Bilingual Humor, Verbal Hygiene, and the Gendered Contradictions of Cultural Citizenship in Early Mexican American Comedy

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Issue Date
2003Author
Haney, Peter C.
Publisher
American Anthropological Association
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This article examines the paradoxes of linguistic purism in a series of sound recordings of comic dialogues made by Mexican immigrant comedians in San Antonio, Texas, during the Depression. The dialogues present characters who mix English and Spanish as transgressors of gender roles and national identities, reserving their harshest criticism for women. However, bilingual wordplay in the dialogues suggests a dialectically opposed ideological move toward a celebration of linguistic and cultural hybridity.
Description
This is the Author's Final Draft. The publisher's official version is available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2003.13.2.163. The audio files are also available online at http://linguisticanthropology.org/journal/web-enhanced-articles/blingual-humor/ .
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Citation
Haney, Peter. (2003) “Bilingual Humor, Verbal Hygiene, and the Gendered Contradictions of Cultural Citizenship in Early Mexican American Comedy.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13(2), pp. 163-188. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2003.13.2.163
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