Conceptualizing Chicago Cubanidad: Spanish Ideologies and Identity

There is currently a dearth of research about linguistic attitudes towards stigmatized variants of Spanish in the US. Cuban Spanish is ideal for such research because it includes commonly stigmatized phonological features such as lateralization of final /ɾ/ and weakening of coda /s/. This variety of Spanish has been researched in the context of Miami, Florida as it boasts the largest number of Cubans outside of the island. However, this research is contextualized to a geographic setting in which Cubans represent an overwhelming percentage of the population and benefit from high social status. There is need for research that reveals how Cuban attitudes and identity vary when individuals find themselves geographically distant from Miami’s forceful discourses about what it means to be and sound Cuban. The Chicago Cuban community is an ideal setting for this research as Cubans constitute roughly 2.9% of local Latinos. The present study uses a perceptual dialectology ranking task and sociolinguistic interviews in order to reveal 1) how Chicago Cubans index their identity and how these indexicalities are similar to and different from their counterparts in Miami and 2) how the Chicago Cuban-American identity is evidenced in their attitudes towards different varieties of Spanish.