Soft Linguistic Terrorism for the 21st Century: Standardizing Life Itself

by Dr. Mike Mena

Date: September 30, 2023

Venue: UTSA Downtown Campus

Room: TBD

Time: TBD

Abstract

                  At the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, “standard” language most strongly indexes a linguistic register from anywhere else but the local Mexican American home, spoken by anyone else but the local south Texas borderlands population – that is, a language from elsewhere with an assumed inherent superiority and economic value (Mena 2023, Mena 2022; Mena and García 2020). Over three decades ago, Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (2012 [1987]) identified ideologies of linguistic standardization as an oppressive force in the Rio Grande Valley of sout Texas. Such standard language ideologies were used to delegitimize Chicanos via “linguistic terrorism,” or, routine forms of psychological and physical punishment meant to enforce idealized white, middle-class, monolingual social norms. However, times have changed. To account for more recent conditions, I qualify contemporary manifestations as SOFT LINGUISTIC TERRORISM in order to acknowledge how such techniques of raciolinguistic governance have been modified for the 21st century. I argue that soft linguistic terrorism relies less so on punishment, and more so on incentivization and ideological recruitment, yet continue to reproduce the near identical racializing ideologies Anzaldúa earlier identified decades ago (i.e. the presumed deficiency of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and the production of the standard/substandard dichotomy).