Spanish in Chicago

Spanish in Chicago describes the spoken Spanish of Chicago-based Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and MexiRicans across three generations, identifying patterns of change and their likely causes. Through close sociolinguistic analysis of a large corpus of interviews, Kim Potowski and Lourdes Torres trace the effects of language and dialect contact, providing a vital contribution to sociolinguistics and Latino studies.

Kim Potowski is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on Spanish in the United States, including factors that influence language maintenance and connections between language, education, and identity. She is the founder of the Language in Context Research Group and author or editor of several books, including The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language and Language Diversity in the USA. Her advocacy for the value of dual language education in promoting bilingualism and biliteracy was the focus of her TEDx talk "No Child Left Monolingual."
Lourdes Torres is Vincent de Paul Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. She is the editor of the journal Latino Studies and the series co-editor of the Global Latin/o American Series of the University of Ohio Press. Her research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, Spanish in the US, and Queer Latinidades. She is the author of
Puerto Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of a New York Suburb and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism and Tortilleras: Hispanic and the Latina Lesbian Expression.