This paper explores linguistic practices reflected in Tijuana’s linguistic landscape. Research is this area is of particular interest because Tijuana is part of one of the largest transnational conurbations where language contact between Spanish and English is reified, and instances of a wide range of language contact are instantiated there: from language attrition to language death, from borrowing to translanguaging. In particular, this work focuses on translanguaging in the linguistic landscape of the iconic Avenida Revolución and in some of the main thoroughfares and various neighborhoods and shopping centers that range from working-class to upscale while also analyzing how linguistic practices set up linguistic borders.
The objectives of this investigation are to identify the kind of linguistic practices that occur in border situations and to determine the implications the avenue’s linguistic makeup may have in the demarcation of linguistic borders, in linguistic practices and in self-fashioning, more specifically amongst the sign creators along Avenida Revolución. Since languages index identities, national, ethnic or linguistic, and through use may mark social and geographical background as well as gendered identities, it is of interest to see how identities are perceived, negotiated, and contested in a place where Spanish and English are indeed symbolic capital that allows social mobility. The construction and co-construction of identities in this border city are influenced by a complex array of cultural, social, political and transnational factors, and Mexicanness seems to be commodified.
The analysis of the corpus of signs this research is based on leads us to conclude that the local linguistic landscape reflects through translanguaging the reality locals as transborder people live in and the ways self-fashioning endows them with traits that set them apart from outsiders.
This study will add to current research of linguistic practices along and across borders and will further expand current linguistic landscape research.
