Los californios: Historia sociolingüística de California en el siglo XIX by Covadonga Lamar Prieto (review)

Los californios presents a comprehensive sociolinguistic analysis of the historical dialect of Spanish present in California during the nineteenth century, with a focus on the second half of the century, after the incorporation of California into the United States. In the first half of the book, the author describes the historical, political, ideological, legal, and educational factors that affected Spanish use by nineteenth-century Californios and contextualized their experience. In the second half, the author describes the corpus she used to analyze the linguistic features of nineteenth-century Californio Spanish, which she enumerates in the final chapter of the book. Throughout, she argues for the consideration of Californian Spanish as a specific, historic dialect of Spanish. Lamar Prieto's research specialties are sociolinguistics and Spanish in the United States, with a focus on the historical presence of Spanish in California from the eighteenth century, which affords her a privileged vantage point for this type of analysis.

In chapter 1, Lamar Prieto describes the experience of Californios during the transition from a Mexican territory to a US state. She focuses on how changes in their use of Spanish, the law, the educational system, and land ownership were inextricably intertwined with and influenced by hegemonic US ideology perpetuated by historians such as Hubert Bancroft. She outlines the historical events that led to the loss of official recognition of Spanish, as well as the marginalization of Californios from the political and public sphere. Lamar Prieto uses literary and journalistic excerpts to combat several of the dominant narratives that she summarizes in the chapter.

In chapter 2, Lamar Prieto outlines the three arguments frequently offered against the consideration of Californian Spanish as an individual historical dialect of Spanish. First, population movement and language contact are thought to have interrupted dialect continuity. Second, Californios were perceived as not capable of expressing themselves in all pragmatic contexts. Third, historical Californian Spanish disappeared rapidly due to a lack of patriotism for Mexico and Spanish on the part of Californios. Lamar Prieto uses literary texts and historical census data to refute these claims. In this chapter, she also connects the dearth of dedicated linguistic studies of Californian Spanish to the perceptions outlined above.

Chapter 3 summarizes the relationship between race and language in California in the nineteenth century, with a focus on the perception of these two social constructs by non-Californios. The first part of the chapter, using explorer manifests and eighteenth-century censuses, debunks the outsider myth that Californios were largely of Spanish origin. The second part employs testimonials written by travelers to California to display visitors' perceptions of the language, culture, and ethnicity of Californios. Lamar Prieto argues that Spanish linguistic discrimination became a tool to control Californios and disguise systemic racial marginalization, since Hispanic identity, then and now, could not be linked to one type of complexion.

Chapter 4 explains the method used to compile the corpus. In all, 102 texts dating from 1802 to 1884 were selected. Specifically, Lamar Prieto chose texts to fairly represent women writers, to not overrepresent individual authors, and to reflect different registers. The chapter contains a detailed description and numerous examples of each text type included and excluded from the corpus, as well as her reasoning.

In chapter 5, the longest, Lamar Prieto describes the main findings of her linguistic analysis of Californio texts. She divides the chapter into descriptions of its phonetic, syntactic, and semantic characteristics. The largest section is that on phonetics; she describes each phonetic phenomenon and provides examples and/or quantitative rates of occurrence. Lamar Prieto ends the chapter by comparing Californio Spanish to contemporary Los Angeles Spanish, concluding that several of the characteristics of Los Angeles Spanish have their origin in historical Californio Spanish.

The sole aspect in which Lamar Prieto's Los californios lacks detail is the presentation of three linguistic characteristics of Californio Spanish. At the beginning of chapter 5, the author lists the phonetic phenomena...