovoked” and blamed the violence on, among other things, a failure of the police command structure and inadequate planning. Moreover, the report found that the police officers did not properly declare the assembly to be unlawful, so when they forcibly dispersed the marchers, they violated the marchers’ First Amendment rights. How did the TV newsrooms represent this important event to the public at a time when the nation’s attention was focused on immigration policy? To find out, my research team and I examined 51 stories about the day’s events, broadcast by three national networks and five local L.A. stations. Our study combined three independent approaches: fact-checking (we evaluated the accuracy of the reporting by comparing it to the LAPD account); critical discourse analysis (we focused on the metaphors that anchors and reporters used when they spoke about the social agents involved); and visual semiotics analysis (we interpreted how the newsrooms visually represented the events). Our results were disheartening. We found that local and network television newsrooms presented the events of May 1 using a conventional frame that we call the “riot-suppression narrative.” Like all journalistic narrative frames, the riot-suppression narrative features a set of stock characters— villains, victims, and heroes. The marchers in this narrative are cast as violent (hence criminal) agitators, while the police are law-abiding government agents charged with disciplining disorderly civilians. And for this particular news event, the role of victim was reserved for news media personnel caught up in the police attack—not families with children in strollers, innocent marchers, or even the hapless street vendors—because the riot-suppression narrative always indicts demonstrators as the violent perpetrators. Framing Peace as Violence: TV Coverage of L.A.’s May Day 2007