Immigrant identities : a discourse analysis of narratives told by Mexicans in the U.S.

Access restricted to the OSU CommunityThe study presented explores the relationship between migration and identity, looking at the discourse construction of the self by Mexican immigrants within narrative talk about the experience of immigration. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with fourteen Mexican immigrants, most of whom are undocumented. The question of identity is analyzed from a discourse analytic perspective examining the relationships between linguistic choices, story worlds represented, and interactional worlds in which the narratives are told. The aspects of identity analyzed are social orientation, agency, self and other-identification. Each of these aspects is investigated through the analysis of linguistic choices. In the case of social orientation, I analyze pronominal choices; in the case of agency, I look at reported speech acts and their attribution to self and others; in the case of self and other-identification, I study ethnic labeling in orientation clauses. I argue that the meaning of the linguistic phenomena analyzed cannot be fully understood without making reference to wider social processes that frame the immigration experience. Storytelling is seen in the dissertation as a type of social practice since when immigrants tell narratives, they create new meanings by building and communicating images of themselves and others, interpretations of the migration process, and of their roles in it. Thus narratives are seen as both reflecting and constituting social reality