National narratives, institutional ideologies, and local talk: The discursive production of Spanish in a “new” US Latino community PHILLIP M. CARTER Program in Linguistics, Florida International University Deuxième Maison 453, 11200 SW 8th Street Miami, FL 33199, USA pmcarter@fiu.edu ABSTRACT This study investigates the figuration of “Spanish” as a sociocultural dis- course within the context of a middle school in North Carolina, where immigration from Latin America is new, yet quickly accelerating. The school-based discourse is analyzed in terms of everyday ways of talking among students, as well as institutional ideologies and practices, which mediate national discourses about US Latinos and reinforce tropes circulated by students. Everyday ways of talking among non-Latino students suggest that Latinos—both immigrants and US born—are Spanish monolinguals who “choose” to be segregated from the English speakers. The use of Spanish by Latinos is constructed by non-Latinos as secretive and dangerous, linking local tropes about Spanish to national discourses. Consistent informal pressure against Spanish at school links to broader pressures against Spanish in the community and beyond. The discourse problematizes Latino identity formations and limits the types of identities available to Latino students. (Discursive production, Spanish, US Latinos, Latino threat narrative)* INTRODUCTION National discourses about US Latinos, immigration, and Spanish have proliferated in the United States over the past two decades, ebbing and flowing in both quantity and vitriol, as Chavez (2008:34) points out, with global and national economic con- ditions, the broader political climate, and the demand for cheap labor. These dis- courses construct US Latinos, both immigrants and the US-born, as Spanish monolinguals, unable or unwilling to learn English, who, “flood,”“invade,” or “infect” the US (Santa Ana 2002), depleting local budgets and draining resources from cities, states, and the nation. Intersecting with ideologies of English monolin- gualism (Macías 1985; Wiley & Lukes 1996; Wiley 2000; Santa Ana 2002) and standard language (Lippi-Green 1994, 1997; Silverstein 1996), U.S. popular dis- courses about Spanish have, over time and with great repetition, come to constitute hegemonic ways of thinking and talking about US Latinos, and produce as their © Cambridge University Press, 2014 0047-4045/14 $15.00 209 Language in Society 43, 209–240. doi:10.1017/S0047404514000049