My daughter's language ideologies

The other day Lucero and Rosie were cleaning windows and other random surfaces in our apartment...for fun. This is the second time they've done it-- I wonder how long I can keep up this ruse. I remember how much fun my sister and I used to have cleaning windows when we were kids. It just felt so adult to use glass cleaner.

So Lucero says to me: "Mommy, you pretend we're maids and you tell us what to clean." Uh, okay? Felt sorta wrong, but whatever, I'll play. I ask the girls to clean the dirt off the front door. Then Lucero puts on a rural southern white accent as she says, "Well, ma'am, we cleaned the doors and windas and them thar shelves. Anything else we can do fer ya?" I was waiting for her to start whistling Dixie. I wondered if I was hallucinating the whole thing.

Have I ever mentioned the part where I spent a few years of grad school studying popular language ideologies toward non-standard dialects? So Lucero's little shtick was super fascinating to me. Not least of all because my daughters are Mexican-American, and if there's a stereotypical maid in Texas, it's gonna be Mexican/Mexican-American. So I was grooving on the fact that Lucero was shaking it up a bit. I asked her why she'd chosen the accent she had. She said it was just the first thing that came to her. What did I expect? "Well, mom, I was just having fun interrupting typical expectations about race and language, while reifying the correlation between class and blue collar labor."

Anyway, speaking of race and stuff, have you seen the first season webisodes of Awkward Black Girl?! It's so very awesome. I discovered it while reading about the hoopla over the whiteness of the new HBO series Girls over on Racialicious. Girls is about four upper-middle class white girls living in Brooklyn, leading really privileged lives. I watched the first episode because I love Judd Apatow--the producer and director of Freaks and Geeks and Knocked Up, the movie that made me laugh so hard it triggered my labor with Rosie. There were some amusing parts of Girls, but I was shocked that it was such a narrow and already quite well-represented group of people. Plus all the actresses are privileged daughters of mucky-mucks. Yeah, no thanks. I mean, really, there are a lot of untold stories that are going to be interesting to a wide audience. And, something else I found through the same article...have you heard of Stevie Ryan? She's a white actress who does this stereotypical chola shtick called Little Loca. How it is not (a) totally racist, and (b) a crappy chola/chicana accent to boot?