Translanguaging in the Linguistic Landscapes (LL) of the U.S./Mexico Border and U.S. Latine Transnational Spaces

Comparing Use and Identification in Sonora, México and Rhode Island, U.S.A.

Resumen

For a special issue on linguistic landscapes (LL) and bilingualism in the Global South, our paper, like others in this issue, provides a synchronic snapshot and a diachronic consideration of the societal and educational influence of a multilingual LL of a specific Global South context - Sonora, México. However, it also goes beyond this localized analysis to include a LL contrastive analysis with a Global North context - Rhode Island, U.S.A., to ask questions about language ideologies and educational possibilities across similar, yet distinct borderland and transnational spaces. Through a multi-institutional, transnational collaboration, we specifically look at how communities in both contexts enact creative linguistic agency via translanguaging on signs in the LL, which act to both create critical identification and work toward linguistic survivance. Using conceptual tools from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) we analyze the knowledge production and power dynamics created through the textual metafunction of translanguaging in the LL. We compare and contrast societal and educational ideologies towards translanguaging in both contexts and investigate the potential for leveraging the LL for developing bilingualism, teaching about culture(s), and for raising critical language awareness among students in schools. We conclude by reflecting upon lessons learned from a Global South borderlands context for the greater understanding of the linguistic practices and educational opportunities for communities of transnational spaces in the Global North. A major takeaway from this work is that translanguaging acts as a powerful and unifying semiotic strategy for agentic identity formation, linguistic survivance, and for linking geographically distant transnational spaces and histories.