Prof explores MexiRican Spanish

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

MONMOUTH - Kim Potowski, a member of the University of Illinois-Chicago's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, will speak at Monmouth College at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Morgan Room of Poling Hall.

Titled "I Was Raised Talking Like My Mom: The Influence of Mothers on the Spanish of MexiRicans," the talk is free and open to the public.

"The U.S. Latino population is not only growing, it is also becoming increasingly diverse," said Potowski, who studied 27 "MexiRicans" - individuals with one Mexican and one Puerto Rican parent. "Although many expressed a concept of Latino identity that incorporated aspects of both Hispanic backgrounds, several factors affected the expression of either Mexican or Puerto Rican identity."

Potowski's study found that almost 75 percent of the participants were rated as having dialect traits similar to those of their mother's ethnolinguistic group, underscoring the role of mothers in language transmission and the development of minority language identity.