ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the apparent paradox of Spanish in Miami, i.e. Spanish is spoken by a local majority who positively value and accord it political and economic prestige, yet it is oftentimes culturally and socially stigmatized by the youth of successive generations who appear reluctant to speak it. In a questionnaire study, teenagers of lower-income versus upper-income backgrounds provided significantly different responses to a series of items regarding the roles and values of Spanish and English, reflecting differential degrees of orientation toward the ‘language as commodity’ ideology of economic neoliberalism and the exigency of English in the broader scheme of things. In this respect, Miami offers an intimate glimpse into the complex vertical scalar orders of language contact situations in postmodernity (Blommaert 2010), and into the rescalings or reconfigurations that characterize Spanish vis-à-vis English in the global era. In Miami, superdiverse Spanish-speaking migratory flows crisscross hegemonic English language use across all socioeconomic strata; the perception of Spanish ‘on the ground’ is conditioned by the ideological discursive construction of Spanish ‘in the marketplace’ on a higher-level vertical scalar order. This chapters suggests that this crisscrossing constitutes a parodic practice in Hutcheon’s (2002) terms, or a paradoxical combination of localism and transnationalism vis-à-vis nationalism.
