¿Puras groserías?: Rethinking the role of profanity and graphic humor in Latin@ students’ bilingual wordplay.

This article explores the role of profanity and graphic humor in the bilingual wordplay of Latin@middle school students. We highlight the creativity, skill, and communicative competence embed-ded in this transgressive wordplay, revealing how these youth employed profanity and graphichumor to index ethnic solidarity and construct bilingual identities. We argue that further explo-ration of such wordplay might well reveal other functions and meanings that are obscured when itis simply dismissed as inappropriate.