ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the ways that Puerto Rican and Mexican New Northwest High School (NNHS) students construct national identities by creating and engaging in symbolic practices that remap the boundaries between Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Chicago. It presents that Puerto Rico and Mexico are understood to exist in Chicago through processes of reterritorialization. The chapter illustrates spatial-diasporic and ethnolinguistic elements of panethnic category-making processes, with the ultimate goal of demonstrating how Chicago becomes a central site for imagining and experiencing Latina/o panethnicity. It analyzes the interplay between ideas about language and place in the construction of panethnic identities. The chapter investigates sociolinguistic fashioning of Latina/o panethnicity in NNHS. It points to a set of hybrid language practices to demonstrate how the diasporic remapping of Puerto Rico and Mexico within Chicago corresponds to the linguistic remapping of Spanish within English.
