ABSTRACT

One way of making the political personal takes the form of a well-known globalized genre: t-shirts promoting particular causes. Once, a Mexican American Angelino visitor wore such a t-shirt stating “Se habla español” on the Metro in Barcelona. For him, the message constituted a challenge to the English monolingual ideologies that permeate his home country. However, he found to his surprise that under the streets of Barcelona, where English-Only sentiments can be expected to be entirely absent, it garnered him some icy looks. More curiously, nearly everyone who found the message disturbing spoke Spanish natively or nearly so, and had the visitor asked them a question, they would have surely responded in that language. In fact, even if that Angelino—or anyone else with a presumably non-autochthonous phenotype—asked a question in the other local language—Catalan—the response would still as likely have been in Spanish. Rather than taking the escalator down into a rapid transit system, this young Angelino seemingly went down a sociolinguistic rabbit hole where language conflicts and preferences take the form of inscrutable paradoxes.