Emanuel A da Silva

This article examines how essentializing ideologies of language and identity in Toronto’s Portuguese ethnic market, constructed as monolingual and monocultural within the larger mainstream market of English-speaking Canada, provide the background for humorous sociolinguistic performances that playfully acknowledge, reproduce, and challenge ethnolinguistic stratification.
After more than sixty years, the dominant spaces of the local Portuguese market continue to exclude most Portuguese-Canadian youth by rarely legitimizing the use of English, bilingual code-switching, or ‘broken’ or ‘Azorean’ Portuguese. By choosing YouTube as a space in which to engage audiences in ideologies of language and identity through performances of sociolinguistic caricatures, three young Portuguese-Canadian amateur comedians negotiate sociolinguistic boundaries with an ambivalent agency. The mocking performances are legitimized by the performers’ in-group status and reveal, among other things, how a stigmatized variety of Azorean Portuguese and certain ethnolinguistic stereotypes can be reappropriated and reinforced relative to sociolinguistic hierarchies.
Keywords: Language ideologies, ethnic humor, performativity, heteroglossia

This paper challenges the normalised view that immigrant communities, like language and identity, are natural and depoliticised social realities. They are, in fact, carefully constructed social projects structured by people with multiple positionings who compete over unequally distributed resources. A critical and ethnographic sociolinguistic analysis reveals Toronto’s Portuguese-Canadian community as a market where internal group divisions along linguistic, regional and generational lines are masked in order to appeal to the homogenising discourses of Canadian multiculturalism and Portuguese nationalism. The market is thus divided between a minority of Mainland Portuguese, whose standard language variety and dominant cultural habitus afford them positions of power, and a majority of Azorean Portuguese, whose ways of being and speaking Portuguese are delegitimised. Qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interviews and participant observation, suggest that the Canadian-born inheritors of this market navigate discursive spaces which largely remain monolingually and monoculturally Portuguese and that are filled with contradictions marginalising most young people for lacking the “right” linguistic or cultural capital.

This critical sociolinguistic paper adopts a materialist view of how multiple languages and identities are negotiated in an effort to re-examine multilingualism and why people invest in certain sociolinguistic practices. The focus is on the social and linguistic resources and performances of Portuguese–Canadian youth in student cultural associations or clubs in Toronto. The sociolinguistic work carried out in these Portuguese clubs provides a rich context in which to explore diverse linguistic repertoires and trans-local identities which are the hallmark of a postmodern, globalised world. These student associations are flexible transnational spaces where young people should be free to construct their multiple sociolinguistic identities as they see fit. They should be able to assert their creative agency without the constraints of traditional ethnolinguistic gate-keepers like Portuguese teachers, parents or community leaders who can impose homogenised or ‘legitimate’ ways of speaking and being Portuguese. Yet, this hypothetical freedom and flexibility are not easily achieved and they often come at a cost. At issue are questions surrounding authenticity, legitimacy, dominant linguistic and nationalist ideologies, and access to material and symbolic capital that structure the Portuguese–Canadian community as a market and position some people as ‘heroes’ of the Portuguese cause, and others more like ‘zeros’.

While classrooms remain the de facto space for formal instruction of Portuguese language and culture, there is no doubt that extra-curricular activities held by or in conjunction with "Lusophile" university student associations also serve as dynamic spaces where knowledge of the Portuguese language and Lusophone cultures are constructed, deconstructed, shared and possibly even contested. That said, the situation and challenges of these student associations has gone largely overlooked in academic discussions of language instruction. This paper seeks to address this gap by focusing on two Portuguese-Canadian university student associations in southern Ontario.

"This paper explores the challenges that neoliberalism and the globalized new economy present to the politics of linguistic minority movements by ethnographically examining language policy as a discursive process, rooted in political economy. Following the post-WWII period, as most Western States restructured from welfarism to neoliberalism, there was a shift away from minority (language) rights towards economic development. In Canada, where State policy maintains a French–English "linguistic duality", francophone regions outside Quebec became sites of discursive struggle, following the collapse of the old economy, between (1) a focus on the collective reproduction of "community" (maintaining language, culture and identity), and (2) the State’s focus on facilitating individual economic reproduction. What emerges is an attempt by the State, and certain community actors to save the traditional francophone minority collectivity by focusing on the "community economic development" of rural bastions, rather than the economic integration of individual francophones living in diverse, urban areas.

Keywords: Linguistic minorities, Neoliberalism, Globalization, Political economy, Francophone Canada, Ethnographic sociolinguistics"

[I organized the following panel at the SS20]
Diasporic discourses on multilingualism and performativity: Portugueseness across time and space

[Panel abstract]
By problematizing the polycentricity of language and the multiple positionings of social actors, the papers in this colloquium explore the sociolinguistic trajectories and the discursive tensions that exist around identity and language within Portuguese-speaking diasporic (emigrant) communities in North America, Western Europe, Scandinavia, and the British Protectorate of the Channel Islands. A critical and ethnographic analysis of multilingual and multivocal performances across different geographical, social and political spaces reveals the complex and unequal ways in which social actors mobilize the symbolic and material capital of language and identity across trans-local markets. How are the social and linguistic boundaries of these diasporic communities structured (between pressures of uniformity and diversity) and with what consequences for whom? How do Portuguese-speaking migrants and their descendants of Mainland European, Azorean and Madeiran heritage negotiate, reproduce or challenge different ideologies of legitimate or authentic “portugueseness” (ways of being and speaking Portuguese)? In order to explore these questions of structure, agency, time and space, among others, the papers in this colloquium draw from critical discourse analysis, critical interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The data analyzed present a broad range of linguistic and identity performances spanning from political discourses, comedy sketches, personal narratives, and everyday interactions. In addition to examining the specificity of each particular sociolinguistic context, the papers also speak to the larger impact that globalization, transnational mobility and post-nationalism have had on traditional representations of language, identity and other social categories. 

[Invited panelists]

Sandi Michele de Oliveira (University of Copenhagen)
Title: 40 years later: Discourses of the Revolution and the construction of identity in the Portuguese diaspora.

Jaine Beswick (University of Southampton)
Title: Sou Madeirense, embora pertenço a esta ilha: Multifaceted identities of the Madeira-Portuguese on Jersey, The Channel Islands.

Michele Koven (University of Illinois) and Isabelle Simões Marques (Universidade de Coimbra)
Title: Contesting emigrants' "portugueseness" on YouTube: The case of Ro et Cut's Vamos a Portugal.

Emanuel da Silva (University of Toronto)
Title: Mobilizing linguistic marginality: Humour, youth and azoreanness in Toronto’s Portuguese market.

[Invited discussant] Marilyn Martin-Jones (University of Birmingham)

[I organized the following panel for this conference]
Panel title:
60 years of official Portuguese presence in Canada: Interdisciplinary analyses

[Panel abstract:]

Canada is a country widely known as a major destination for large numbers of international migrants who have always played a role in shaping its social, economic, and political landscapes. The history of “official” Portuguese migration to Canada began six decades ago, in May 1953, when a group of Portuguese from the Azores, Madeira, and mainland Portugal left to work in the Americas. The reasons for the subsequent waves of transnational Portuguese migration are numerous, but the general narrative is one of struggle, determination, and success. Today, with more than 400,000 Canadians of Portuguese descent representing approximately 1.3% of Canada’s population, this ethnic group represents one of the country’s largest minorities. This minority, however, has its own internal diversity as nearly two-thirds of Portuguese-Canadians have transnational ties to the Azores, while the rest have roots in Mainland Portugal and a small minority from Madeira. In Canada, one of the characteristics of Portuguese migration is the fact that the vast majority of Portuguese have settled in major urban areas (Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver), where they have established “institutionally complete communities” (commonly referred to as “Little Portugals”). These ethnic communities or markets have transformed certain metropolitan areas into diverse and multicultural “cities of nations” and transnational social spaces. Nevertheless, despite their relative demographic and geographic importance in Canada, Portuguese-Canadians remain largely marginalized from positions of power within the Canadian mainstream and the lived experiences of the different generations of Portuguese-Canadians are not widely known. This panel is an attempt to address this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective. A time-span of 60 years provides researchers with a sufficiently large window to examine the ways in which experiences of social integration, spatial mobility, ethnic community-building, transnational kinship ties and generational development have changed over time. The four paper presentations will draw from historical and contemporary data about the migration and settlement of the Portuguese in Canada, as well as from sociological data on their educational achievement, barriers to their social integration, internal sociolinguistic and regional tensions, and complex processes of ethno-cultural and gendered identification. This panel does not claim to be representative of all the research done on Portuguese immigrants and their descendants in Canada, nor is it representative of the all the different experiences faced by Portuguese-Canadians over the last six decades. Instead, it focuses on five fundamental aspects of the “community”: settlement, education, language, gender and transnationalism. These aspects intersect with broader questions surrounding identity, integration, exclusion, diversity, mobility, and access to resources. The ways in which these questions are negotiated by first-, second-, and third-generation Portuguese-Canadians will shape the future of this ethnolinguistic market as it strives to affirm a more prominent place in Canada while maintaining diasporic ties to Portugal.

[Invited panellists]
Carlos Teixeira (University of British Columbia] - "Portuguese Communities in Montreal and Toronto: From Isolation (“Little Portugal”) to Residential Integration (Suburbanization) (1953-2013)?"

Ana Gherghel (Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade dos Açores) - "Transnational spaces of multi-generational Azorean kinship networks in Quebec." (with Josiane Le Gall, Université du Québec à Montréal, Centre de Santé et Services Sociaux de la Montagne).

Fernando Nunes (Mount Saint Vincent University) - "The Academic Underachievement of Portuguese-Canadian Youth: Realities, Myths and Policy Implications."

Emanuel da Silva (University of Toronto) - "Legitimizing code-switche(r)s: portinglês and language ideologies in Toronto’s Portuguese-Canadian community."

[ABSTRACT:} This paper traces the legacy of ideological constructions of “legitimate” social and linguistic capital that stratify Toronto’s Portuguese-Canadian community. It explores how tensions surrounding the definition of legitimate Portuguese language and identity are also about competition over limited and unequally distributed resources in the (trans)national and diasporic markets of Portugal and Canada. In these spaces, internal divisions among the Portuguese are ignored or essentialized in an effort to (re)produce the homogenizing linguistic ideology of the nation-state and to manage multicultural difference along ethnic and working-class lines. The result is that the Portuguese-Canadian market is divided between a minority of Mainland Portuguese, whose standard language and dominant habitus afford them positions of power, and a majority of Azorean Portuguese, who are marginalized by their delegitimized habitus. This division is based on historical differences in Portugal that are reproduced in Canada. Although the location and the meaning of the differences changed through migration, their legacy remains productive in the local Toronto market. How do the traces of this legacy impact the Canadian-born Portuguese descendents who are discursively positioned as the inheritors and future investors of the diasporic ethnolinguistic market? What do they stand to gain or to lose?
    The data presented focuses on the life trajectories of three young Portuguese-Canadians and their (un)successful negotiations of language, identity and space. This ethnographic and critical sociolinguistic analysis (Heller 2002) explores how their performances of portugueseness challenge or reproduce the dominant discourses, while examining how language reveals and constrains social positioning (Gumperz 1982, Bourdieu 1982).
"

This dissertation demonstrates that notions of language and identity are not entirely about personal characteristics (what a person is born with, what is “in his blood”), nor are they entirely about agency (how a person chooses to present herself). Instead, they are largely about markets and about the multiple positionings of social actors within markets that are structured by ideologies of the nation state, immigration and the globalized new economy. This critical perspective challenges the normalized view that immigrant (diasporic) communities are simply natural social groupings or depoliticized transplantations of distinct ethnolinguistic units from their “homeland”. They are, like language and identity, carefully constructed and managed social projects that are shaped by forces from within and from without.

In Canada, the conditions for the institutionalization and (re)production of ethnolinguistic differences, which also make and mark class relations, are strengthened by the state’s multiculturalist policy. The Portuguese-Canadian community is one such ethnolinguistic market and the goal of this research is to examine which forms of portugueseness dominate the market, why and with what consequences for whom. Building from an ethnographic and critical sociolinguistic approach (Bourdieu 1977, Heller 2002), the qualitative data behind this research was produced through a two-year ethnography, participant observations and semi-structured interviews drawing primarily from six second-generation Portuguese-Canadians and members of their social networks. 

The findings suggest that the kind of portugueseness that dominates the Portuguese-Canadian market is one from Mainland Portugal; one that is folklorized, patriarchal, and that promotes (Mainland) Portuguese monolingualism and false cultural homogeneity. A consequence of this sociolinguistic structuration is a division between Azoreans and Mainlanders who make up two parts of the same Portuguese market; partners in conflict over the legitimacy and value of their linguistic and social capital. Furthermore, the inheritors of this market, the second and subsequent generations, navigate discursive spaces filled with contradictions that often marginalize them. Their experiences highlight strategic mobilizations of Portuguese language and identity, as well as the consequences of having delegitimized cultural and linguistic capital. In short, this dissertation highlights the productive tensions between structure and agency, between uniformity and variability, and between exclusion and inclusion.