IntraLatino language and identity is an original sociolinguistic study of MexiRicans, that is, individuals raised by a Mexican and a Puerto Rican parent and thus exposed to two significantly divergent varieties of Spanish from birth. By focusing on the linguistic practices of MexiRicans in Chicago, Potowski not only integrates a previously neglected bicultural community in the US into sociolinguistic discussion, but also provides a substantially improved framework for the study of intrafamilial language contact.
Chapter 1 discusses the epistemological underpinnings of bidialectalism, showing how it stands at the intersection of language acquisition and dialect contact. Chapter 2 presents a thorough account of methods with reference to quantitative analyses of linguistic variables and a corpus of qualitative interviews.
By triangulating evidence from three linguistic domains—lexical preferences (chapter 3), discourse markers (chapter 4), and phonological features (chapter 5)—Potowski goes beyond previous accounts of intradialectal contact, which are typically limited to a single dimension.
As predicted by research on koineization, MexiRican Spanish is not a unitary, stable dialect. Even though MexiRican average scores lie in between those of the monodialectal communities, individual speakers behave heterogeneously. Indeed, while some MexiRicans display what Potowski calls a balanced pattern, most speakers actually present a predominance of either Mexican or Puerto Rican features. Furthermore, Potowski's data reveals that third generation MexiRicans are not necessarily subject to more dialect levelling than second generation MexiRicans (e.g. p. 169), suggesting that MexiRican Spanish is not undergoing koineization.
There are significantly more MexiRican individuals that behave predominantly like monodialectal Mexicans than like monodialectal Puerto Ricans (e.g. eighteen individuals with predominantly Mexican lexicon vs. only three for Puerto Rican lexicon). This pattern is convincingly analysed as the product of social factors: there are many more Mexicans than Puerto Ricans in Chicago, and, crucially, Mexican Spanish enjoys the status of a prestigious variety while Puerto Rican Spanish is subject to strong stigmatization, as is the Puerto Rican community. This notwithstanding, MexiRicans overwhelmingly reject the essentialist ‘soundism’ their communities often subject them to and claim affiliation to both linguistic and cultural communities (chapter 7).
Further novel findings include the fact that having a Puerto Rican mother seems to be a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for a MexiRican to display a predominantly Puerto Rican pattern; in addition, the discovery that, while lexical and phonological features have a moderate tendency to pattern together, discourse markers are largely independent of either (chapter 6).
There are also a number of epistemologically interesting discoveries, like the finding that linguistically naïve Spanish speakers provide fairly accurate ratings of MexiRican speech features when compared to an acoustic analysis (chapter 5).
A significant flaw of the book is the large number of typographic errors and the omission and repetition of some graphs (e.g. p. 89). The factual data are nonetheless usually recoverable from the text body. Despite these unfortunate problems, the book is written in an elegant, clear, and accessible style and should appeal to a wide range of audiences from variationist sociolinguists and dialectologists to anthropological linguists, discourse analysts, and critical race theorists. Overall, it is an outstanding contribution.
