ABSTRACT
This chapter offers historical and contemporary ideological and cultural perspectives on Spanish in the US, as context for the book’s analysis of the sociolinguistic situation of the language in Miami. It is proposed that South Florida is a microcosm of the ways in which the situation of Spanish, particularly in its relationship to English, is gradually being reconfigured on local, national, and global scales. Economic neoliberalism, global consumerism, and the ‘scapes’ of globalization (Appadurai 1996) provide the conceptual basis of the argument that Spanish in Miami reflects various dimensions of incipient postmodernity. Separate sections trace the evolution of ideologies of Spanish in the US according to the ‘linguistic order’ from modernity to postmodernity and explain why Spanish in Miami offers us special insight into the postmodern sociolinguistic circumstance through the lens of financescapes, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes.
