ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses the mutually constitutive relationship between participants’ language practices and the social structures of their families and networks and the local urban landscape of Phoenix, Arizona. It explores queer Mexicans/Latinxs’ self- and other- presentation in personal narratives. The book shows how identities are produced, and discovers how identified people and Mexican/Latinx communities are talked into being, imagined, and rejected. It attempts to address the question of the exclusion of queer bilinguals in research on language maintenance and shift, particularly the maintenance of Spanish in the US The book draws on data from sociolinguistic questionnaires related to language proficiency, language use, and social network relationships, as well as from interviews. It provides a thorough exploration of queer Mexican/Latinx narratives about coming out, about resisting the coming-out imperative, and about one translatina’s tellings of self-definition, disclosure, migrating, and transitioning.
