Durham,
North Carolina, a city of close to 200,000, located near the fall
line in the Piedmont of the state, is home to the Research Triangle
Park, which drove employment and in-migration (of all ethnicities)
in the 1990s. Numerous professional and service-sector opportunities
arose, and immigrants primarily from Mexico, but also from El
Salvador and Honduras, were among those to take advantage; many
of their young children are now native-born American citizens.
Of metro counties in North Carolina, Durham trailed only Forsyth
in the percentage of 1990s population growth that was comprised
by Hispanics. The city of Durham represents a fertile field for
the investigation of interaction between Hispanics and speakers
of other varieties and of the possible emergence of a new regional
variety of Chicano English.
The NCLLP has just begun to examine the speech of a group of Latino
students aged nine through eleven enrolled in an ESL class in
Durham. The makeup of the school is approximately 70% African-American,
20% Latino or Hispanic, and 10% White. We will examine the ways
in which children from a new but rapidly burgeoning Latino population
negotiate the demands of English proficiency and of social interaction
with White and African American classmates.
