Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos' need to identify ourselves as a distinct people. We needed a language with which we could communicate with ourselves, a secret language. For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest—for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are:
Standard English
Working class and slang English
Standard Spanish
Standard Mexican Spanish
North Mexican Spanish dialect
Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have regional variations)
Tex-Mex
Pachuco (called calo)
My "home" tongues are the languages I speak with my sister and brothers, with my friends. They are the last five listed, with 6 and 7 being closest to my heart. From school, the media and job situations, I've picked up standard and working class English. From Mamagrande Locha and from reading Spanish and Mexican literature, I've picked up Standard Spanish and Standard Mexican Spanish. From los recien llegados, Mexican immigrants, and braceros, I learned the North Mexican dialect. With Mexicans I'll try to speak either Standard Mexican Spanish or the North Mexican dialect. From my parents and Chicanos living in the Valley, I picked up Chicano Texas Spanish, and I speak it with my mom, younger brother (who married a Mexican and who rarely mixes Spanish with English), aunts and older relatives.
With Chicanas from Nuevo Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Spanish a lit- 15 tle, but often they don't understand what I'm saying. With most California Chicanas I speak entirely in English (unless I forget). When I first moved to San Francisco, I'd rattle off something in Spanish, unintentionally embarrassing them. Often it is only with another Chicana tejana that I can talk freely.
Words distorted by English are known as anglicisms or pochismos. The pocho is an anglicized Mexican or American of Mexican origin who speaks Spanish with an accent characteristic of North Americans and who distorts and reconstructs the
language according to the influence of English.[95] Tex-Mex, or Spanglish, comes most naturally to me. I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word. With my sister and my brother Nune and with Chicano tejano contemporaries I speak in Tex-Mex.
From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco. Pachuco (the language of the zoot suiters) is a language of rebellion, both against Standard Spanish and Standard English. It is a secret language. Adults of the culture and outsiders cannot understand it. It is made up of slang words from both English and Spanish. Ruca means girl or woman, vato means guy or dude, chale means no, simon means yes, churro is sure, talk is periquiar, pigionear means petting, que gacho means how nerdy, ponte dguila means watch out, death is called la pelona. Through lack of practice and not having others who can speak it, I've lost most of the Pachuco tongue.
Chicano Spanish
Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization, have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak. We collapse two adjacent vowels into a single syllable and sometimes shift the stress in certain words such as maizjmaiz, cohete/cuete. We leave out certain consonants when they appear between vowels: lado/lao, mojado/ mojao. Chicanos from South Texas pronounce f as j as in jue (fue). Chicanos use "archaisms," words that are no longer in the Spanish language, words that have been evolved out. We say semos, truje, haiga, ansina, and naiden. We retain the "archaic" j, as in jalar, that derives from an earlier h (the French halar or the Germanic halon which was lost to standard Spanish in the 16th century), but which is still found in several regional dialects such as the one spoken in South Texas. (Due to geography, Chicanos from the Valley of South Texas were cut off linguistically from other Spanish speakers. We tend to use words that the Spaniards brought over from Medieval Spain. The majority of the Spanish colonizers in Mexico and the Southwest came from Extremadura—Hernan Cortes was one of them—and Andalucia. Andalucians pronounce ll like a y, and their d's tend to be absorbed by adjacent vowels: tirado becomes tirao. They brought el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalismos.[96])
Chicanos and other Spanish speakers also shift ll to y and z to s.[97] We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, toy for estoy, hora for ahora (cubanos and puertorriquenos also leave out initial letters of some words). We also leave out the final syllable such as pa for para. The intervocalic y, the ll as in tortilla, ella, botella, gets replaced by tortia or tortiya, ea, botea. We add an additional syllable at the
los Chicanos: Regional and Social Characteristics of Language Used by Mexican Americans (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1975), 39. 6. Hernandez-Chavez, xvii.
beginning of certain words: atocar for tocar, agastar for gastar. Sometimes we'll say lavaste las vacijas, other times lavates (substituting the ates verb endings for the aste).
We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from ball, carpeta from 20 carpet, mdchina de lavar (instead of lavadora) from washing machine. Tex-Mex argot, created by adding a Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such as cookiar for cook, watchar for watch, parkiar for park, and rapiar for rape, is the result of the pressures on Spanish speakers to adapt to English.
We don't use the word vosotros/as or its accompanying verb form. We don't say claro (to mean yes), imagrnate, or me emociona, unless we picked up Spanish from Latinas, out of a book or in a classroom. Other Spanish-speaking groups are going through the same, or similar, development in their Spanish.
Linguistic Terrorism
Desleguadas. Somos los del espanol deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare,
your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla.
Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially,
culturally and linguistically somos huerfanos—we speak an orphan tongue.
Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other.