“José, can you see?”

Abstract

“José, can you see?” is the punch line to a bad joke. José, a new immigrant, praises American hospitality because at his very first baseball game, he was sent way up to the best seat in the stadium. Just before the game began everyone stood up, turned to him—perched on the flagpole—and sang out, “José, can you see?” Jokes like this one, along with exaggerated imitations of a Spanish accent, as in, “Es no my yob,” and “My ney José Jiménez”; racist labels such as spic, wetback, greaser, beaner; and public insults like J. Edgar Hoover’s admonition that one need not worry if Mexicans or Puerto Ricans came at you with a gun because they couldn’t shoot straight, but if they had a knife, watch out—are examples of the blatantly racist discourses that construct Latin©s in the United States as stupid, dirty, lazy, sexually loose, amoral, and violent. Linguistic anthropologists, notably Bonnie Urciuoli and Jane Hill, have analyzed the ways in which these forms of speech and evaluations of language succeed in constructing whiteness, with standard English as its voice box, as the unmarked, normal, and natural order in the United States. In her powerful study of language prejudice and Puerto Ricans in New York City, Urciuoli documents how the English of working-class Puerto Ricans and other racialized groups—in schools, workplaces, and all gatekeeping encounters—is intensely monitored for any signs of an accent, nonstandard grammar, pronunciation misfires, or vocabulary gaps.