ABSTRACT
In the preceding two chapters I described how, in order to study the speech sounds of English-lapronunciación, el abecedario-a group of Mexican migrant workers recorded a series of strategic moves in a game played with letters and sounds. A move in that game took the form let this letter y in the roman alphabet take the value of this sound x in spoken English. I described how what I called a discourse on letters and sounds accompanied that game. I argued that every time the game was played, “normal” relationships between illegal aliens and legal citizens were temporarily suspended to give place to what I called a scene of writing.
