Resisting A-Political Linguistics: Using D-Smoke’s El Rey as a Multi-Modal Case for Mapping a Blaxican Contact Variety
In this presentation, I discuss the implications of privileging value-based political research agendas in linguistics and affirm the impossibility of objective scientific linguistic research. Instead, I argue that linguists must cultivate a practice of transparency, noting not only their positionalities (see Lin 2015; Clemons and Lawrence 2020; Clemons 2024 for reference to these calls) but also in their political motivations. In this way decisions about research questions, frames, and interpretations become clearer. Since research in linguistics often attends to the contact of speakers of different languages/varieties, but also tends to disregard the humanistic study of language as social practice, the current paper draws on the work of social, political, and (racio)linguistic theorists to propose an unruly entrance into mapping a contact variety of Spanish used by Black, Mexican, and Blaxican communities in Southern California.
The paper provides a cultural and linguistic analysis of the 2022 D-Smoke (Daniel Anthony Farris) song El Rey, as a representative of uniquely Black and Mexican soundscape. Using the song, which features a prominent sampling of José Alfredo Jiménez’s classic ranchera, we ask what is salient about the Black Mexican soundscape of Inglewood, California. Moreover, we ask how this soundscape creates the possibility for a distinct Blaxican Spanish variety, which is explored through layers of linguistic and extra-linguistic code-switching, merging phonetic and syntactic switching with switches that are more visual and representational. We posit Black and Mexican sounds as aural signatures for Inglewood, California, the greater Los Angeles region, the greater California region, and ultimately the spaces where Black and Mexican subjectivities meet across the U.S. By exploring that which exists as Black and Mexican sonic, linguistic, and visual symbols in the song and official video for El Rey, we argue that D-Smoke creates a space of solidarity through a Blaxican soundscape while contesting identity regimes. Importantly, the Blaxican soundscape defined in this paper represents a site of negotiation, an audiotopia where identity is forged and language pedagogies, policies, and orientations can be (re)envisioned. Through the mapping of this example, I explicate my model for political transparency in linguistics that resists formerly constructed categorizations of linguistics as either theoretical or social. Moreover, I point to the ways that these studies insist on a conceptualization of language that is intimately tied to the body Bucholtz and Hall 2016), not only of those being researched but of the researchers themselves. In doing so, I argue for a model of language analysis grounded in a Black feminist framework that privileges people’s ability to define themselves through their own cultural and linguistic practices – self-determination – and that requires political transparency as linguistic praxis.
