Soft linguistic terrorism: 21st century re-articulations

Abstract Over three decades ago, Gloria Anzaldúa identified ideologies of linguistic standardization as an oppressive force in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas as well as the local university. Such ideologies were used to delegitimize Chicanos via “linguistic terrorism,” or, routine forms of psychological and physical punishment meant to enforce idealized white, middle-class, monolingual social norms. However, times have changed. To account for more recent conditions, I qualify contemporary manifestations as soft linguistic terrorism, which relies more so on incentivization (reward as opposed to punishment) and ideological recruitment (enforcement based on the appearance of consent), yet continue to reproduce the near identical racializing ideologies Anzaldúa identified decades ago. Using a linguistic anthropological approach to discourse analysis, this article focuses on ethnographic interviews with students and faculty to illustrate how forms of linguistic terrorism have been rearticulated via raciolinguistic ideologies in the same region and at the same university that inspired Anzaldúa’s formulation of linguistic terrorism in the 1980s.