I'll start my post by saying that the interview I conducted for the Final Project in this class was one of the most rewarding experiences I could have imagined coming from this class. As I've gone through the semester, I have frequently been frustrated with sociolinguistics for the same reason I was frustrated with science (I took biology, physics, and geology, if you're wondering) as an undergraduate. My frustration stemmed from the fact that when I read about all the wonderful work being produced by these disciplines, I was truly fascinated. When I got into the classroom, however, I was stifled by repetitive, detailed analyses of seemingly trivial details, the relevance of which was obscured by my inability to get past the fact that there had to be something better to do with this discipline than draw posters of cell reproduction. If you're still reading you'll have to pardon my digression. The truth is that often times, even 10 years later I get frustrated reading some of these studies because whether an /s/ is retained, aspirated, or deleted in a given social context really doesn't tell me about what I want to know. And while having to look at death by statistics in articles from scholarly journals is really close to making my bucket list, it really isn't what I want either.
It turns out that what I wanted was an experience like this interview. Probably not for the same reasons as a linguist, but who cares about them? I think I have always been intrigued by the interviews in the NMCOSS because it is a window into the history of this area, my history. Linguistically, we code switch some, we truncate /r/, we say trabajábanos instead of trabajábamos, and to quote Damián, "SO". I have a sense intuitively for what is happening in the language, just as everyone does in their own original dialect, but I was fascinated by the interview for the historic and ethnographic information I gained from it. It is priceless.
The people I interviewed were an 85 yr. old man and his 83 yr. old wife. They are from my país. After fighting in WWII, he went home and married his wife, and they came to Albuquerque in the 50s to find work. They worked, him as a ranch hand, her as a day care worker here in Albuquerque from the 50s to the 70s. They formed part of the Sawmill and Los Jardines neighborhood, and talk of Indian School Road between 6th street and Rio Grande as a cattle trail, fit for travel only by a horse and buggy. What these people have lived and experienced here in Albuquerque can never be recreated or accurately represented. I am so glad that I got to record 47 minutes of what they could tell me about their life here.
I appreciated the opportunity so much, that now I won't even complain about having to use such a valuable interview to scrutinize the mechanics of their speech and not the significance of the message in the interview. I'm off to the wonderful world of Santa Barbara!
As a chicano linguist I've actually felt many of the same feelings. I've definitely felt that many of the studies done on our speech communities didn't quite tell me what I wanted to know either. I guess you could say that I've been a bit of a Damián Quixote, charging down the molino with a lanza in some of my studies in the past as I've attempted to go beyond germ counting. I must say that I've come full circle, however. You never stop learning and developing and I myself have come to feel the relevance of these studies on more of an intuitive level. Actually, I'm an artist at heart, having spent much of my life developing my abilities as a composer and a visual artist. My goal, which I'm beginning to see happen, is to approach linguistics in the same way I did my art. To see these investigations as pieces of creativity that we throw out into the world in order to contribute one more perspective on what it it to be human.
ResponderBorrarSo then, let's not just code. Lets hear the stories!!! These interviews are pieces of art in and of themselves!!!