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...clientele to connote the flavor and pride of Latino identity. Unlike other art or literary forms, however, business names reflect a commercial accommodation to the techniques and strategies of marketing more than a defiance of mainstream culture or the statement of cultural resistance to Anglo society. Their choices are strongly influenced by places and experiences that reflect Latino culture outside the local area rather than locales of current residence within rural southern Florida. (Transmigrant business, farm workers, naming practices and sociocultural identity, population expansion and rural settlement, southern Florida)
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Discussing the shifting ethnicities that accompany the process of globalization, Hall (1991:42) calls identity "the ground of action," suggesting that the way one identifies is what will most influence one's behavior. Rouse (1992) provides additional discussion on what this might mean for Latino immigrants, for whom, he argues, an alternative framework is needed. He suggests that Latino immigrants maintain interests and commitment to family and the town from which they came at the same time that they develop another way of viewing the world through their experience in a new environment. He calls views from these dual experiences "bifocality." This article extends the work of these two authors, first by considering expressions of identity in naming practices for grocery stores and restaurants, and then by expanding the community of interest beyond migrant laborers to the entrepreneurial class within the Latino population. To do this assumes that the individuals who engage in entrepreneurial activities (specifically establishment and management of a business) may include men and women with backgrounds similar to their clientele. By way of a statistical analysis, I examine the formulation of immigrants as members of "multiple communities" (Chavez 1994) by testing the influence of place and experience on naming practices for grocery stores and restaurants.
The context for this inquiry is the process of Latinoization in rural areas of southern Florida, chosen for the rapid growth of the Latino population within the southeastern United States and that part of Florida. Increases in Latino and Latino-origin Caribbean people within the southeastern United States are similar to processes of Latinoization in other areas of the country, notably rural California, where persons of Mexican ancestry predominate in many towns and small cities (Allensworth and Rochin 1998). At one time, Chicago had the largest concentration of persons of Mexican ancestry living outside the southwest (de Lourdes Villar 1994), but this has changed. Latinos are increasingly found in metropolitan areas, such as Washington, D.C. (Pessar 1995), and New York City (Sontag 1998) in the northeast, or small towns and cities in the midwest, such as Garden City, Kansas (Stull, Broadway, and Erickson 1992). Another area of the country that draws large numbers of Latinos is rural southern Florida. The term "rural" is to be used with caution. Three counties of interest in this article (Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Hillsborough) have sparsely populated portions that are devoted to highly productive agriculture, but also have metropolitan urban areas (West Palm Beach, Miami, and Tampa, respectively) for which the counties are better known. Residents of Miami-Dade County, for example, distinguish South Dade as the southern, agricultural portion of the county from the northern (Miami) portion (Bryan, pers. comm.; also Greiner et al. 1992:69n).
Unlike the phenomenon of past decades of concentrated numbers of a single national origin that settle in one region or area (Allensworth and Rochin 1998), several national origins comprise the Latino population in rural counties of southern Florida. The U.S. Census found that 12.2 per cent of Florida's population in 1990 and 16.8 per cent in 2000 were Hispanic/Latino. From 1990 to 2000, the state's overall population increased 1.24 times, which was surpassed by the Latino population, which increased 1.70 times. Ten places in rural areas of the state are listed by the U.S. Census of the Population as having a Latino population of 50 per cent or more in 2000, but no more than five rural places had Latino populations that comprised 35 per cent or more of the total population in 1990 (Table 1). All but one of the ten places (Pierson-Sevilla in Volusia County) with a proportionately large Latino population are located in the southern half of the state. All ten places are known for their migrant population, comprised mainly of men and women of Mexican descent. One contribution to these increases is the availability of property, where lot owners can place trailers and build homes for renting or owning, in contrast to other areas where inexpensive property is less plentiful and housing more expensive.
The focus of analysis here is the effect that Latinoization has on the naming of commercial establishments in rural areas of southern Florida that cater to a clientele of Latin American and Latino-origin Caribbean ancestry which, for the most part, are managed and/or fully owned by men and women of Latin American and Caribbean Latino ancestry (hereafter shortened to Latino/a). Naming systems are an indicator of cultural identity that goes beyond personalized naming when extended to business firms. Grocery stores and restaurants are of key concern, as these establishments in many rural areas of southern Florida provide a site that both attracts and centralizes social interaction.
BACKGROUND
Biographical materials from Latino/a writers emphasize the local importance of the grocery store as a common site of aggregation more than studies which have appeared in the scientific literature, which are relatively silent on sites of aggregation. Although authors are describing urbanized areas, their writings are significant in an emphasis on the centrality of the grocery store in community and family affairs. The autobiography of Mary Helen Ponce (1993), for example, describes two local store owners in her home town in California, Mr. Jameson and Mr. Tamez, who "were good, kind men who did more than sell food" (Ponce 1993:91). Since her family had no telephone, the store owners relayed important messages to the family; Ponce describes sporadic communication from the tuberculosis sanatarium on her brother's condition through the store owners to her family, who lived down the street from the two stores (Ponce 1993:91-97). As another example from the opposite coast, Judith Ortiz Cofer (1993) writes of an affinity between clients and neighborhood grocery stores in New Jersey, including product labels that monolingual speakers could read (Ortiz Cofer 1993:86) and record-playing by adolescents as a means to signal romantic interest in someone (Ortiz Cofer 1993:138-40). Whereas Ponce refers to Latino and Anglo merchants (west coast), Ortiz Cofer is referring to merchants of Latino and Jewish descent who owned the neighborhood stores where she was raised (east coast). Approached from a different perspective, Richard Rodriguez (1982:29) remembers Mexican stores through the image of red and green hot chili peppers that hung like Christmas decorations near the clerk's counter. He blends the colors red and green that are common in mainstream society at Christmas with an icon of chili peppers that is decidedly Chicano. As Montano (1997) points out, reference to chili peppers was derogatory when used by Anglos in Texas to describe Mexican Americans. Rodriguez's maneuver is a "parodic parry" (Tuleja 1997) that turns what otherwise would have been a negative connotation on its head.
Ortiz Cofer and Rodriguez mention large chain stores where their respective families shopped, which were found outside Latino neighborhoods where their families lived. At these stores, Rodriguez translated for his parents. Ortiz Cofer, however, is silent on whether she ever translated for her mother (her father served in the U.S. Navy, which implies English-language skills, at least for him). Ponce provides little detail of alternative places of shopping for her family or whether she and her siblings translated for their parents. For the generation of Latino/as that was in the United States at the time these writers were growing up, having store managers and clerks with skills in both Spanish and English was a draw for customers.
It is telling that Ponce, Ortiz Cofer, Rodriguez, and earlier Latino/a writers rarely used the restaurant as a site of aggregation for interaction in local neighborhoods. The reasons for this distinction between patronizing local grocery stores and restaurants (except for extended family celebrations) is the home-based nature of the grocery store, where one would purchase what one needed for preparation at home, and the more commercialized use of the restaurant to serve a public that went beyond the local neighborhood.
These autobiographical reminiscences suggest that grocery stores would differ from restaurants in naming practices, since the grocery store is a prime site of social aggregation and interaction for persons of Latino ancestry, whereas the restaurant is a means of entering the business world for Latino/as who find themselves in a new environment in a new country. This expectation, which was partially supported, was that grocery stores would show more instances of names that were culturally encoded, whereas restaurants would have names more easily understood outside the Latino community. In rural southern Florida, there has been an increase in the number of stores, restaurants, and other businesses that have been established by Latino/a owners for a growing Spanish-speaking population, most of whom came to Florida from Central America, specifically, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, as well as Latino-origin countries of the Caribbean, specifically, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Attracted to rural areas where agricultural employment is common, men and women of several national origins are represented among those who enter the state to perform farm labor. (2)
The centrality and focal attraction of the neighborhood store within an urbanized area of immigrants (Sanchez 1993) is replicated by a country store that creates a similar centrality in a rural area where few sources exist for the purchase of consumable necessities, such as food and household products. Skelly et al. (2002) identify the store (tienda) as the pivotal structure for Latinos who interact and share information within "sociospatial knowledge networks' in rural areas of another southeastern state (North Carolina). Apart from the provision and sale of food and household products, the common services provided by grocery stores managed/owned by Latino/as in rural southern Florida include: a) selling telephone cards for calls to Latin America and the Caribbean (some cards emphasize reduced rates for international calls, and some emphasize reduced rates for domestic calls), occasionally with interior booths for privacy of the international calls; b) cashing pay checks for workers who lack access to check-cashing services, especially on weekends, after payday; c) providing space for pinball machines and/or billiard tables (typically one to three tables or one to two machines), which may be in a side room or back room; d) renting and selling a range of video selections in both Spanish and English, some of which are imported from Latin America; and e) selling tickets for regional buses and van services, especially to and from the border (la frontera). A few grocery stores doubled as eating establishments by building a lunch counter at one side of the store, or by placing a few...
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