Mock Spanish invokes stigmatizingstereotypes about Latinas/os without making such stereotypes explicit. "emost profound aspect of this process, however, is not that it frames “Spanishspeakers” (regardless of national background and ethnoracial identity) in par-ticular ways, but that it speci!cally produces “Latina/o” as a U.S. racial category.

U.S. Latinas/os are faced with and participate in the double-stigmatization oftheir English and Spanish linguistic practices.

In the U.S. context, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “strategies of condescension”(Bourdieu 1991, 19) is interesting to consider in relation to race. "ink of manyAmerican political candidates’ common practice of speaking a phrase or two ofstilted Spanish in front of Spanish-speaking audiences. "eir legitimate publicuse of the Spanish language is secured in relation to their racial positions and/or the subordination of Spanish to English in White public space (Hill 1998).For many U.S. Latinas/os, public usage of Spanish or “accented” English isprohibited and/or understood as an index of primordial inferiority (i.e., racialdifference).

Signs of accents andSpanish-language use are regarded as re%ections of abject foreignness, regard-less of the long history of Spanish-language use across the Americas.

Spanglish is proposed asa unifying force among Latinas/os. Mobilizing prevailing language beliefs that“a culture” must speak “a language,”

After this I ran away and went to my mother, who was living with Mr. Richard Darrel. My poor mother was both grieved and glad to see me; grieved because I had been so ill used, and glad because she had not seen me for a long, long while. She dared not receive me into the house, but she hid me up in a hole in the rocks near, and brought me food at night, after every body was asleep. My father, who lived at Crow-Lane, over the salt-water channel, at last heard of my being hid up in the cavern, and he came and took me back to my master.

had scarcely reached my twelfth year when my mistress became too poor to keep so many of us at home; and she hired me out to Mrs. Pruden, a lady who lived about five miles off, in the adjoining parish, in a large house near the sea. I cried bitterly at parting with my dear mistress and Miss Betsey,