Code-switching in music has been attested at least since medieval times (Argenter, 2001; Armistead & Monroe, 1983), and is a salient feature of US youth styles such as Dominican-American bachata (Flores Ohlson, 2011; Ohlson, 2007), and Chicano and Cuban-American rap (Hernández, 2012; Loureiro-Rodríguez, 2017). However, little attention has been paid to bilingual lyrical production from the US-Mexico borderlands especially from an earlier era (Peña, 1985).
Our study focuses on artistic Spanish-English code-switching from the US southern border states (Texas, Arizona, California) over the 20th century. Data come from 200 songs by musicians ranging from forgotten artists (Joe Bravo, Lenny Salinas) whose recordings are only available in specialized repositories (Strachwitz Frontera Collection, UCLA), to internationally prominent musicians (Cheech and Chong, Lalo Guerrero, Texas Tornados), whose work is still commercially available. We transcribed the lyrics and analyzed language-mixing phenomena to ascertain their form, socio-pragmatic functions, and main themes (Callahan, 2002; Loureiro-Rodríguez, 2017; Montes-Alcalá, 2012; Sarkar & Winer, 2006; Torres, 2007; Williams, 2010).
The songs exhibited three linguistically noteworthy phenomena. The first is the presence of code-switching, which increased over time, and was meant to Latinicize songs by inserting items easily recognizable by non-Spanish speakers (sombrero, taco, tequila). The second was inter-sentential code-switching at poetic boundaries, meant to present similar ideas sequentially, and often redundantly, so that the meaning was available to different degrees to monolingual and bilingual audiences. The last feature is bilingual lyrical virtuosity, which can only be fully appreciated by a Spanish-English bilingual audience. These include cross-linguistic rhyming patterns and humor (Texas Tornados Dinero), parodies and musical pastiche (e.g., Lalo Guerrero’s Elvis Perez, There’s No Tortillas, Pancho Claus), which localize majority songs in the minority culture, and metalinguistic references to languages and registers (e.g., Cheech and Chong’s Pachuco).
The formal features underscore themes that cut across historical periods, most pointedly, the contrast in the social roles of the two languages. Border bilingual music emerges as a surreptitious tool to legitimize the vernacular in the public sphere, by flouting the constraints imposed by hegemonic monolingualism. In that regard, comedy appears as a major vehicle of linguistic resistance.
