A Proud Corazón: Spanglish between History, Language and Representation

This dissertation deals with the phenomenon of Spanglish, a hybrid language recently born in the United States of America from the encounter of English and Spanish languages, or, to be more precise, from the bilingualism of their speakers, mainly individuals with Mexican or Latino American heritage. The first chapter begins the analysis by retracing the history of the United States, with a particular focus on the languages spoken through time, from the Declaration of Idependence, until today. We will see how English has been imposed to immigrants living in the US, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth century through the “Melting Pot” of Theodore Roosevelt, because of various political movements that wanted English to be the only language spoken in the country, but we will also see how minorities answered to this one-sided, discriminating view, and how the “Quilt” came to be. The second chapter will focus on Spanglish itself and on its speakers, illustrating the reasons why Spanish speaking people came to be such a large community in the US, and describing how Spanglish developed and what its linguistic features are. It will also be important to speak about the various conflicting views of linguists about Spanglish: there are those who believe it to be “good”, to be the language of newer generations of Hispanics in the US, and those who believe it is “bad”, because it contaminates both languages and prevents its speakers to be proficient in both of them. In the third chapter, I will talk about Spanglish representetion in the media, with all its aspects, stereotypes and clichés, with particular focus on cinema and television. In order to do this, I will start from the first apparitions in the media, and how they started to be part of popular culture.