Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua

2. Histories and Contexts of Communication

22 Coral and China, ages seven and nine, were closely related and had been raised as sisters. Their parents, originally from the northern mainland region of the Atlantic Coast, identified as Miskitu, and when they were raising their older kids, they spoke mostly Miskitu to them. But when Coral and China were young, their parents began speaking more Spanish in the hopes of promoting their school success. They sent the girls to a prestigious private school on the island with a predominantly Creole student body and most classroom discourse in Spanish. China, as a result, spoke almost exclusively Spanish. Coral was equally comfortable with Spanish, but through close friendships with Creole girls, she had developed strong competence in Kriol English as well. In the midst of preparations for a doll play activity one day, Coral and China began to express their irritation with each other and broke into a competitive routine of insults in Spanish. It came out quickly, as if it had been rehearsed in past disputes. Example 2.1 1 Coral: Te voy a pegar, japonesa. I’m going to hit you, Japanese girl. 2 China: NEgra. BLACK girl. 3 Coral: JapoNEsa. JapanESE girl. Chapter Two Histories and Contexts of Communication Histories and Contexts of Communication · 23 4 China: NEgra. BLACK girl. What could this exchange mean? What is the sense behind two Miskitu girls calling each other “black” and “Japanese”? It was clearly a competitive act of insulting, but the terms make sense only in the context of regional histories of race and in the social context of the girls’ relationship. To understand how these terms could become insults, we need to delve into the regional histories and social contexts that underlie this interaction. In part because race and ethnicity often remain hidden as structures of power in Miskitu children’s interaction, I draw attention to these concepts in this chapter to underscore their relevance whether or not they become explicit in everyday discourse.1 As Peter Wade (2002, 2008) has written, discourses of race and ethnicity are often intertwined in Latin America; both concepts may be invoked in reference to physical or cultural features, and both are historically variable and open to interpretation. Modern concepts of race and ethnicity emerged from colonial projects that classified peoples around the world in a hierarchy of development, and they have continued to be used in postcolonial nation building (Quijano 1993). However , in Nicaragua, state-sponsored discourses of multiculturalism have denied and obscured the existence of race and racism (Hooker 2005a). Grassroots political and educational projects of interculturalism grapple with received categories of ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, race, often challenging the hierarchy but more rarely challenging the naturalization of the terms themselves. Histories and contexts of interaction are also crucial to understanding heterogeneous ways of speaking. Studies of code-switching in the past few decades have made important contributions in demonstrating the conventionality and skill of these communicative practices, thereby countering dominant ideologies of deficit in multilingual speech. But too often, analysis of multilingual speech is confined to a few turns of discourse, rather than attending to the broader contexts that shape those utterances. As Benjamin Bailey has written, “If multilingual talk is an especially meaningful mode of speaking, it is not the nature of the forms that make it so but rather particular social and political histories” (2007:363). This chapter maps the distant histories and immediate social contexts in which Miskitu children’s voices are embedded. 24 · Voices of Play Intercultural Histories Even a casual visitor to the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua will catch echoes of past voices in speech that sounds familiar to an English or Spanish speaker but is not entirely comprehensible. The crucible for these crosslinguistic relations was forged in the mid-seventeenth century, when England and Spain vied for control in the region known as the Mosquitia—the Caribbean coast of modern-day Nicaragua and Honduras. Indigenous peoples had some interaction with Europeans in the region before then, but it was in the early 1640s that new social formations began to emerge. Escaped African slaves, some of them from a failed Puritan colony on Providence Island, arrived on the coast near Cabo Gracias a Dios (named by Columbus during his final voyage in 1502). They intermarried with the indigenous people living there, forming a group that gained ascendancy through an alliance with the English. By 1679 these people were called...