Mark or Overcome Borders? A Study of Identity Construction of Colombian Teachers in Public Schools of the United States

Abstract

In the framework of the present colloquium on Transnational Americas, this talk aims to explain how language ideologies and linguistic hierarchies are involved in indexing speakers to spaces of belonging that draw ideological and social boundaries around human beings from the use of the word “we”. With this purpose, a small-scale study with Colombian teachers in public schools of USA was carried out. These teachers answered an online questionnaire and participated in an interview via Skype. The results were analyzed taking into account the principle of indexicality, proposed by Bucholtz and Hall (2010). Contemporary discourse studies have shown that social identities are not fixed, but constructed according to the positioning speakers seek to inhabit temporarily in the course of a linguistic interaction to achieve specific social goals in the negotiation of belonging with the others. Thus the concept of boundary is not either fixed, but it is understood as a symbolic construction that is founded on a subjectivity that circumscribes the world of “one” and “other”, from the cultural, social and linguistic practices.