Racism at Chalupatown

Despite the fact that the entire enterprise of Chalupatown was centered around Mexican culture and cuisine, racism (particularly toward Latinos) was fairly common among a relatively small subset of the restaurant's wait staff. Some (though definitely not the majority) of the Anglo servers regularly exchanged strongly racist evaluations of their customers. These evaluations often included open use of offensive racist pejoratives. For example, one server complained to another that he was not receiving good tips because he had been repeatedly given “bad tables” by the host. Because of an ongoing dispute between the two, the server felt that the host was intentionally seating minority customers in his section to prevent him from making good tips. He complained to another server, “You would not believe the tables I've had today – Look, I made a list: four tables of beaners, two tables of niggers and one table of deaf-mutes.” My reaction to overhearing this resulted in an apology for using offensive language followed by several days in which various servers made repeated jokes and negative comments about my “hypersensitivity.” The fact that such racist banter was tolerated by some of the servers and managers reflects the lack of concern about racism among the Chalupatown staff.

For these particular servers, keeping track of the ethnic background of their customers was viewed as a valid way to gain a sense of how much tip money they were making, with the implicit assumption that the more white customers one had, the higher his or her tips would be. Because their racist attitudes influenced the service they provided minority customers, their expectations of small tips were usually fulfilled. This group of Anglo servers regularly complained when given a table of Latino customers and consciously provided Latino customers with inferior service because of the racist assumption that Latino customers don't tip well. When the inferior service resulted in a small tip, this was seen as justification for inferior treatment itself, rather than as the actual result of providing poor service. Given that the customers were overwhelmingly Anglo, these servers felt they could afford to let service to Latino customers slide and make up the income by focusing on Anglo customers.

One server ultimately realized that she – not the race of her customers – was the cause of the low tips, and that her racist attitude was not in her own interest. She and I were scheduled to work the same shift as servers in adjacent sections of the restaurant. She arrived late, so I was given a table in her section. When she arrived, I apologized for taking her table and offered to have the manager transfer the ticket so that she could be their server. When she saw that the table was filled with a large Latino family, she said, “No way. You can have them. In fact, I'm giving you all my beaners today.” Throughout the day she told the hosts to seat Latino customers in my section rather than hers, assuming she would increase her tips by giving me the “low-tipping” Latino customers and keeping the “high-tipping” Anglo customers for herself. At the end of the day the amount of my tips was substantially higher than what she had earned. She had a reputation as one of the highest-earning waitresses in the restaurant, and having been “out-tipped” was something of an embarrassment for her, especially since she had told several other servers that she was sabotaging my tips. A couple of weeks later, she thanked me for showing her that she had been wrong, saying, “If you're nice to them, they tip you really well. Now I just pretend not to hate them.”

There were also occasional expressions of racist attitudes by some of the managerial staff, although these were much less common and less likely to be expressed openly, and they rarely included the use of pejoratives. One manager frequently had parties at her house that were initially open to the entire restaurant staff, although they were primarily attended by servers and other managers. The first time I attended one of the parties, I happened to bring several Spanish-speaking co-workers. From this point on, the parties stopped being open to all employees and became “invitation-only.” After realizing that I knew the parties were continuing, the manager apologized for not inviting me, saying that it was because I regularly socialized with Spanish-speaking co-workers and she “didn't feel comfortable having them in her house.” I was told that I was actually welcome at her parties in the future as long as I agreed not to bring any of the kitchen workers with me. The racialized nature of managerial attitudes toward the workers is reflected in the following interaction, which occurred when I came to pick up my paycheck.

Rather than refer to the kitchen staff in terms of the division of labor (the actual reason for two sets of checks), the manager referred to the stack of kitchen checks as the “brown pile.” This incident is typical of the way in which the kitchen staff was viewed as a racialized Other by much of the Anglo staff. Managers and servers frequently referred to kitchen employees with phrases such as “that one” or “those two” rather than with personal pronouns such as “him” or “them.” Many servers did not even seem to know the names of Spanish-speaking employees, and they would regularly ask bilinguals for the names of cooks and busers they were working with. Often, the question would be phrased as “What's that one there called?” rather than “What's his name?” or “What's that guy's name?” The use of “that one” dehumanizes the referent, similar to the use of animal metaphors in public discourse about Latinos discussed by Santa Ana 1999, 2002.

Racist assumptions were common among the restaurant's customers as well. One Chicano server (a native English speaker) repeatedly found that customers were hesitant to interact with him directly. Occasionally clients would express doubt that he was their actual server (despite his having introduced himself as such) and repeat their requests to an Anglo co-worker, explaining that they weren't sure that he was actually their “waiter.” After repeatedly being taken for a buser rather than a server, he quit his job at Chalupatown (less than a month after starting) to take a job in another restaurant with more Latino servers and customers.

Despite the prevalence of such attitudes, neither the servers nor managers ever expressed the view that the restaurant was a “racist” environment. The owners often provided helpful services to Spanish-speaking workers, such as offering interest-free loans to longtime employees and helping with legal and medical matters. In organizing work-related events, the managerial staff always tried to convey a sense of inclusiveness, posting notices of events such as holiday parties or company picnics in both English and Spanish. Because they offered employee services that were absent in most restaurants, the treatment of Spanish-speaking workers at Chalupatown was in many ways much better than in other Anglo-owned restaurants. For the most part, the managerial staff (including the owners) saw themselves as open-minded and accepting toward Latino employees and did not feel that white racism was a problem in their establishment. If the owners did hear racist comments from Anglo workers, they were usually quick to chastise them. There was no overt attempt at discrimination, and racism was not discussed at meetings between workers and management. If racism was an issue, it was usually expressed in terms of Latino workers' attitudes toward whites. The segregated nature of the staff (with almost entirely Anglo wait staff and entirely Latino kitchen staff) was explained as being necessary and efficient, because the Latino workers were uncooperative and unwilling to work closely with English-speaking whites. This type of projection is typical in the discourse of color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva & Forman 2000, Bonilla-Silva 2002), in which racist ideologies are reproduced in discourse that is outwardly anti-racist.

The structure of Spanish-English alternation in Anglo speech

As noted above, my initial motivation for collecting data was to study the grammatical structure of Anglo code-switching at Chalupatown. The structure of alternations in Anglo speech is distinctly different from that of those found in studies of codeswitching by native Spanish-English bilinguals. In a groundbreaking study of Spanish-English codeswitching among Puerto Rican speakers in New York, Poplack 1981 proposed two constraints that govern how two languages can be combined:

Poplack illustrates the free morpheme constraint with the example *eat-iendo ‘eating’, where the Spanish suffix –iendo is a bound morpheme. The equivalence constraint would be violated by switches such as “a car nuevo” (Poplack 1981; cf. Gingràs 1974). Here the syntax of Spanish un carro nuevo and English a new car differ in that the adjective in English is before (rather than after) the noun. Both of these constraints were regularly violated in Anglo code-switching, as in the examples below:

Spanish-English bilinguals may violate these constraints as well, but code-switching of these types is rare. In Poplack's original study, violations of the equivalence constraint were found in less than 1% of all switches (Poplack 1981). Although Poplack found no violations of the bound morpheme constraint, Myers-Scotton (1993:34) notes that the bound morpheme constraint may be violated (as in boil-ando ‘boiling’) by Spanish-English bilinguals in Texas. Given the rarity of such examples in studies of code-switching, it seems reasonable to assume that such violations are atypical of code-switching by native bilinguals. In recording examples of Anglo use of Spanish, I originally hoped to find interesting data that might demonstrate how these constraints were violated by English-dominant speakers. It quickly became clear, however, that the violation of these constraints in Anglo uses of Spanish was not a question of code-switching patterns, but simply the result of a total absence of Spanish grammatical structure in Anglo speech (despite the presence of Spanish morphemes).

Although Anglo managers and servers might occasionally produce directives entirely in Spanish, directives were more typically given either entirely in English or in a mix of English and Spanish. Most use of Spanish by Anglos in the restaurant involved the substitution of single Spanish morphemes into otherwise English sentences, as in the following examples:

Although Anglo speakers used Spanish often, the syntactic structure of these utterances was consistently English. The syntactic structure of Spanish was never involved. Anglo use of Spanish almost always involved cases of “nonce loans” (Poplack et al. 1988) or “insertions” (Muysken 2000) of Spanish constituents into English sentences.

The absence of Spanish grammatical structure in Anglo code-switching might lead one to assume that these utterances result from a lack of competence in Spanish. While it is clear that many of the Anglo speakers were not fluent speakers of Spanish, most of them had enough competence to produce many of these directives in Spanish. In cases of extreme urgency, Anglo speakers would often use sentences that were entirely in Spanish. The use of actual Spanish by Anglos was most common when in emergency situations or as a last resort when miscommunication had become an obvious problem. The following interaction took place after a prep cook cut his hand on the meat slicer. The manager is opening the first aid kit to pull out a bandage while another employee brings a car around to take the cook to the emergency clinic. Following the manager's instructions, the cook is holding his hand above his shoulder in a towel. The cook had lowered his hand several times and the manager repeatedly asked him to keep his hand up (a pattern that continued after this interaction):

Here the manager uses Spanish syntactic constructions that are quite distinct from English grammar. The construction hay que ‘it is necessary that’ has a null subject where English would generally use a personal pronoun. If the manager had been using only English grammar one might expect something like tu necesitas ‘you need to’ rather than an impersonal construction like hay que. The manager also correctly uses the definite article la with the noun mano (hand) where English would use a possessive pronoun (your hand). The correct use of the feminine la rather than the masculine el with the noun mano avoids another pitfall of L2 Spanish speakers, who may mistakenly use the masculine article under the assumption that all nouns ending in [o] have masculine gender. The (incorrect) use of su mano is extremely common in Anglo Spanish; even the restrooms at Chalupatown had the typical Mock Spanish Lava sus manos sign found throughout the Southwest (Peñalosa 1981, Hill 1998). The manager was at least fluent enough in Spanish to produce syntactic constructions that often pose difficulties for English monolinguals using Spanish as a second language. When the cook returned to work the next day, the same manager asked him “How is your mano?” – returning to the nonce borrowing pattern typical of Anglo Spanish. Although a lack of competence might explain some examples of Anglo nonce borrowings, in many cases the absence of Spanish grammar does not result from a lack of fluency, but rather reflects the absence of any attempt actually to speak Spanish.

The absence of Spanish syntax in Anglo speech at Chalupatown is similar to other forms of linguistic appropriation, which typically involve a greatly reduced (or entirely absent) grammatical structure of the source language. Actual Spanish grammar is virtually nonexistent in Mock Spanish, where the only productive grammatical processes seem to be the addition of +o to English nouns and the addition of the article el. Of course, the affixation of +o is not actually a rule for Spanish (actual Spanish nouns end in a wide range of sounds). Instead, the rule is specific to Mock Spanish. In an examination of Spanish textbooks written for Anglo employers, Erard 1996 also found that Spanish grammar is often greatly reduced or ignored in Anglo speech. For example, the authors of Farm and Ranch Spanish choose only to introduce the formal personal pronoun Usted, ignoring the familiar pronoun tú and its associated verb forms (Erard 1996:314), erasing the potential for indexing a position of familiarity with Spanish speakers. The general irrelevance of Spanish grammar for Anglo speakers reflects an ideology in which Spanish speakers themselves are viewed as inconsequential (cf. Santa Ana 2002:2–3). The erasure (Gal & Irvine 2000) of Spanish syntactic structure reflects a racial ideology involving erasure of Latinos themselves (cf. Perea 1995).

Anglo Spanish serves as an example of what Zentella 1996 has called the process of “chiquitification” of Spanish and Spanish speakers. Zentella defines “chiquitification” as a process which “diminishes the complexity of the languages and cultures of the more than 22 million Latinos who reside in the U.S.” (Zentella 1996:1). She argues that the ideology of chiquitification fuels discrimination and Hispanophobia. The difficulties Spanish-speakers at Chalupatown face when confronted with a chiquitified Spanish demonstrate the powerful impact of chiquitification in the everyday lives of Spanish-speakers.

Anglo Spanish as Mock Spanish

That Anglo use of Spanish is often simply Mock Spanish is evident in the exchange between a server and a bartender in example (11) below. The interaction occurs in a wait station, a small room with doorways on three sides that connects the kitchen, bar, and serving area. The area is only about four feet across, so that it is possible to conduct conversations across the room (such as between the bar and the kitchen). Because the area contains many items essential to servers (chips, soda machines, tea and coffee, an ice bin and a register), the wait station is continuously busy with numerous workers passing back and forth between parts of the workplace. The server is standing in the wait station filling glasses at the soda machine as the bartender is returning from the restroom. As the bartender passes through the wait station to the bar, the server stops and asks him to have the buser refill the ice bin.

Example (11) reflects the common practice among Anglo servers of avoiding directives to Spanish employees by passing them off to other employees, particularly those who are newer, younger, or lower-status (i.e., not necessarily based on their potential competence in Spanish). In this example, the server's choice to pass the directive off to the bartender may result from the face-threatening nature of this specific request. Refilling the ice bin is not the buser's responsibility, and the server is basically trying to trick the bartender into convincing the buser to perform what should be the server's own job responsibility (hence my response to the buser). As a fairly new employee, the bartender was unaware that the job was the server's responsibility and became angry when I explained the situation later.

In this example, the speakers immediately resort to Mock Spanish when discussing how to communicate to a Spanish speaker. The first example, mas ice-o, involves the use of Spanish grammatical elements on English words (the addition of +o to an English noun). Immediately upon learning (and correctly pronouncing) the Spanish word, the bartender turns to hyperanglicization (yellow). Although the other bartender asks me if yellow is close enough to be understood as hielo, he instructs the server to just say yellow before I have a chance to respond. The Mock Spanish nonce forms are quite funny to the speakers, and both the server and bartender laugh throughout and after the exchange. Here the Spanish does not serve to facilitate communication with the Spanish-speaking employee; it does little more than index the racial difference between the buser and the servers themselves. The Spanish is entirely for the benefit of the Anglo speakers' own amusement, and the actual Spanish speaker is quite marginal to the interaction despite the fact that it revolves around an attempt to communicate with him. Spanish simply serves to index a particular Anglo understanding of social affect and humor, but it does not actually serve the function of facilitating communication with Spanish speakers (see discussion below).

The widespread use of Spanish obscenities noted earlier is another affinity between Anglo Spanish at Chalupatown and the mass-media productions of Mock Spanish described by Hill. Spanish expletives occurred both as substitutes for English obscenities and in combination with English expletives. Several English male monolinguals frequently boasted about their ability to express obscenities accurately in Spanish. These male servers repeatedly produced Spanish obscenities as an attempt at humor. A few male servers would regularly approach monolingual Spanish-speaking males with no other purpose than to utter highly offensive Spanish words in isolation. One server in particular would persistently accost male Spanish-speaking employees and yell isolated Spanish obscenities referring to female anatomy. These outbursts were usually prompted by the presence of a female customer he found attractive somewhere in the restaurant. However, the woman in question was rarely (if ever) near enough to be recognized as a contextual factor, so his outbursts seemed to occur for no reason at all. The Spanish speakers would occasionally react with laughter, but more often simply roll their eyes or shake their heads. Among other Anglos, the word caca ‘shit’ was the most common Spanish obscenity. Managers would regularly used caca in directives such as “Why is there caca on the floor?” (referring to trash that has spilled). Thus, common uses of Spanish at Chalupatown reflected stereotypical forms of Mock Spanish both in terms of their English-centered structure and in their negative indexical associations.

Use of directives at Chalupatown

Verbal directives

The Anglo managers at Chalupatown had distinct individual responses to the problem of communicating with Spanish-speaking employees, depending on individual stances toward Latino co-workers. Two of the Anglo managers knew enough Spanish to produce directives that were understandable in Spanish. Both these managers recognized that racism was a problem in the restaurant, something most other managers denied. In sharp contrast, two managers who openly expressed racist attitudes both used only English in interactions with Spanish speakers, with the exception of a few select Spanish words that were common knowledge among all employees (e.g., mesa, agua, queso). Regardless of whether they were speaking English or Spanish, Anglo speakers would often produce the English items with exaggerated nonnative phonology (e.g.

) but produced anglicized forms of the Spanish items (e.g. [k^héjsow] for queso). Spanish speakers used unmodified Spanish phonology for both the English and Spanish words.

The managers using “pure” English typically produced directives containing elements of “foreigner talk” (Ferguson 1975, 1981). Foreigner talk is a register that speakers use in attempts to communicate when they assume that an interlocutor does not know the speaker's language. Features of foreigner talk used by Anglo workers at Chalupatown included exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, speaking at higher amplitude, exaggerated pronunciation, and syntactic reduction. Frequently, Anglo speakers would use an exaggerated Mock Spanish accent when communicating with Spanish-speaking co-workers – for example, the phrase “MORE CHIPS” with the second word produced

, accompanied by the gesture of pointing at the empty chip container. As with the use of Mock Spanish, the use of exaggerated nonnative pronunciation reproduced a negative racial stereotype for Anglo amusement.

The effectiveness of these directives was limited to a few specific contexts. Only one of the managers regularly sought out bilingual workers to translate directives to the kitchen staff. It is probably not coincidental that this particular manager grew up in Europe, was a native trilingual, and had a very positive attitude toward multilingualism.

The predominant means of issuing directives was used by managers with some knowledge of Spanish and involved utterances with primarily English content, with occasional words and (more rarely) phrases in Spanish. The amount of Spanish content varied, but it was sometimes insufficient for conveying meaning to a monolingual Spanish speaker. The phonology of these switches was always hyperanglicized, as in

for hablar and

for telefono in the following example:

Although directives of this type were quite frequent, the managers seemed to recognize that they were often unintelligible to monolingual Spanish speakers. In the following example, the manager openly admits that the directive was not understood:

It is assumed that Spanish-speaking employees will eventually “get used to” receiving directives that they cannot understand. Despite recognizing that directives were not always understood, managers typically blamed failure to follow a given directive on the Spanish-speaking employee. In the following example, a manager blames the failure on the “laziness” of the Spanish-speaking employee rather than on miscommunication, despite the fact that the directive contained only three words in Spanish, none of which is particularly helpful for determining the meaning of the sentence:

Having been told only ‘all this’ and ‘because’ in Spanish, the employee was left without sufficient information to comprehend the directive; it could be equally interpreted as ‘I'll finish all of this because you have other things to do’. Nonetheless, when the directive was not followed, the manager accused the employee of being lazy.

These verbal directives maintain their performative effect as directives. Spanish speakers recognize that they are expected to perform some task. However, the referential function of the directives often fails because of the limited Spanish content. Spanish speakers are thus left in a situation where they must complete directives they may not fully understand (see below). The actions of Spanish speakers are evaluated as if the failure to fulfill directives were a willful act rather than a failure to understand. The linguistic form of these directives restricts the agency of Spanish speakers by limiting the effect their actions may have both on themselves and on others. Spanish speakers are often left with insufficient information for performing their job successfully but are still subject to managerial evaluation of their actions.

Written notices for employees

Written notices posted for employees were much more likely to be entirely in Spanish, as opposed to the predominantly English verbal directives. The notices were sometimes written out by hand but more often prepared using a computer. Translations were either written out by managers themselves (often after consulting a bilingual) or obtained by using machine translation programs available over the Internet. Bilinguals were more likely to be consulted in the production of written notices than in the case of verbal directives. In cases where a bilingual was used, the translation was often orally transmitted, resulting in numerous changes when it was written down by the monolingual English speaker. The written notices typically contained sufficient Spanish for comprehension but displayed very little regard for actual Spanish grammar. For example, the written notice below (a reminder about daylight savings time) contains a mix of accurate and ungrammatical language:

In this case, the manager consulted with a bilingual speaker before printing out the final version of the notice. These consultations were cursory, usually just intended to check for the comprehensibility of particular words or phrases. Thus, the final version of the notice contains several errors despite the input of a native speaker (e.g. a su relog for del reloj, en la noche for por la noche). Notices prepared in consultation with bilinguals often contained grammatical forms not typically used by the managers themselves. For example, the notice about time change contains a fairly sophisticated use of the subjunctive and future tenses (cuando sean las 12:00 pm seran las 11:00pm) that would not normally occur in the spoken Spanish of any of the Anglo managers.

The only time I was asked to check a translation, I was explicitly told not to worry about whether the grammar and spelling were correct, but only to verify that the notice would be understandable to a monolingual Spanish speaker. I was told that the use of “correct” Spanish was unnecessary because “most of them can't read anyway.” This explanation surfaced repeatedly both as a justification for disregarding the grammatical rules of Spanish and as an explanation for misunderstandings in the transmission of kitchen orders (see below).

The managers and owners regularly (and incorrectly) asserted that the majority of the kitchen staff was illiterate. Although it would make sense to assume that a person with supposedly limited literacy skills would be more likely to understand written language if it were actually grammatical, the managers assumed that because the workers didn't regularly use formal standard Spanish, it was acceptable to address them in language that was highly nonstandard and irregular. This view persisted despite the fact that employees regularly corrected the ungrammatical Spanish in written notices, as in the example below:

As posted, the verb in the second sentence of the posting (abra) was written without the initial 〈h〉 and without the accent on the final vowel. The written form is the present tense subjunctive of abrir ‘to open’ rather than the (intended) future form of haber ‘to do’. The employee's correction restores the intended semantic content in addition to correcting spelling errors. Although the verb was corrected by a Spanish-speaking worker, this particular nonstandard orthography was actually used by some of the workers themselves. For example, the only notice written by the workers themselves contains exactly the same error:

Written notices posted by managers also contained sporadic inclusions of English content words with no regard for whether the employees would know what the English words actually meant, as in the examples below (note also that necesito is spelled incorrectly in the second example despite the fact that the correct spelling is closer to the English cognate “necessary”):

The most striking difference between Spanish and English notices posted at Chalupatown was that English notices were almost always mitigated in some way, while Spanish notices were more direct. Typically, English notices included an explanation for a particular directive, particularly in cases in which the workers might react negatively to the directive itself:

In example (20), the directive against eating avocados is accompanied by a justification (the price of avocados). The quotes around “high cost” seem to mark emphasis. Like the Spanish-speaking employees, English-speaking workers regularly corrected such errors on the notices themselves, often adding negative comments about the management. In example (21), the directive against placing objects behind registers also comes with an explanation. The informal tone of the justification (electrical thingys) and the inclusion of thank you further mitigate the directive. While nonstandard English marks familiarity, nonstandard Spanish serves to maintain social distance.

In contrast, Spanish-language notices were very direct and rarely included justification or explanations; they sometimes went so far as to include threats. An example is a notice that appeared during the “toilet paper war” between management and employees. There were often problems with the plumbing at Chalupatown, particularly in the restrooms. Overflowing toilets were common, especially on weekends when the restaurant was extremely busy. The busers regularly had to deal with these floods by manually unclogging the toilets and cleaning the water and excrement from the bathroom floor. Because the toilet was a continual problem, many of the Spanish-speaking workers put used toilet paper on the floor rather than placing it directly in the toilet and contributing to another flood. This follows the practice in most parts of Mexico and Central America, where the plumbing cannot operate properly when paper is flushed down the toilet. Many of the Mexican and Guatemalan workers maintained this practice in their own homes, placing a waste basket beside the toilet to collect paper rather than flushing it. Although the management was aware of this practice, they did not want waste baskets beside the toilets and were upset by customer complaints about piles of used toilet paper on the floor.

The managers first attempted to resolve the problem by selectively directing busers to not leave paper on the floor and asking them to spread the word to other Spanish-speaking employees. When the busers were told to let other employees know to flush their paper, they responded by explaining the problem with the plumbing and asking for the toilet to be fixed in order to accommodate flushed paper. The requests for repairs were ignored, and the verbal directives failed to resolve the problem. The management then posted the following written notice:

In addition to the predictable grammatical errors (e.g., de el for del), the notice is somewhat overstated. The most direct way to make this directive would be simply to say, “Don't throw toilet paper on the floor” (“No tire Usted papel higénico al suelo”). The highly explicit and threatening nature of the notice contrasts sharply with the mitigated English notices and reflects the assumption that Spanish-speaking employees have a general problem with comprehending directives and require overly explicit directions accompanied by threats. It also places responsibility for the problem entirely with the workers themselves, ignoring the fact that the workers were acting in what they saw as the best interest of the restaurant by attempting to avoid overflowing toilets. The notice was not successful in stopping the appearance of toilet paper on the restroom floor. Because the owners had no plans to repair the plumbing and hence expected the busers to continue to clean flooded restrooms regularly, the kitchen workers were offended that their side of the problem had not been addressed. The threatening tone of the notice only complicated matters, and an employee tore the notice down after a few days. Eventually the managers held a meeting for all kitchen workers specifically to deal with the toilet paper problem. In the course of the meeting, the management finally agreed to bring in a plumber, and both problems (flooded restrooms and paper on the floor) were eventually resolved. The “toilet paper war” could have been resolved easily by responding to the busers' initial requests for plumbing repairs. The busers' recommendations were not taken seriously (or perhaps even listened to) until the situation had become something of a crisis.

Because native speakers were often consulted in their production, written notices were more likely to succeed in terms of both their directive function and their referential function; that is, they were more likely to be understood than were verbal directives. However, the disregard for Spanish grammar indexes a negative evaluation of Spanish and Spanish speakers. The chiquitification of Spanish sets up unequal relationships between participants in an interaction. The disregard for Spanish grammar was typically accompanied by a disregard for Spanish speakers as cultural actors.

System for taking food orders

Disregard for Spanish grammar also resulted in problems with the computerized system for delivering food orders to the kitchen. Servers placed orders using a touch-screen computer with windows containing various options. When someone entered a table number, a screen would open with options such as BREAKFAST, SPECIALS, ENTREES. Touching the desired window would open a new screen listing particular menu items with MODIFY and DONE keys. The MODIFY key would lead to a screen of options including side orders and ingredients, with commands such as SUB (substitute), ON SIDE, NO (to remove a particular ingredient or side dish). All of the keys on the server screens were in English, with the exception of borrowed names of particular foods, such as enchilada. When the server placed an order, the computer printed a “translated” version in the kitchen so that the order could be prepared. The translations were entirely based on one-to-one correspondences, so that each English key corresponded to a specific Spanish output. Some of the translations included obvious grammatical errors. For example, ON SIDE was translated as ALADA (literally ‘winged’) rather than actual Spanish AL LADO ‘on the side’. Although there were several exceptions, content words were generally left in English and function words were typically translated into Spanish, as in the example below:

As with other forms of directives, the disregard for Spanish grammar has led to the production of directives that are not easily interpreted. The (English) server screen contained distinct keys for WITH, SUB, and ADD. However, in the kitchen output, all of these terms were translated as CON (literally ‘with’). The distinctions between the three command keys were often crucial to intended meaning:

In the kitchen printout, orders using SUB or ADD were indistinguishable from those using WITH (all appearing as CON). For servers, the distinction between ADD and WITH was a question of price. ADD would be used to add more of an ingredient that was already included in the item (such as adding extra meat to a taco). In contrast, WITH meant to add ingredients that did not add to cost (such as adding lettuce to a taco). When ADD was used to increase a particular ingredient, the resulting kitchen order (translated as CON) could be illogical or confusing. For example OMELETTE ADD EGG was translated as OMELETTE CON HUEVO ‘omelette with egg’. Since all omelettes contain eggs, an order for “omelette with egg” was entirely redundant and provided no suggestion that the server was actually requesting an omelette made with four eggs instead of three. Failure to add the additional ingredient was typically interpreted as the result of conscious neglect or “stinginess” on the part of the kitchen staff.

Similar problems arose with the use of the SUB command (also translated as CON). Servers usually assumed that the item to be removed in a substitution would be obvious unless specified. When substituting black beans for refried beans on a dish that was always served with refried beans, for example, adding SUB BLK BN (‘substitute black beans’) presupposed that the reader knew that the black beans replaced refried beans rather than rice or cheese, for example. The order would be translated as CON BLK BN ‘with black beans’, giving no indication that an actual substitution was involved. The common mistake resulting from this translation error was for the cook to add both types of beans to the dish, a logical interpretation of the translation. These substitution errors were typically seen as resulting from the kitchen staff's being lazy by not reading tickets correctly, simply being “stupid,” or consciously making things difficult for the server (sometimes owing to real or imagined animosity between particular individuals). As with verbal directives, the system for placing orders limited the ability of Spanish speakers to perform their job duties successfully and thus receive positive evaluations of their actions from co-workers and managers.

Fulfilling directives one doesn't understand

Because failure to respond to directives was usually blamed on the Spanish-speaking employee, repeated failure to respond properly could lead to losing one's job. Asking for clarification often resulted in reprimand from the manager, and so some employees asked for more explicit or clearer instructions only as a last resort. Reprimands ranged from verbal admonishment to being fired. Failure to fulfill a directive typically resulted in scolding from a manager, but repeated failures to comply (or a single serious failure) could result in being “written up” or losing one's job.

Spanish-speaking employees had several mechanisms for coping with the continual demand to follow directives they did not understand. These strategies included extensive training, seeking clarification from more senior Spanish-speaking employees, and seeking the help of a bilingual.

Spanish-speaking employees took a very careful approach to employee training. Training of English-speaking employees usually consisted of one day of “shadowing” the trainer, followed by a day in which the trainee would do the majority of work under the trainer's supervision. Tasks of sporadic or rare occurrence (such as servers' placing specially modified food orders or bartenders' changing the carbon dioxide tanks for soft drinks) were usually not covered during the training of English-speaking employees. It was generally understood that when such needs arose, the employee could simply ask a manager for instructions. In contrast, the Spanish-speaking employees recognized that newly trained employees would need to know about all possible tasks (including relatively rare ones) because it was likely that they would never receive clear instructions from managers. Because of this difference in access to information, the initial training for Spanish speakers included details concerning locations for storing utensils and putting away shipments, including things that were rarely used.

In cases where a manager's directive involved something that hadn't been covered in training, employees would usually seek clarification from a more senior Spanish-speaking employee. Because most of the cooks had previously worked as dishwashers or busers, they were often familiar enough with other jobs in the restaurant to help the newer employee determine the meaning of a particular directive. In these cases, the newer employee would explain his limited understanding of a directive and request elaboration. Managers would sometimes use kitchenware or tools as a visual aid when giving verbal directives, and newer employees would simply carry the tool to a more senior employee and ask, “What am I supposed to do with this?” This means of seeking advice was the most common response to interpreting directives involving tasks that had not been covered in training.

Employees faced with directives they did not understand would also ask for help from a bilingual co-worker if one were readily available. In cases of very rare or highly specific directives, other monolingual employees often were also unable to interpret a particular directive, and looking for a bilingual was the employee's only option before returning to the manager and possibly facing a reprimand. Monolingual Spanish-speaking employees would typically try to remember the English content of directives in order to be able to ask a bilingual to translate a particular word or phrase so they could fully understand the directive in question. For example, I had the following interaction with a buser trying to interpret a directive – which must have been something like “We need more soap in the baño” – without knowing the English word soap (having heard English [sowp] as [su:p]).

On occasions when the Spanish-speaking employee could not remember the English content of a directive or when the directive had absolutely no retrievable Spanish content, even bilingual co-workers were unable to help. In these cases, the Spanish-speaking employee was only able to ask very general questions, such as “What does she want me to do?” These cases were most likely to result in the Spanish-speaking employee's returning to the manager for clarification. Employees were aware that a longer time spent trying to understand a directive would result in being scolded for not having fulfilled the directive promptly. Occasionally, employees would ask a bilingual to go to the manager directly and explain that the Spanish speaker did not know what was expected of him. Even if the bilingual were willing to intervene, this did not mean that a reprimand was always avoided: The manager would sometimes scold the employee both for not fulfilling the directive and for interrupting the bilingual's regular work.

Spanish as a marker of solidarity

The majority of Anglo workers did not generally pay attention to conversations between Spanish speakers in which no Anglos were involved. Latino workers were thus able to vent frustrations and negative assessments of co-workers fairly openly. Discussions about issues of racism, exceptionally rare in English, were quite common in Spanish. English-language discussions about race almost universally involved stereotyped assessments of customers or negative attitudes toward Latino co-workers. In contrast, Spanish-language discussions often dealt with racist attitudes of individual English-speaking workers or the general problem of racism in the restaurant.

Spanish-speaking workers would regularly discuss which co-workers were seen as racistas ‘racists’ and which were buena gente ‘good people’. These discussions were generally framed as a mechanism for improving working conditions by alerting co-workers to avoid potential problems by avoiding interactions with potential racistas. Discussions of the possible racist attitudes of individual co-workers, especially managers, allowed workers to warn one another in order to avoid problematic interactions that might result in arguments. Because it was generally recognized that requests made to a racista were unlikely to be fulfilled, these discussions improved workplace efficiency by alerting workers to which Anglo co-workers were cooperative and which were more likely to complicate interactions because of their racist attitudes (cf. Lindeman 2002). New workers were often highly conscious of the racista and buena gente categories, frequently asking about different co-workers in order to learn which ones were best avoided.

Anglo co-workers most widely recognized as racistas were those who had repeatedly reprimanded or yelled at Spanish-speaking workers for minor infractions, particularly those that would typically go unmentioned if committed by an English-speaking worker. As is often the case with managers who are viewed as mean or unfair, employees would alert one another when the manager was present in the workplace. It should be noted that the two most prominent racistas were also negatively viewed by Anglo employees, suggesting that a more generally abrasive personality could contribute to the perception of one as racista.

Neither group of employees, Anglo nor Latino, generally knew the names of all the co-workers from the other group. Anglo workers did not generally talk about or interact with specific Latino employees enough to learn their names. In contrast, Spanish-speaking employees generally developed Spanish nicknames for many of the Anglo employees. This may be partially due to the difference in job duties. A server makes requests to the kitchen as a whole, while kitchen workers fill requests for specific servers. A server would not generally know who was preparing his or her order, but kitchen workers would know exactly which servers placed each order they prepared. Some of the nicknames referred to an individual's disposition or personality, such as La Loca ‘the Crazy Woman’ or El Joto ‘the Fag’, (offensive). More typically, they referred to an individual's physical characteristics, like Pelón ‘Baldy’, La Gordita ‘the Chubby Woman’, or Nalgona ‘the Woman with a Big Butt’ (offensive). Because nicknames were most common for Anglos who did not interact with Latino co-workers, most Anglos referred to by nicknames did not realize that they even had them.

Nicknames were regularly used to discuss racista co-workers openly in Spanish even when the manager in question was present. One manager who was relatively short in stature was nicknamed Culerín ‘Little Asshole’ (offensive). Another manager who frequently came to work high and took breaks to smoke marijuana behind the building was nicknamed El Chinito ‘the Little Chinese Man’ because he always kept his eyes squinted under the bright lights of the kitchen.

Although Anglo fears of Spanish being used in insults were generally exaggerated, Spanish-speaking employees would sometimes conduct negative appraisals of an Anglo co-worker in the co-worker's presence. Sometimes, mocking comments in Spanish would be directly addressed to an Anglo worker with the knowledge that the addressee was unlikely to understand what was being said.

Bilingual workers would also use code-switching to exploit the pragmatic potential of Spanish (cf. Valdés 1981). Switching into Spanish in a conversation with monolingual English-speaking participants might be used to exclude Anglos from the conversation. In the following example, the server Carmen (one of the two bilingual servers) uses Spanish to taunt the manager Culerín by hinting that he is the topic of the Spanish conversation. Culerín is managing the bar and thus has supervision over me, but not over Carmen. When the interaction begins, I am preparing drinks for servers and Carmen approaches to see if her order is ready. She begins talking about Culerín in Spanish while he is not present, but continues talking about him (to me in Spanish) after he approaches and attempts to enter into the conversation.

After a minimal phatic response to Culerín in English (I'm fine), Carmen returns to Spanish, telling me that she hates Culerín even though he has tried to start a conversation with her in English. When I ask whom she is referring to, she points her head at Culerín and says él (3rd singular pronoun). Carmen raises her voice and adds emphatic pitch accent when she says él and tu jefe, both Spanish phrases Culerín is likely to understand. Culerín begins by trying to initiate a friendly conversation with Carmen in English, but quickly moves to a managerial stance. Culerín's reaction, telling us to stop talking and return to work, suggests that he has gotten the hint. His reaction is understandable, since directly telling us not to talk about him in Spanish might convey insecurity or paranoia on his part.

After Carmen continues in Spanish, Culerín tries again to halt the Spanish conversation by telling her again to return to work, despite the fact that he is technically not her supervisor. Servers regularly complained about the fact that Culerín would try to tell them what to do even when he had no supervisory power over them. Carmen switches into English for her final comment to me, see, that's why, referring to the fact that Culerín has overstepped his job duties by acting like her boss. The switch into English as she walks away makes it fairly clear that Culerín was indeed the topic of our Spanish conversation without giving him an opportunity to respond.

Here Carmen is able to turn the tables and use Spanish in order to restrict the agency of Culerín. She drops hints about the referential meaning so that Culerín may recognize that he is the topic of the conversation. Because the conversation is in Spanish, Culerín is unable openly to express evaluation of the interaction or defend himself. He resorts to a position of relative power by taking a managerial stance in an attempt to end the conversation altogether.

Sometimes, mocking comments in Spanish would be directly addressed to an Anglo worker with the knowledge that the addressee was unlikely to catch all of what was being said. Most of the time, humor at the expense of Anglo co-workers went entirely unnoticed. On one occasion, a manager who was having a particularly bad hair day told me that she had been receiving compliments from the kitchen staff. She said, “The cooks told me I looked really pretty today. They said they liked my hair.” Somewhat bewildered, given the state of her hair, I simply said “That's nice” and remained silent. After a short pause, the manager asked, “Hey, what does escoba [‘broom’] mean?” Clearly she had not understood the sarcastic nature of the cooks' compliments. Thus, although the irrelevance of Spanish for managers made work more difficult for Spanish speakers, it also made it possible openly to vent frustrations and criticisms without sparking reprimands from managers.

Spanish as a tool of resistance

Anglo language ideology at Chalupatown constrained the agency of the Latino workers in English-dominated contexts, but the Anglo disregard for Spanish also made it possible for Latino workers to use Spanish to develop an alternative linguistic market. Although kitchen workers had control over very few resources in the restaurant, the Anglo disregard allowed kitchen workers to use Spanish to exert control over the limited resources available to them. Because the owners were concerned about theft by employees, many of the resources workers required to perform their jobs were kept in locked cabinets that could be opened only by a manager. Servers would regularly hide resources such as pens, credit card trays, and aprons to make sure that they could get them without help from a manager. For bartenders, hosts, and kitchen workers, garbage bags were the most difficult resource to obtain.

Although garbage bags were mostly used by busers and cooks, bartenders and hosts required them as well. Garbage bags were most needed toward the end of a shift, when managers were usually extremely busy and unlikely to stop and unlock the cabinet containing garbage bags. As it could take up to half an hour just to find a manager willing to open the cabinet, garbage bags took on great value for the workers who needed them. Some managers would occasionally give out an entire roll at once, since opening the cabinet repeatedly while trying to close the restaurant was impractical. Others would never give out more than one or two bags at a time. Because one never knew when the chance to get more bags would come around, workers would hoard garbage bags and hide them from other employees. I was actually told about the importance of hiding surplus garbage bags as part of my initial training as a bartender. Disputes over garbage bags were a regular occurrence, and workers would regularly change the secret location of their bags to keep them from being taken by other workers.

Because busers used many more bags than other employees, managers were more likely to fulfill their requests for an entire roll. Busers working day shifts would often save bags for those working at night and let them know where they were hidden. Busers were able to maintain the largest garbage bag stockpile in the restaurant and would usually share the location with other Spanish-speaking workers. Because I often worked shifts that overlapped with morning and evening buser schedules, the morning busers would often tell me the location of garbage bags (in Spanish) so that I could inform the busers working the night shift. Spanish speakers thus had better access to bags than English speakers and were less likely to end up in conflicts when they needed a bag. The option of simply asking where the bags were located was not available to other bartenders who did not speak Spanish regularly (i.e., those who used Spanish only for requests and directives). The busers would sometimes tease bartenders in Spanish rather than tell them where the bags were. For example, another bartender in search of bags once told me, “The bags are in the escondidas, wherever that is.” (escondidas ‘hidden’, feminine plural)

Bartenders were often told they could leave as soon as the garbage had been taken out. If there were no bags, this might mean that the bartender would leave work late simply because of the time wasted searching for bags. If a bartender became frustrated trying to find bags, the access afforded by speaking Spanish took on real value, because busers would sometimes insist that bartenders give beer to all the kitchen workers in exchange for a few garbage bags.

Because of the division of labor along racial lines, Latino workers also had more direct access to food within the restaurant. At Chalupatown, servers could order food at half price, while bartenders, hosts, and kitchen workers received one free meal for each shift that they worked (excluding several of the higher-priced menu items). Because the Latino employees worked in the kitchen, they could prepare whatever they wanted with the ingredients available, while Anglo employees usually had to order from the menu. During periods when business was relatively slow, the cooks would sometimes prepare a large amount of a special dish for all of the kitchen workers. Word would spread around the restaurant in Spanish, so that the cooks could get an idea of how much food to prepare. The Anglo workers tired of eating off the same menu five days a week would often complain, “Why can't we get that?” When two of my Anglo co-workers realized that I was regularly asked if I wanted a serving, they asked if I could help “get them on the list.”

Spanish also provided different access to food because of interactions with the delivery drivers for produce companies. The drivers all spoke Spanish and would sometimes leave gifts of fruit for the kitchen staff. Sometimes drivers or employees themselves would bring pastries for other workers. In the summer, the produce driver would leave a watermelon once every week or two. A group of Anglo servers once took the watermelon for a party to which kitchen workers were not invited. After this, the kitchen staff began to hide the watermelon in the cooler. As with specially prepared dishes, news that the watermelon was about to be cut or that pastries were available would spread through the restaurant in Spanish, making it unlikely that Anglos would be able to partake. Although the resources involved were fairly petty items like garbage bags and watermelons, kitchen workers were able to use Spanish to control the resources that were available to them.

Pretending not to understand

Another way in which Spanish allowed for resistance in the workplace was the possibility of pretending not to understand a directive. Because Anglo employees typically made little effort to make themselves understood in Spanish, Latino workers generally had that option. This strategy was not widely used and would not be effective in many cases owing to an assumption of comprehension by managers (cf. ex. 14 above). Contrary to the assumption of Anglo managers, Spanish-speaking workers would rarely if ever use this strategy to avoid their actual work responsibilities. Pretending not to understand was most frequently used to avoid conflict in cases where an Anglo employee asked a kitchen worker to violate workplace rules. Some of the Anglo employees would regularly try to get kitchen workers to perform tasks for them, as in the example of refilling the ice bin. For several weeks, some Anglo servers would pay busers extra money to perform what should have been the servers' own side work (e.g., sweeping their section, refilling salt and pepper shakers). This practice was prohibited after the managers were forced to stay late one night, waiting for two busers to perform the side work ten different servers had paid them to do. Other examples in which servers might make special requests include asking for food items without ringing them in on the register, requesting larger helpings, and asking busers to pour water and tea for customers. In these cases, pretending not to understand was a viable strategy because the Anglo employees were aware that they were asking a co-worker to break the rules and would not generally press the issue. Although Anglos typically assumed that kitchen workers pretended not to understand a wide range of directives, this strategy was actually used most frequently in cases where Anglos were both trying to exploit Spanish-speaking co-workers and violating workplace rules. Pretending not to understand blocked Anglo attempts to assert control over the actions of Spanish-speaking employees, but it also reinforced the Anglo perception that Spanish speakers understood English more than they let on.