ABSTRACT
The chapter documents some of the linguistic practices of two Latin Americans in a Madrid indoor market as they engage in everyday work activities. It reveals two different portraits of mobility, along a fluid-fixed continuum as crystallised in the fluctuance and permanence of their linguistic practices across and within market boundaries. Overall, the analysis of ethnographically gathered data offers a snapshot of the connections between linguistic practices and contexts of mobility in a workplace setting. Specifically, fixedness was found in a context of limited mobility, and hybridity in one of relative mobility. They were both associated with the characters’ respective migrant trajectories and oriented as valued, desirable, and contextually fitting.
