Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community
By Marcia Farr
* Publisher: University of Texas Press
* Number Of Pages: 342
* Publication Date: 2006-12-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0292714831
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780292714830
Product Description:
Rancheros hold a distinct place in the culture and social hierarchy of Mexico, falling between the indigenous (Indian) rural Mexicans and the more educated city-dwelling Mexicans. In addition to making up an estimated twenty percent of the population of Mexico, rancheros may comprise the majority of Mexican immigrants to the United States. Although often mestizo (mixed race), rancheros generally identify as non-indigenous, and many identify primarily with the Spanish side of their heritage. They are active seekers of opportunity, and hence very mobile. Rancheros emphasize progress and a self-assertive individualism that contrasts starkly with the common portrayal of rural Mexicans as communal and publicly deferential to social superiors.
Marcia Farr studied, over the course of fifteen years, a transnational community of Mexican ranchero families living both in Chicago and in their village-of-origin in Michoacán, Mexico. For this ethnolinguistic portrait, she focuses on three culturally salient styles of speaking that characterize rancheros: franqueza (candid, frank speech); respeto (respectful speech); and relajo (humorous, disruptive language that allows artful verbal critique of the social order maintained through respeto). She studies the construction of local identity through a community's daily talk, and provides the first book-length examination of language and identity in transnational Mexicans.
In addition, Farr includes information on the history of rancheros in Mexico, available for the first time in English, as well as an analysis of the racial discourse of rancheros within the context of the history of race and ethnicity in Mexico and the United States. This work provides groundbreaking insight into the lives of rancheros, particularly as seen from their own perspectives.
Summary: the verbal franqueza style of Ranchero Mexican culture
Rating: 5
This scholarly work is an exceptional contribution to the fields of language and identity. Farr presents a very well researched ethnographic study on a major subgroup of Mexican transnationals, the Rancheros. These people are crucial in the creation of Mexican norte駉 culture, which allows for the first time to an English-reading audience an important pair of contrasts, to the Mexican elite of the metropolis and to the indian campesino of southern Mexico.
With fifteen years of cross-generational, cross-gender, and cross-border interaction, extensive and insightful reading of the key scholarships across disciplines, and exacting attention to the speech of her informants, Farr describes on-going on the fly cultural framing that Ranchero speech patterns, discourse patterns, and meta-discourse patterns create and reinforce. I knew from previous reading that Farr's work was insightful, but the depth of her thinking on Mexican discourse overwhelmed me. I could not read this book in a cursory manner; her descriptive insight into the language that I research (and in which I was raised; home culture) had me reaching for a note pad at every page. Before I finished the fifth chapter, I had filled twenty sheets in my cramped handwriting.
Farr's main argument is that the distinctive Ranchero culture is articulated by way of a distinctive discourse style, estilo franqueza. This culture is based on a liberal individualistic ideology that distinguishes it from sure駉 and metropolitano groups of Mexicans, as well as distinguishing it from Mexican indigenous and mestizo ways of life. Mexicans are often viewed homogeneously as sustaining a communal and anti-capitalist ideology, in contrast to (an also homogeneous) Anglo-American individualism and capitalist ideology. Farr describes Rancheros holding both a familial yet individualistic ideology. This is of course nothing new to Mexicanists, but Farr's contribution is to link the Ranchero discourse "verbal style," franqueza, to this ideology. And it is written for an English-reading audience. Moreover, Farr makes clear that franqueza is articulated by way of a "grammar of self-assertion" that is non-deferential; that it both allows for egalitarian stances among equals, and it establishes and affirms a patriarchal social order across the Ranchero community. Farr does this by describing the linguistic and discourse components of the grammar of self-assertion, and with fine examples, which are analyzed with clarity and aplomb! Franqueza, the "primary framework" in which Rancheros speak their society into existence, has two special frames, relajo and respeto. As Farr notes, these three discourses have been discussed (in different terms) by Latin Americanists for a time (e.g. Lauria 1964), but the strength of Farr's work is her emphasis on how the distinctive parts of Ranchero culture are expressed with the three: franqueza (individualism, progress, contrast with humilidad or ornateness, work without subservience, constructing Other Mexicans, and gender); respeto (individualism with familialism, social orderings, reciprocity); and relajo (stepping out of the everyday, to showcase talent and personal transformation, to comment on the everyday, and to enact gender).
This in itself would be quite a book, but the transnational character of Chicago Rancheros should make this manuscript invaluable to U.S.-oriented scholars. Farr provides Mexicanists and Chicano studies scholars of many disciplinary stripes with a great deal to think about. Much of what she points to regarding Ranchero culture can be extended with utility to norte駉 and Chicano or Mexican-American culture. This book should be read far beyond linguistic anthropology--across the social science spectrum (particularly by rhetoricians, political scientists, folklorists, gender scholars, public education scholars) as well as by scholars of various forms of cultural studies and history.
Farr avoids jargon and strives for clarity that too often escapes anthropologists enamored by social theory. This is an authoritative work, the capstone of fifteen years of ethnography and of scholarship that draws from much previously unintegrated thinking. This book will be worked over, aggressively critiqued, and cited intensely for the next fifteen years! |
楼主: 帆帆
erspective" and "viewpoint" are widely used in everyday talk as well as in the specialist languages of the social, cognitive, and literary sciences. Taken from the field of visual perception and representation, these concepts have acquired a general meaning and significance, as characteristics of human cognitive processing. Since, however, this field is shared by an increasing body of disciplines, perspective terms have also acquired specific and technical meanings. A striking example is the newly introduced use of "perspectivation" in discourse analysis. This volume on "perspective and perspectivation" should help to fill the gap between the common understanding of perspective and the specifics of its structure and dynamics as they have been elaborated in the human sciences, mainly in psychology and linguistics. The focus is on the structure of perspectivity in cognition and language, and the dynamics of setting and taking perspectives in social interaction and in the construction and understanding of texts. Both topics are presented here in an interdisciplinary way by a group of linguists and psychologists.