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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT. This paper provides a historical perspective of Spanish in the U.S.-Mexico border by focusing on seventy-two unpublished documents written in the San Diego area in the 19th century, before and after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. A linguistic analysis reveals three main features of this variety. Firstly, it is closely connected to Mexican dialects. This claim is supported by lexical and syntactic evidence, and by orthography consistent with seseo, yeismo, loss of palatals flanked by high vowels, and strong final-/s/ retention. Secondly, it exhibits conservative features in its verbal system, e.g. retention of synthetic future and future subjunctive, overlap of haber and tener, and innovation in its nominal affixation, e.g. simplification of diminutivization. Finally, the influence of the English superstratum after annexation occurs late and is sporadically visible in some borrowings of lexical items and semantic and syntactic calques. *
INTRODUCTION. This is a study of Spanish in the San Diego area during the 19th century, based on seventy-two unpublished documents. It aims to provide a preliminary and panoramic description of this borderland variety of Spanish by considering its linguistic characteristics and by connecting them to the prevailing social context, including the demographic and social changes the area underwent in the 19th century. In order to carry out the analysis, documents written before and after the annexation of Alta California to the United States were considered, and their salient linguistic features identified, classified, and related to their social context.
A qualitative linguistic analysis reveals three main features of this variety. Firstly, it is closely connected to the varieties of northern Mexico. Secondly, although in some ways it tends to be conservative, exhibiting some archaisms and rural features, it also shows some innovations that parallel those of other noncontiguous American varieties. Finally, the documents exhibit only sporadic and superficial traces of contact with English, which suggests that the influence of the superstratum after annexation was not profound. (1)
The sections that follow provide a brief outline of the objectives, methodology, and sources of the data, as well as a brief sketch of the historical context of the documents, both before and after the American annexation. This is followed by an analysis of the main linguistic characteristics found in the documents and a discussion of the possible links between each specific feature and the social context to which it may be attributable.
1. OBJECTIVES, METHODOLOGY, AND SOURCES OF THE STUDY. The historical dimensions of California Spanish have received extensive attention in one work whose emphasis is mostly lexical (Blanco 1971). More recently, Perissinotto (1992, 1998) has focused on mission and presidio requisitions and invoices (memorias and facturas) to shed light on the linguistic features of Spanish and on everyday life in Santa Barbara during the Spanish period. Additionally, studies such as Acevedo (2000) and Balestra (2002) have analyzed specific aspects of the verbal system of this variety in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, from linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. However, none of the studies has simultaneously considered the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of the 19th century California Spanish to draw general conclusions about the dialect.
The present study builds upon those earlier works but also begins to fill this gap. To do so, it focuses on documents from the southernmost town of Alta California, San Diego and environs, analyzing the texts' most salient linguistic features, in order to contribute to the overall understanding of borderland Spanish and its evolution, and to suggest areas where more detailed consideration would be fruitful in the future.
In order to achieve these objectives, seventy-two documents were classified considering when and where they were written, their communicative purpose, and their authors and addressees. The documents were analyzed for their phonological characteristics (insofar as they are reflected by orthography), and for their morphological, syntactic, and lexical features.
Of the seventy-two documents analyzed, twenty-three belong to the Spanish and Mexican periods (1793-1847), while forty-seven were written during the American period (1848-1894). (2) They are dated in San Diego and surrounding areas, both in Alta and Baja California, or written by authors from the town while corresponding with their families. The manuscripts are public and private instruments and personal letters. In the first group, there are brand registrations (14), lists of property (4), reports of damage and loss of merchandise (3), purchases of real estate and brands (4), requests for land grants and loans (3), wills (3), receipts and promissory notes (2), marriage registrations (2), the first assessment of property of San Diego, and other miscellaneous pieces (6). The personal correspondence is made up of family and personal letters (24), business and professional letters (3), and invitations (3). (3)
Of the forty-eight known authors, thirty-eight are men and ten are women. The list of authors includes several prominent local personalities and members of the powerful landowner families, as well as high-ranking officers and rich merchants. There are also middle class authors, such as civil servants, low ranking officers, and store owners. Some, especially in the earlier period, are members of the local clergy. Occasionally, the authors are common laborers or semi-skilled workers for whom no biographical information is found. The authors are mostly native speakers of Spanish, but some speak English as a first language and have learned Spanish later in life. In a few documents, some parties are Spanish-speaking, while others are not.
Their levels of literacy span a range. At one end there are writers with consistent orthography and neat handwriting, both signs of relatively advanced levels of education. At the other, there are illiterate authors who sign with crosses, so that the body of the document does not reflect their linguistic production at all, but rather that of their scribe. Between these two extremes there are semi-literate speakers, with labored handwriting and inconsistent spelling. As has been pointed out before (Elizaincin, Groppi, Malcuori, and Coll 1997), these informants are particularly valuable to historical research: they are familiar enough with writing to be able to produce documents, but not capable of overcoming the contradictions of a writing system which deviates from exact sound-symbol correspondences. One must bear in mind, however, that, at the time, spelling was hardly ever uniform, as the influence of the Real Academia Espanola in the area was limited (Perissinotto 1998).
2. BACKGROUND: HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE DOCUMENTS.
2.1. CALIFORNIA BEFORE AMERICAN ANNEXATION. Prompted by the encroachments of foreign powers, Spain started establishing missions in the Californias in 1697. The process continued for over a century, until 1823, with the founding of San Francisco Solano in Sonoma. The mission fathers and the converted Native Americans who lived with them were protected from the incursions of non-Christian natives by Spanish soldiers established in presidios. Situated next to these military and commercial outposts were the pueblos, towns of Mexican farmers meant to sustain the presidios and to stabilize the settlements. However, encouraging settlement proved difficult, so the numbers of non-indigenous Spanish speakers remained low.
California was not settled by Castilians; in fact, in 18th century Spain movements of population and economic changes had shifted power to the peripheral provinces of the north, northwest, and east, and it was there that the Bourbon kings turned for talent to colonize California. For example, Killea (1977) estimates that out of the 89 officials and missionaries in San Diego between 1769 and 1822, 55 hailed from the Spanish periphery, while nine were from the central meseta and only five from New Spain. On the other hand, the rank and file and the pueblo settlers were generally enlisted from the colonial population, from locations such as Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California (Northrop 1984, Perissinotto 1992).
The early Spanish settlements in California were therefore multilingual and multidialectal. On the one hand, the missionaries and officers spoke not just varieties of Peninsular Spanish but also Catalan (Perissinotto 1992:38). Moreover, the neophytes spoke a staggering number of different indigenous languages; Blanco (1971:87) estimates 22 language families and 138 varieties. Finally, the soldiers and settlers contributed their New Spain regional dialects to this linguistic mix (Perissinotto 1992).
The population of the San Diego de Alcala mission, for example, grew from its modest beginnings in 1769 to become the most populous, with 1,523 inhabitants, mostly mission Indians, in the 1790s. The population of the presidio, however, was much smaller (180 so-called Spaniards in 1798 and 237 in 1811) (Pourade 1961:84, Griswold del Castillo 2006).
With Mexican independence in 1821, the California missions subsequently fell under the rule of the new republic, which started to distribute the land to private citizens and to foster colonization in the early 1830s (Sanchez 1995). Additionally, American and European merchants and entrepreneurs had started arriving in California before Mexican independence, and their numbers grew steadily after it. By 1848, the non-indigenous population had grown to a total of 15,000 inhabitants (Marschner 2000), of which the non-Hispanics accounted for 6,500, over a third of the total (Francis 1976). These non-Hispanic settlers often...
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