䊏
Jennifer F. Reynolds
THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little
Parrots): The Negotiation of Respect
and Responsibility in Antonero
Mayan Sibling and Peer Networks
This article examines family and peer practices of socialization that illuminate a culture
specific social ontology of intentions (Duranti 2006). An interpretive approach to the study of
children’s language socialization and peer talk is adopted to analyze how local beliefs concerning children’s socialization and development are afforded within multiparty participation
frameworks that involve teasing and shaming routines. These routines are powerful discursive strategies in the everyday negotiation and co-construction of peer politics and kin group
social relationships. Data include ethnographic observational and naturally occurring videorecorded quotidian interactions collected March 1998–March 1999 in San Antonio Aguas
Calientes, a highland Guatemala Kaqchikel Maya town. [responsibility, intentionality,
language socialization, peer talk-in-interaction]
H
ablan como puros pericos.” (They talk like little parrots).1 Eugenio, a
19-year-old youth in my ethnographic study of Kaqchikel Maya family and
peer language socialization practices, emphatically uttered this remark
within the context of a causal conversation among members of his kin network. The
discussion concerned the everyday work of caring for younger siblings, nieces and
nephews, and Eugenio was chortling over how his identical twin nieces (age three)
would repeat everything they heard, unthinkingly like little parrots. The humorous
subtext of his comment was not lost on his cousin and age-mate peer, Yesenia. She
launched into a story that illustrated the same phenomenon. She recounted times
when her sister’s 21-month-old twins, Tere and Alfonso, would utter the highly
offensive word, cerote (asshole). This particular insult is typically heard in the
drunken speech of men during highland town festivals or in conflict talk between
rival youth groups of either gender. Out of the mouths of adults, insults and other
forms of ritualized ridicule in verbal art and public performance are culturally salient
in Mayan towns (Bricker 1973, 1974; Gossen 1974a, 1974b, 1977, 1979). Out of the
mouths of Chamula Maya babes, however, cerote and other token instances of marginal speech genres, “speech for people whose hearts are heated,” were treated in the
same way Yesenia and Eugenio described them—just one more memorable story of
family life where “silly, unknowing immature” children, are not being held responsible for the pragmatic punch of their utterances.
Cultural psychologists and linguists who have worked across a range of indigenous Maya communities in other parts of highland Guatemala and southern Mexico
“
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 82–107, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2008
by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2008.00005.x.
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Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
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acknowledge similar culture-specific beliefs concerning early child language socialization and development. These beliefs endow young children with a special status,
one that absolves them of full responsibility for their actions, even in instances when
their actions could be construed as disrespectful (de León 1998; Gaskins 1996; Mosier
and Rogoff 2003; Rogoff 2003). Children so perceived are no longer strictly treated as
infants because they can participate in conversation, but they also are believed to lack
the reasoning skills necessary for officially assuming greater household responsibilities, including caregiving tasks. Older children, between the ages of 7 and 12, are
seen as more fully “understanding” and can be held accountable for transgressive
acts.2 In this paper, I draw upon research within the traditions of language socialization and peer culture (especially research in talk-in-interaction) to probe how this
particular cultural stance is embodied in quotidian Kaqchikel Maya family and peer
practices. I argue that this stance affords an important window into a processual
examination of “the social ontology of intentions” (Duranti 2006) from a socialization
perspective.
Research in language socialization and peer talk-in-interaction provide powerful
frameworks for interpreting the social and discursive organization of caregiving
and peer culture practices. I will examine a set of discursive practices and participation frameworks that simultaneously reflect and constitute the way Mayas
enact respect and responsibility in the mediation of kin and peer relationships.
These practices socialize young children into ways of being and perceiving precisely
by positioning them interactionally as participants who merely ape adult expressions. I will argue that this counter-intuitive situation actually provides children an
opportunity to adopt powerful voices and test the strength of social ties within
relatively safe interactions where the responsibility for the perlocutionary outcome
is distributed and diffused. Such an analysis requires that I disrupt the emic
adult-centric perspective, one which largely ignores young children’s creative contributions, in order to consider how all members involved, including young
children, are active participants who co-construct and negotiate these beliefs in quotidian practice.
Since 1991 I have established and maintained rapport with Kaqchikel Mayas from
several highland Guatemalan towns. The actual research for this paper, however, took
place March 1998–March 1999. Data consist of field notes and video recordings
produced while being a participant observer in three significant settings: in households, in the vending networks while the teens and kids worked, and public town
events. Video recordings and transcriptions of 40 hours of naturally occurring speech
of caregiver–child and peer interactions form the basis of this analysis. Transcription conventions were adapted from those first developed by Gail Jefferson (Sacks,
et al. 1974: 731–734). I use pseudonyms and alter other identifying information to
ensure participant confidentiality.
Responsibility and Intentionality in Language Socialization and
Peer Culture Research
A little more than a decade ago linguistic anthropologists, inspired in part by the
early works of Hymes (1974), Keenan (Ochs) (1977), and Rosaldo (1982), called for a
dialogic, empirical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies of responsibility and intentionality. Contributors to Hill and Irvine’s (1992) edited collection
titled Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse moved beyond the cognitive-bias
inherent in Western notions of intentionality to examine culturally relative ways
through which social beings are held to account for their verbal and nonverbal
actions. The papers displayed a range of approaches and relevant units of analysis
in the study of “responsibility” and “evidence;” some focused on the linguistic
encoding of evidence in evidential morphology and meta-linguistic verbs of speaking
(including reported speech) while others highlighted the social organization of
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speaking distributed across participant frameworks (Goffman 1974, 1979, 1981) and
genres within everyday, ceremonial and institutional contexts of interaction.3 Hill and
Irvine underscored the centrality of examining participant roles for achieving a dialogic analysis of culture as practice.
Some recent scholarship in this vein is moving beyond a critique of Western
concepts of intentionality and responsibility toward developing a theory for interpreting social action that accounts simultaneously for culture-specific and universal
dimensions of intentionality. Duranti (2006) proposes a phenomenological, allencompassing approach in his “social ontology of intentions.” The social ontology
of intentions draws upon Husserl’s concept of “aboutness” (or “directionality”) to
explain how human action (both conscious and unconscious) is always oriented
toward something or someone else. “ ‘Aboutness’ (of “thinking, feeling and doing)”
is intersubjectively achieved and mediated via culturally relative practical, moral and
aesthetic frameworks (2006:37). Duranti writes,
This means that the predicament of our social ontology is that we cannot be human in general
(i.e. in universal terms) without being human in particular, that is, without defining ourselves
and being defined by others as particular types of persons, that is, subjects who—under
circumstances that are always particular (even though generalizable)—display, for example,
compassion or hate, hope or despair, care or indifference toward real or imagined entities. It
is this property of human existence that makes its detailed documentation possible and, at
the same time, necessary. [Duranti 2006:37–38]
The literature on language socialization and peer talk-in-interaction both provide
processual frameworks for examining how it is that cultural-specific theories of
“aboutness” is socialized and assessed in quotidian caregiver–child or peer activities.4 Both emphasize how “the child” becomes a “speaker of a culture” (Ochs 2002)
through his or her participation in language routines with caregivers (Briggs 1998;
Ochs and Schieffelin 1979, 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986; Garrett and BaquedanoLópez 2002; Kulick 1992) and peers (Blum-Kulka and Snow 2004; Cook-Gumperz
and Kyratzis 2001; Gaskins, Miller and Corsaro 1992; Goodwin 1990; Kyratzis 2004).
They emphasize how children are active participants in shaping their own cultures.
This is especially evident when children and their caregivers strike complementary
stances in the negotiation of responsibility for the consequences of social acts committed, conscious or otherwise. Ochs (1993) argues that Samoan caregivers cultivate
the phenomenon of child cursors when they adopt the stance that children are not
yet fully social beings and are cheeky by nature. This was best exemplified in caregivers’ labeling of infants’ utterances as a form of cursing (even when the child
does not curse). Children subsequently embraced this role, and so were active participants in the re-creation of a particular sort of a hierarchical caregiving
relationship—one which absolved the youngest children of social responsibility for
uttering “bad” words.
These research traditions diverge in the degree to which they have examined
cross-cultural variation in child and peer socialization. Peer cultural studies adopt
social constructivist and Vygotskian theoretical frameworks, which begin with the
premise that children “actively contribute to societal reproduction as well as societal
change” (Corsaro 1997:5). These studies often use the descriptor “kid” to provide a
child-centric perspective that disrupts adult-centric perspectives inherent in the ways
scholars often use the concept “child.” Peer talk-in-interaction studies, which form a
subset of this research, focus specifically on how peers construct gender and ethnic
identities, resist adult culture, and engage in their own practices of exclusion and
inclusion via a host of activity-types and forms of talk and through the manipulation
of discursive alignments (Kyratzis 2004).
These studies typically have examined industrial and post-industrial societal contexts that reflect so-called child-centered cultural patterns for educating “the child”
and creating a particular kind of childhood. The childhood fostered within a childcentered pattern of socialization is typically defined by mainstream middle class
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
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social practices and values that first group children by absolute age rather than by
ability. Children are often segregated from adult spheres of labor and leisure and
sequestered into child-centric institutions (the domestic sphere or schools) specifically designed to educate them (Rogoff 2003). Most often it is within these non-kin
based organizational contexts where early forms of peer culture emerge.5
While peer culture scholars have noted cross-cultural variation in kids’ peer cultural practices, they have not fully contended with the full range of social contexts
and patterns for children’s language socialization. Historian of U.S. childhoods
Zelizer (1994) reminds us that the current middle class notion of “the child” and of
modern childhood, isolated from adult spheres of production, is in fact a culturalhistorical product that emerged as a result of socio-economic and cultural transformations between the 1870s and 1930s. The 18th-century child, who had previously
been a “useful” participant contributing his or her labor within kin and community
networks was transformed into a “priceless” and “useless” object in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, in need of protection from the ravages of modern technologies
(e.g., cars and street trolleys) and capitalist industries (e.g., manufacturing, mining,
and service). Before this era, child-centered models did not inform U.S. mainstream
ways of child rearing.
Linguistic anthropologists and cultural psychologists Heath (1983), Ochs and
Schieffelin (1984), Zentella (1997, 2005), Rogoff (2003), and Gaskins (2006) have all
discussed at length how the child-centered pattern is reflective of only one general
cross-cultural and cross-historic tendency, though it is often problematically naturalized in developmental psychology as the universal way to raise children. They
adopt practice- or activity-based theories of social reproduction, specifically those
of Bourdieu (1977) or Vygotsky (1986), as they examine alternative sociocultural
patterns that have been loosely grouped together as “situation-centered” approaches
to child socialization.
Situation-centered patterns tend to group children by their relative age, interest,
and ability to participate in everyday activities. “Education” does not solely occur in
child-centered institutions, nor are children precluded from observing and participating in so-called “adult” activities. Most learning occurs first by one’s own initiative
and keen attention to on-going routines and ability to pitch-in in culturally appropriate ways (Rogoff 2003). The focus of these studies has been to examine how
children become competent members of their respective societies as they adapt to
and participate in everyday kin and community activities. No special analytic emphasis is devoted to peer culture, in part because peer culture appeared indissoluble from
“adult culture.” This is in stark contrast to child-centered patterns where there are
identifiable peer cultures that can be conceptualized as separate albeit influenced by
“adult culture,” though it may be problematic to do so because it tends to trivialize
children’s contributions and impact on society.6
Of central concern to both traditions is the issue of how social control and the
assessment of responsibility is enacted sequentially in routine exchanges. Language
socialization research focuses on the functional distribution of different kinds of
socialization routines that involve acts of social control within families. It is through
these types of routines where families display and negotiate power (Aronsson
and Thorell 1999; Ervin-Tripp, et al. 1984; Ochs 1988; Ochs and Taylor 1992, 1993;
Schieffelin 1990). Peer culture research focuses on how oppositional stances displayed
in conflict talk are pleasurable as well as painful sites of youth’s interpretive reproduction (Corsaro and Maynard 1996; Corsaro and Rizzo 1990; Evaldsson 2004, 2007;
Griswold 2007; Goodwin, 1990, 2002, 2006; M. H. Goodwin and C. Goodwin 1987;
Poveda and Marcos 2005; Sheldon 1990; Shuman 1992). In both traditions, forms of
social control encoded in grammatical forms or embodied in shifts in footing within
participant frameworks reveal the social and discursive processes through which
authority and responsibility are put on display and evaluated both implicitly and
explicitly within the social networks most central to children and youths’ socialization and development.
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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
I combine these two approaches in order to examine the context of Kaqchikel
Maya kin and peer interactions where responsibility and respect are enacted and
socialized. The analysis begins with a discussion of a Mayan cultural model of
respect and examines how it is enacted and embodied in social practices that
involve the participation of young children. It will be revealed that Maya children,
their near-peer caregivers and families adopted dimensions of both child and
situation-centered approaches to child language socialization. The children of San
Antonio Aguas Calientes have similar early childhood experiences to those of Maya
children from other ethnolinguistic communities. Children are not isolated from
adult spheres of labor and leisure; they are granted tremendous autonomy, though
at the same time they are expected to adapt to the situation by keeping out of the
way when they are not capable of fully participating in labor activities. Presupposing these experiences are culture specific notions of intentionality (Warren 1995)
and responsibility (Gaskins 1999; Mosier and Rogoff 2003). Thus, in the second
analytic section I examine the participant roles that young children occupy within
multiparty participation structures of conflict talk, namely teasing and shaming
routines, as children continuously negotiate caregiver and sibling hierarchies within
families and peer networks. These interactions enact quotidian ways through which
Mayas assess the social ontology of intentions in the unmasking of potentially
dangerous alternative intentions that can lead to estrangement within kin and peer
networks.
Maya Cosmology—Respecting Unity in Diversity:
Quotidian Practices of Voluntary Responsibility
San Antonio Aguas Calientes, the site of this study, is a highland Kaqchikel-Spanish
bilingual town, nestled in the Quinizilapa valley in the central highlands of Guatemala. It was founded during the Spanish Conquest between 1524 and 1530 along the
shores of the former Lake Quinizilapa, situated next to the colonial town of Santiago
en Almolonga (present-day location of Antigua, Guatemala) where the Spanish conquistador, Pedro de Alvarado, resided. Indigenous groups forced to settle there
during the early colonial period, comprised a diverse ethnolinguistic milieu; indigenous languages might have included the Mayan languages, Q’eqchi,’ K’ichee,’
Tz’utuujil, Chontal and Kaqchikel, and the southern Uto-Aztecan languages Nahuatl
and Pipil (Annis 1987). Kaqchikel eventually became the lingua franca in the valley.
After centuries of sustained occupation and close proximity to Spanish-speaking
colonial centers of power, most Antoneros (people born in San Antonio Aguas Calientes) became highly proficient Kaqchikel-Spanish bilinguals. It has only been within
the past few decades that San Antonio’s tradition of stable bilingualism switched,
moving towards Spanish monolingualism (Brown 1991, 1998).7
In some ways San Antonio is atypical of most Indian towns in highland Guatemala.
It is in close proximity to Ladino (i.e., an ethno-racial category denoting non-Indian)
centers of political and economic power. Residents historically have been open to
interacting with outsiders, adopting new ideas if it suits local development. A shift in
the local political economy is exacerbating social inequality within the town, and two
interrelated pressures have precipitated this shift. First, a greedy Guatemala City
lawyer, backed by the might of the military during the late 1970s and early 1980s civil
war (referred to as la Violencia (the Violence)), usurped a large track of productive
land in the valley (Annis 1988). Second, population increases within this stressed
system of land-tenure have rendered impossible a self-sufficient subsistence maize
agriculture. Families’ survival depended on their ability to forge and maintain translocal ties to other national ethnic groups, religious groups, secular non-governmental
organizations, tourists, and foreign state agencies. This in turn provided the necessary
social capital for family members in the late 1980s and 1990s to successfully sustain
diversified household economies, which has enabled some to negotiate and mitigate
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
87
the blunt force of some of the more turbulent neoliberal macroeconomic policies
destructive to sustaining indigenous life-ways in Guatemalan communities (Little
2003, 2004; Reynolds 2002).
In other ways, San Antonio is quite typical of other prosperous highland Mayan
towns in so far as local forms of social organization and cultural ideologies acknowledge and valorize an indigenous way of life that is believed to be culturally distinctive from so-called mainstream Guatemalan Ladinos. Domestic labor migration
patterns of youth and married men have not disrupted the division of labor in
household reproduction, though this was beginning to change as of the late 90s and
early 2000 when significant increases in transnational migration of entire families
took place. Most town members are proud to be referred to as Antoneros and they
view an indigenous ethnic identity and lifestyle associated with living in San
Antonio as something they choose, not something that is negatively ascribed to
them by the dominant society. One of the mothers in my study proudly told me
“Soy india porque quiero” (I’m an Indian because I choose to be).8 Thus, pride in an
indigenous ethnic identity and adherence to a unique Maya Cosmology reveal San
Antonio to be quite typical.
According to the ethnographic canon, Maya Cosmology in various quotidian and
ritual instantiations is characterized by discerning unity in diversity (Fischer 1999;
Montejo 2005). The generative logic of Maya Cosmology is tacitly manifest in hierarchically organized families and households. It functions according to the principles of
interdependence with autonomy, whereby the interdependent roles of a diverse
family composition recreate the collectivity (Gaskins 1999; Rogoff 2003). This cultural
model is best characterized as socializing members into responsibility to a collectivity
with freedom of choice (Mosier and Rogoff 2003).9
Two dimensions of respect crosscut the Cosmological model of family. The first
dimension of respect is relational; the amount of deference and respect one gives and
receives depends upon one’s place within a gendered and age-graded hierarchy
(Watanabe 2000). Very young children, however, occupy a distinctive place within
this hierarchy, perhaps due to their status as a particular type of non-person (Goffman
1963). As the opening anecdote reveals, young children and infants are perceived to
lack social understanding (see Gaskins 1996) and consequently are accorded a type of
exempt status.10 They are not held fully accountable (Mosier and Rogoff 2003; see
Bunte in press; Paradise 1987; and Schieffelin 1990 for other cross-cultural examples
of this phenomenon). In the Antonero case study, as the following analyses will
reveal, this also appears to be true in contexts where young children are active
participants in family disputes.
The second dimension of respect is individual; everyone is granted autonomy and
the freedom to choose not to participate or cooperate with the larger group activity
(Gaskins 1999; Rogoff, et al. 1993). While adults and sibling caregivers do not often
force children to do things that they do not wish to do, caregivers do issue bald
directives and false threats when children are in harms way or are interfering in
productive activities by distracting and re-directing attention, and by teasing and
shaming them.
The following transcript excerpt provides an illustration of these beliefs embodied
in Antonero practice. Excerpts 1a and 1b take place during the midday meal among
extended family members. It involves a dispute between siblings, Cristina (age seven)
and Alfonso (21 months) and reveals the mother’s (Miranda) dual orientation to
respect the individual autonomy of both her children while simultaneously granting
the younger disputant an exempt position. The dispute suddenly erupts between the
two children when Alfonso spills his juice on Cristina. Miranda acknowledges that
Alfonso did something wrong (line 5), but does nothing to intercede on behalf of
either child. Cristina, however, does not grant Alfonso an exempt position and she
calls attention to what he did by grabbing his shirt and muttering how much his
behavior annoyed her (line 7). A series of slaps ensues, with Alfonso aggravating
the attack (line 8) and Cristina retaliating in kind (line 9). Ernesto, the 14-year-old
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
88
uncle, bears witness to the dispute and draws his sister’s attention back to it (line 10).
And almost as if on cue, Alfonso begins to protest through tears of rage (line 11).
Goffman (1967) early noted that emotional outbursts like this one are far from being
“irrational expressions,” but rather are best understood as a type of ritual move,
“conveying that he [the child] already has a face to lose and that its loss is not to be
permitted lightly. Sympathetic parents may even allow for such display, seeing in
these crude strategies the beginnings of a social self” (1967:23).
Transcript Excerpt 1a—Sibling Dispute and its Subsequent Mediation
Participants:
Miranda (age 30; mother)
Cristina (age seven; daughter)
Alfonso (21 months; son and focal child)
Ernesto (age 14; uncle, Miranda’s younger brother)
L# Participants Behavior
`
English Gloss
1 Alfonso
(( Alfonso spills his drink on Cristina))
2 Cristina
(( looks disgruntled))
3 Miranda
qué te hizo.
What did he do to you?
4 C
me echó fresco en mi huipil?
He splashed juice on my huipil (a handwoven blouse).
5 M
ei::::: sí pues:::
Ei:::: yes indeed.
6 Ernesto
(????) (( Speaking to another person))
7 C
[ma::l allí 11
Bad there/How you annoy me there.
[((Cristina grabs Alfonso’s shirt))
8 A
((He slaps Cristina))
9 C
((She slaps him back on the hand))
10 E
mirá
Look
11 A
EHM:::: EH:::::
EHM:::: EH:::::
Alfonso’s irrepressible insistence that someone take action on his behalf (beginning in
line 11) and different caregivers’ orientations to the unfolding events shed light on the
negotiated nature of discipline and assessing responsibility among members of this
extended family. In this system there are obvious tensions between the conflicting
cultural preference to simultaneously acknowledge relative-age status differences
(with the exception of exempt infants and young children) and an individual’s
autonomy. In this above exchange, the siblings in fact did hold each other accountable
for their respective actions. The caregivers’ positions, however, shift over interactional time.
The exchange, which began with the primary caregiver’s reluctance to intervene
on either child’s behalf, evolves into one of increasing involvement. In 1b Miranda
first shames both children for habitual acts of hitting (line 12) and then attempts to
silence Alfonso (line 14).12 When a crying Alfonso holds out his arm for inspection,
Miranda next attempts to distract and soothe him through the use of a formulaic
child-directed rhyme (lines 16, 18 and 32). When these strategies are unsuccessful,
Miranda issues a false threat in the form of a promise to corporally punish Cristina
(line 20). A second caregiver, Ernesto, then steps in and teases Alfonso for his
babyish behavior “Ahorita contratar para el mejor chillón” (Hire him right now for
the best crybaby) (line 21). All of these strategies fail to distract or redirect Alfonso.
Throughout the entire event he continues to emphatically appeal to his mother to
act on his behalf and punish Cristina (lines 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 23, 30, 34 and 36).
Alfonso stops insisting only when he is tricked into believing that Miranda has
fulfilled her promise. In lines 35, 37–38 and 40, Miranda dramatizes corporal punishment first with a hand slap against the table next to Cristina’s hand, and then
with a clanging metal lid. Thus, the sibling conflict draws to an abrupt close
without breaking either child’s will; no forced apologies are extracted nor are real
punishments exacted.
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
89
Transcript Excerpt 1b
L# Participants Behavior
`
12 Miranda
((clicks tongue))<siempre
(está pegando)
13 Alfonso
M:::::HM::::::M:::::::M::::
14 M
callate pues callate:::.
15 A
((He displays his arm to Miranda))
16 M
sana ((rubs his arm))
sana
colita de rana
si no [sana hoy
sanará mañana
si no pasado mañana
17 A
[VE:::::::VE:::::: MAMA::::
18 M
ya stuvo~ya stuov~ya stuvo
19 A
Cristina::::[::::: [ eh eh
20 M
[ vamos a pegar a la
Cristina sí?
21 Emesto
[ ahorita contratar
para el [mejor chillón
22 ?
[(???)
23 A
EHEH:::::::
30 A
31 M
32
33
34 A
35 M
36 A
37 M
38
39 A
40 M
English Gloss
tsk Always (hitting)
M:::::HM::::::M:::::::M::::
Quiet, quiet
Heal,
heal,
tail of frog,
if it does not heal today,
it will heal tomorrow,
if not (then), the day after.
SEE::::: SEE:::: MO::::MMY!
All over~all over~all over
Cristina:::::: eh eh
We’re going to hit Cristina, okay?
Hire him right now for the best crybaby.
EHEH:::::::
[…] ((A side conversation takes place between the older siblings, it draws Miranda’s
attention away from Alfonso))
SI::::E:::: :::: E::: MA:::::::::::: eh eh eh SI::::E:::::::: E::: MA:::::::::::: eh
eh eh
((Switches gaze back to Alfonso))
sana ((rubs his arm))
Heal,
sana
heal,
colita de rana ya
tail of frog. That’s it.
así querés
Is that what you want?
(??) mami::: ((points at Cristina))= Mommy:::
=[ ((Miranda strikes the table with
her hand, pretending to strike
Cristina))
=[ ya le pegué
That’s it, I hit her.
mami:::
Mommy:::
((Picks-up a lid from a pot, she
clamps down on the table
with dramatic flare, again pretending
to hit Cristina; Cristina hides her grinning
face inside her juice cup))
ya le pegué
That’s it, I hit her.
m::
m::
ya. (0.2) callate~pues.
There. (0.2) Now quiet.
Young children learn the dual notions of respect from adults and their near-peer
siblings in the extended family hierarchy as active participants in the ebb and flow of
everyday activities (see Maynard 2002 and de León 2007 for an analysis of Tzotzil
Maya sibling-peers, and Gaskins 2006 on Yucatec Maya sibling-peers). In the second
transcript excerpt, taken from the same household and extended family, we see the
same focal child, 21-month-old Alfonso being accommodated as well as being told to
respect the autonomy of his younger infant sibling, Juan José. In the exchange,
Venancio, Alfonso’s 11-year-old uncle, was caring for Juan José while the highestranking caregiver present, Miranda, was busy preparing tortillas for the midday
meal. Alfonso, his twin sister, Tere, and their four-year-old sibling, Pablito were left
alone to play as they wished. At the beginning of the interaction, Alfonso elicits his
uncle’s attention and refers to the baby, Juan José, with the address term, papa (line 1).
Papa is a token of a type of caregiver or “baby-talk” register; it exhibits the features of
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
90
reduplication and simplification (Ferguson 1977). This excerpt moreover illustrates
how Spanish-speaking Mayas in Guatemala, much like New York Puerto Ricans, use
the same address terms to refer to mothers and fathers and little boys and girls
(Zentella 1997). Zentella writes that “with the help of these labels, young children
learn the essential nature of gender roles; they are future mamis and papis in training”
(1997:232). Indeed, Venancio interprets Alfonso’s utterance as a request to assume a
papa-like role vis-à-vis his infant sibling.
Transcript Excerpt 2—“No Quiere”
Participants:
Venancio or “Cio” (age 12; uncle)
Miranda (age 30; mother)
Alfonso (21 months; son and first focal child)
Juan José (seven months; son and second focal child)
`
English Gloss
L# Participants Behavior
1 Alfonso
Cio::: (0.8) m:: pa:::pa:.
(Venan)cio (0.8) m:: baby
2 Venancio
tu papa
Your baby
3 A
sí:::?
Yes
4 V
((Venancio stands up in front
of Alfonso, while holding Juan José))
5
qué querés con tu papa.
What do you want with your baby?
6 A
papa:.
Baby.
7 V
(( He positions the baby within
Alfonso’s reach))
8 A
((Alfonso embraces the baby))
9 V
lo vas abrazar?
You’re going to hold him?
10
mirá ((addressing Miranda))
Look
11 Miranda
no (0.2) no lo soltés porque
No (0.2) don’t let go because he’s
lo va botar
going to drop him.
12 V
(( He takes the baby back in his
arms))
13
ve? no quiere, no quiere tu papa. See? He doesn’t want, your baby doesn‘t
want. (i.e. being held)
In addition to Alfonso’s utterance of a caregiver register address term, the fact that
the higher-ranking caregiver, Venancio, acknowledges the request at all indicates
that Alfonso is being granted a conversational position of privilege (line 2). In other
words, Venancio ratifies the child as a partially competent interlocutor, one who can
initiate verbal and non-verbal acts and expect his caregiver to respond. Cooperative
proposition building also takes place between the two (lines 5–9), and Venancio
negotiates the meaning of Alfonso’s utterances and actions through expansion in this
dyadic exchange (lines 2 and 9). All of these dimensions engender what appears to be
a prototypical child-centered model of language socialization (Ochs and Schieffelin
1984). Pre-verbal infant vocalizations, however, do not receive this same sort of
preferential treatment.
As the exchange unfolds, Venancio in line 10 draws his sister’s attention to Alfonso
as he assumes the role of caregiver by holding Juan José in his arms. Miranda,
however, does not believe Alfonso to be fully capable of assuming such a role, and
she warns her brother to not let go of the baby (line 11). Venancio complies with her
request and he takes the baby away from Alfonso. He explains to Alfonso the reasoning for doing so, but instead of paraphrasing Miranda’s evaluation of Alfonso’s lack
of competency, he highlights the individual autonomy of Juan José “No quiere, no
quiere tu papa” (He doesn’t want, your baby doesn’t want (to be held)) (line 13). In so
doing, Venancio tacitly reveals to Alfonso that he should not impose his will on the
younger Juan José, even while he is appropriately oriented to the child as a nurturing
caregiver. Alfonso seems to accept this coding of the baby’s wishes and ceases
pursuing his request.
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
91
Being Friends, Being Family: Negotiating Responsibility, Testing Relationships
and Unmasking “Other” Intentions
Thus far I have examined some instances of quotidian discursive practices through
which respect is instantiated and socialized in cross-generational, caregiver–child
interactions in a single Antonero extended family household. The analysis reveals that
this family exhibits dimensions of Maya Cosmology that ethnographers of Maya
communities have documented at earlier times and in different regions (de León
2006, 2007; Gaskins 1999; Nash 1970; Rogoff 2003). I now turn to Kaqchikel Mayas’
notions of the self, social ontology of intentions, and the negotiation of responsibility
in affective relationships. This examination is crucial for understanding the functional
distribution of discursive activities that seem, counter-intuitively, to actually impinge
on the Cosmological approach to respect the individual’s autonomy. Cultural anthropologist Kay Warren early examined Kaqchikel notions of self and intentionality
espoused by highland town members from San Andrés Semetabaj. She argued that
the generation of Trixano elders (circa the late 1970s) espoused a notion of self that
was highly unstable. In comparing Kaqchikel notions of self with Western constructions she wrote:
While those in the contemporary “West” struggle through all kinds of therapy and selfdiscovery to find and display their real selves, the Kaqchikel Mayas are not fully convinced
that this is possible. In San Andrés, certain kinds of people and animals are not regarded as
stable entities. Rather, they are unstable and worrisome transformations of something else.
In some cases, humans who appear normal regularly assume animal form. They are sub’unel:
“deceivers” and “confounders.” They are often described as driven to certain actions, as
animals are driven by an inner compulsion to do what they must. It is their work, their
destiny. [Warren 1995:54]
Similar popular narratives about unstable selves are also common in San Antonio.
Perspectives highlighted in these narratives generally acknowledge how one’s
actions may mask secret intentions that are at odds with a public presentation-of-self.
They also reveal Kaqchikeles’ awareness that one can never truly know another’s
intentions. This belief was also reflected in the local Trixano expression, “jun jolomaj
jun ruch’ulew” (one mind is a world). Of central concern for these traditional power
brokers was the danger of estrangement between generations due to masked “other”
intentions. The moral message underscored the cultural importance of unmasking
deceit. In these stories, protagonists do not impute motives or intentions to others,
rather they publicly reveal “other” intentions through forms of trickery and other
types of ambiguous, discursive activities that force participants to clarify their positions. Intentions thus are assessed in the court of public opinion and treated as the
outcome of particular antisocial behaviors.
In everyday discourse, the purpose of unmasking “other” intentions appears
central to different forms of verbal play between peers and family members. Teasing,
parody, and other forms of public ridicule are immensely popular multiparty practices, which mediate relationships between kin, peer, and community networks. They
are the discursive vehicles through which family members and friends routinely test
the potential for estrangement in their relationships. Discursive phenomena include
verbal duels (some of which escalate to physical duels (i.e., fights)), the use of
pejorative nicknames and insults, all forms of parody and ridicule often animated
as reported speech, innuendo (especially sexual innuendo), and the use of deception.
The following ethnographic snapshot is of an event when a younger sibling parodied
an older one by baptizing him with a new nickname derived from popular media. It
is a verbal strategy common in peer-group communities of practice (Poveda 2006). It
also reveals the predilection of Antoneros who vend handicrafts to strike cosmopolitan or transnational stances via transidiomatic practices; they “interact using
different languages and communicative codes [that] simultaneously present a range
of communicative channels both local and distant” (Jacquemet 2005:264–265).
92
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
“Puro Rikix” (phonetically transcribed /riki∫/) quipped Venancio, as he struck a
pose with fists clenched, arms rounded and thrust downward in a display of brute
strength and rage that someone of my generation would only expect to see enacted by
a comic book character like the incredible Hulk. His performance elicited raucous
laughter from all of the extended family members crowded around the kitchen
table—all that is, with the exception of the intended target of the ridicule, 21-year-old
Odilio. I later learned that Rikix was a reference to the U.S. world of professional
wrestling; Rikishi was one among many ring names of Solofa Fatu, Jr., an Americanborn Samoan professional wrestler. The term is actually a Japanese concept for
“strong man” used to refer to sumo wrestlers. Venancio’s Bakhtinian parodic stylization of strong man behavior (Besnier 1992:175) was a fitting depiction of Odilio; older
and younger siblings alike often criticized him for his enojado (angry) disposition,
which many feared for its destructive potential to rupture relationships.
A typical post-performance evaluative commentary, following such a wellexecuted parody would be “como chinga el Venancio.” Chingar, a Spanish verb that
denotes potentially face-threatening teasing actions (Brown and Levinson 1987;
Goffman 1967) is a lexical slang synonym of molestar (to bother). Both often are used
interchangeably in Guatemala to refer to admirable acts of teasing, which blur the line
between play and not-play. In Guatemala while the lexical item chingar is a metapragmatic acknowledgement of acts that potentially transgress idealized notions of
propriety, it is not imbued with the same ideological significances of colonial/sexual
penetration and betrayal as it does in Mexico.13 Participants involved in acts of chingar
shift footing to adopt different moral stances as they orient to the action unfolding.
Thus the degree to which participants up-take prior verbal acts as either an unacceptable violation of the tacit rules of respect or a good-natured act of a friend or family
member, is assessed on a turn-by-turn basis.
Excerpt 3 provides another illustration of a playful chingar exchange that took
place across two households in a different neighborhood in San Antonio. Participants
shouted back and forth through a planked wall and cane-fence that divides the two
compound households. The first household, within which I held fictive-kin status,
belonged to the Pop family of handicraft venders, weavers, and farmers. During the
day, the young women Leticia and Marisol (an unmarried teen and a just-married
sister-in-law) would sit and weave garments and servilletas (napkins) for either
domestic use or for sale in the nearby tourist market. They also tended to other
household affairs and kept an eye on the youngest of eight siblings, Pedrito (age six),
as he played with his neighbor pal, Quique (age four). The second household
belonged to the carpenter, Horacio Cuc, and his wife, a vegetable vender. At the time
of the recording they had an only child, Quique. In the following excerpt, Horacio
positioned within the second household, calls to his son to come home for the midday
meal. Leticia takes this opportunity to engage him in a teasing routine, which serves
to first question his work ethic, and then second his hospitality.
Leticia employs the vocative T-form, vos, in lines 7 and 9 to address Horacio. Vos,
is the de-facto form of address among peers in Guatemala. Leticia in fact is not
Horacio’s peer, nor does she consider herself to be. In fact, her status as a young
unmarried woman is considerably less than Horacio’s. However, in employing it
here, Leticia keys a performance framework wherein she positions herself as his
mock-peer, someone who is entitled to explicitly pass judgment on his behavior. “You
eat lunch very early, vos” and “you’re not going to invite me?” call into question
Horacio’s reputation as a hard-working and generous host and neighbor. Both of
these examples illustrate ways through which Antoneros (siblings and non-kin)
engage in verbal forms of play that actually involve the imposition of one’s will upon
another. Thus, they constitute ways through which the idealized notion of respect
between un-equals is routinely subverted. They also are discursive practices that may
reveal “other” intentions as the participants initiating them seek to provoke a
response from the one targeted in the exchange. In this last case Horacio ignores
Leticia’s chingar, and the play frame is dropped.
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
93
Transcript Excerpt 3—Playful Chingar
Participants:
Household #1
Jeni (adopted daughter/anthropologist of the Pop
family)
Pedrito (six-year-old boy)
Quique (four-year-old son of Horacio and
friend to Pedrito)
Leticia (Pedrito’s 19-year-old sister [unmarried])
Marisol (24-year-old sister-in-law to Pedrito
and Leticia)
Household #2
Horacio (head carpenter, married head of
household)
Approximately three teenage carpenters were present,
overhearing audience to the exchange.
((Horacio calls to his son, Quique, through the planked wall dividing the two households.))
L# Participants Behavior
`
English Gloss
1 Horacio
QUIQUE:::
Quique!
2 Quique
qué querés conmigo,
What do you want with me?
3 H
venga Quique.
Come Quique.
What?
4 Q
qué?
5 H
almorzar.
Lunch.
6 Q
pera::me
Wait for me.
7 Leticia
bien temprano vos::
Very early, vos (2 per/sing/fam).
8 H
Leti.
Leti.
9 L
bien temprano almorás vos.
You eat lunch very early, vos.
10
hehehehhhh
((laughs))
11
(pause)
12 L
no me vas a invitar
You’re not going to invite me?
13 H
(?)
14 L
no me vas a invitar.
You’re not going to invite me?
Molestar/Chingar routines: Vehicles for Early Antonero
Child Language Socialization
De León (1998), in a study of the micro-genetic development of Tzotzil infants charted
how a child at birth is drawn into intergenerational exchanges via a diverse array of
nonverbal and verbal phenomena and interactional structures. The child is active
as proto-speaker, side-participant, dyadic addressee, and an elicited embedded
speaker in her own development of communicative competence from pre-verbal to
verbal child. Puros pericos, as meta-commentary of children’s developing communicative competency, reveals the elicited embedded speaker as the prototypical interactional role that children are made to play. In this section, I build upon de León’s
study to illustrate how children’s position as elicited embedded speakers informs and
socializes the locally salient belief that children are not yet fully social or capable
beings; they are puros pericos.
Discursive practices that elicit children’s participation as embedded speakers are
referred to in the language socialization literature as prompting (repetition) routines; a
caregiver prompts a child to “say X.” Cross-culturally and cross-linguistically, these
routines function to elicit young children’s participation, model verbal routines, direct
and exert social control over a conversational partner, as well as impart social norms
and values that provide the child with a framework for recognizing culturally specific,
tacit social cues (Brown 1998; de León 1998; Field 2001; Schieffelin 1990; Sidnell 1997).
Prompting routines often frame teasing and shaming interactions in a variety of
cross-cultural contexts in the socialization of affect (Besnier 1992; Ochs 1988). Social
psychologists also acknowledge that teasing is a powerful discursive act that “lies
on a perilous boundary between aggression and play and can increase intimacy and
integrate members into groups or through subtle changes of form become a vehicle
of victimization and ostracism” (Keltner, et al. 1998:1244; see Straehle 1993 for a
discourse analytic perspective). Most of the literature in cross-cultural contexts of
94
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
language socialization has emphasized the positive outcomes of these kinds of
exchanges at the group level. Kaluli caregivers prompt young children in teasing
and shaming routines in order to cultivate assertiveness and feelings of shame associated with interdependent familial obligations (Schieffelin 1986, 1990).14 Midwestern, U.S. white working-class mothers also cultivate assertiveness, prompting their
girls to insult and tease as a form of pre-emptive self-defense (Miller 1986). New
Mexican Mexicano (Briggs 1984), Mexican American (Eisenberg 1986), New York
Puerto Ricans (Zentella 1997), Tzotzil Mayan (de León 1998), and Kaqchikel Mayan
(Reynolds 2002) families all prompt teasing and other forms of verbal play as a
means to establish relationships between kin and others, and especially to teach the
culturally variable values of respect. In what follows, I will unpack the complex
social and interactional work that is accomplished when a two-year-old Antonero
child’s participation as embedded speaker is elicited in a shaming routine, one that
is simultaneously a chingar exchange between two siblings, Lorenzo (age 16) and
Miranda (age 31).
Excerpts 4a and 4b take place in the López Balam household where the oldest
daughter, Miranda (from transcripts 1 and 2) would bring her children to be cared for
by her younger siblings (and not her in-laws’ home) on days when she went to work
in the nearby town to sell handicrafts. Given that the three oldest caregivers in the
López Balam household worked outside the home for the greater part of the day,
caregiving from Monday–Saturday fell to her brothers and sister Lorenzo, Ernesto,
Venancio, Rudolfo, and Yesenia, and her daughter, Cristina. Lorenzo and Ernesto
watched the kids in the morning with Yesenia, who would finish the wash and
prepare lunch for the family before she went off to vend. The early afternoon shift of
caregiving fell to the last two boys (Venancio and Rudolfo) and Cristina when they
came back from Guatemala’s primero básico (primary school).
Prior to the beginning of the excerpt, Miranda told her brothers that she would
help prepare lunch so that their sister, Yesenia, could run an errand in town. Miranda,
Lorenzo, Ernesto, and I are all seated around the kitchen table chatting. Miranda’s
four youngest children, Pablito, the twins Alfonso and Tere (21 months at the time of
the recording), and the infant, Juan José, are all present playing in the courtyard and
entryway to the kitchen. The interaction begins with Tere entering the kitchen to
appeal to her mother to share a lime that she had been sucking. Miranda, deeply
involved in conversation with her brothers, ignores Tere. Lorenzo suddenly initiates
a chingar exchange to tease his older sister; he does so by enlisting the cooperation
of his niece, Tere. The interaction also doubles as a socialization-of-shaming routine
to model assertiveness and have Tere challenge high-ranking caregivers who fail to
meet her needs. To use a Goffmanian framework (1981) for decomposing speaking
roles within this unfolding participation framework, Lorenzo, as author and principal,
prompts Tere to call her mother a pig (line 1). Tere, as animator, complies with
Lorenzo’s command, and she utters the insult (line 2). Lorenzo then intensifies the
chingar routine; he prompts Tere to assert herself again, but this time physically, “hit
her, chubby, hit her hit her, (pause) hit her” (line 3).
After Tere raises her hand to hit her mother, Miranda finally enters the game. In
line 5, she rhetorically asks Tere to confirm that she, Miranda, is her mother. This
question forces Tere to infer the presupposing cultural knowledge that is indexed by
her defiant stance, and question whether it is an appropriate stance to adopt in a
mother-daughter relationship. Miranda simultaneously embraces Tere in a loving
gesture modeling in embodied action what the nature of their relationship should be
like. Lorenzo quickly counters and, in overlap with Miranda, orders Tere to disregard
what Miranda has said and to comply with his order (line 6). Miranda (line 7)
simultaneously counters with a nearly parallel syntactic construction of her previous
utterance, underscoring explicitly what Tere should not do. Tere drops her hand and
aligns with her mother. Miranda rewards her with a taste of lime. The teasing routine
ends here between brother and sister, and so did the shaming alliance between
Lorenzo and Tere, the elicited embedded speaker.
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
95
Transcript Excerpt 4a—Prompting “Pig”
L# Participants Behavior
1 Lorenzo
cocha decile gorda.
2 Tere
[ ((turns to her mother))
[ co:cha.
3
L
4 T
5 Miranda
6 L
7 M
8 T
9 M
`
English Gloss
Say “pig,” chubby
Pig
[pe::gale gordita pegale~pegale? (0.2) pegale?
Hit her chubby hit her hit
her (0.2) hit her
[((lifts his hands and gestures a back-handing motion))
((turns to her mother with her hand raised))
verda que soy tu mama.
It's true that I'm your mom.
((reaches out to Tere and takes her in her arms))
[ (no) pero te pego (decí) ]
[“(No) but I hit you,” say
it.]
[ verda que no me pegás ]
[It's true that you won't hit
me]
no
No ((i.e. , “no, I won’t
hit you.”))
((gives Tere a taste of the lime))
Lorenzo, however, does not let this “betrayal” go unnoticed. A few minutes after the
interaction ended in excerpt 4a, Lorenzo playfully attacks Tere by spitting water at her
in excerpt 4b. A shocked Tere first silently glances down at her arm and dress where
the droplets landed. Then she looks up at the offending Lorenzo; upon viewing his
mocking face she begins to cry with rage. Miranda quickly initiates a teasing/shaming
routine of her own, turning the tables on Lorenzo and effectively channeling Tere’s
babyish tears into an assertive retort, “say, ‘ass’ ” (line 24). Tere complies with gusto as
she bellows back, “ASS” (line 25). The sequenced progression during this particular
instance of conflict talk resembles a similar pattern of escalation and repetition that
Brenneis and Lein (1977) noted in an early study of peer conflict talk, but in their case
they elicited the data in dyadic role-playing exchanges which did not exhibit this
complex multiparty format. For example, while Lorenzo engages Tere directly in a
verbal duel (lines 26–29), he also unsuccessfully attempts to have Tere realign with him
by calling Miranda an “ass” (line 33). Miranda plays the role of sidekick providing Tere
with additional and affective conflict talk (line 31); this alliance re-enforces the morally
righteous and respectful mother-daughter relationship in spite of Lorenzo’s playfully
subversive strategies to drive a wedge between them (lines 34–38).
Transcript Excerpt 4b—Prompting “Mula”
L# Participants
24 Miranda
25 Tere
26 Lorenzo
27 M
28 T
29 L
30 ?
31 M
Behavior
`
English Gloss
mula decile.
Say, “ass"
MU[LA]
ASS
[sos.] a::h bueno. ((He puts his cup down on the table)) You are a:::h fine
((laughs -- walks over to the end of the table and leans down on it))
mula
Ass
sos
You are
(?)
ei:: mirá te están filmando,
"Ei::: look they are
filming you,
don't you see
no mirás mula ((falsetto))
ass"
32 Jeni
33 L
34 M
35 T
36 M
37
38 T
hhhheheh
Miranda mula decí vos.
no decile
n[o::
[es mi mama. decí
(0.2)
es mama
((Jeni laughs))
Say, “Miranda ass"
Say "no”
No
Say, "she is my mommy”
She’s mommy
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
96
Excerpts 3, 4a and 4b illustrate the ubiquity of chingar routines in peer and family
life. Excerpts 4a and 4b additionally reveal that children, even in cases where
they are actively choosing sides and authoring their own words, follow the logic of
a participation framework wherein they accept the role as puros pericos—animating
the words presumably authored by their older peers and caregivers. This enables
them to engage in rough play and forms of non-play without shouldering the perlocutionary consequences that would come with uttering these ritualized insults when
engaging in verbal duels and other forms of conflict talk. It exemplifies what Hill and
Irvine (1992) have referred to as an interactional framework for distributing responsibility. Thus, it can be a means through which caregivers and siblings re-negotiate
their authority and responsibility vis-à-vis their charges and each other. Lorenzo may
be a lower ranking caregiver in terms of age, but he is a constant and important
presence in the life of his niece. The alliance that he situationally forges with Tere in
excerpt 4a serves to remind his older sister that a mother-daughter relationship is one
that must be actively sustained and is not just a cultural given.
Molestar/Chingar Routines: Vehicles through which Puro Pericos
Manipulate their Relative Position of Powerlessness
Some young children may also be quite adept at manipulating their position as
embedded speakers in order to deflect responsibility for their actions. This is especially true for cases when caregivers do not grant them an exempt position. The next
excerpt illustrates an event when Miranda’s son, Pablito, plays rough with his uncle
Ernesto.
Transcript Excerpt 5—Deflecting Responsibility
Participants:
Pablito (four years old)
Ernesto (14 years old)
Lorenzo (16 years old)
Cristina (seven years old)
L# Participants
1 Pablito
2 Ernesto
3 P
4
5 E
6 P
7 E
8
9 Cristina
10 Lorenzo
11 E
12
Behavior
`
English Gloss
(( Pablito kicks Ernesto in his lower back))
el Pablito está patea (mano.)
Pablito is kicking (man)!
a mí a mí no me pegás
Me- you don’t hit me!
((Pablito kicks at Ernesto again))
((Ernesto jumps up to grab Pablito))
Lorenzo told me to.
el Lorenzo me dijo.
(vos) Lorenzo dejá de chingar
(you) Lorenzo, stop messing around.
I'm going to kick you man. How
te voy a patear mano. cae mal.
infuriating!
UO:::::::::H:::::;
((Whoops at the face threatening act))
andá pue h?
Come on then!
((He sits down again mumbling))
que no puedo.
I can't.
In line 1 Pablito surprises his uncle with a kick to the lower back. Ernesto loudly
announces the action (line 2). This utterance simultaneously denounces the act and
paralinguistically is designed to be overheard by Miranda. Pablito aggravates the
interaction by first talking back (line 3) and then kicking again (line 4). He undermines Ernesto’s authority as caregiver to discipline him. When Ernesto jumps up (line
5) in what Pablito interprets as a threatening manner, Pablito responds by deflecting
responsibility onto Ernesto’s older brother (and higher ranking caregiver) Lorenzo
(line 6), even though it is not clear from the video-recording that Lorenzo prompted
this act. Ernesto holds Lorenzo accountable and denounces the behavior as a nonplayful token of chingar (lines 7 and 8).
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
97
Acts of manipulation also take place in non-kin based interactions and similarly
serve to outwit and out-maneuver older peers. Two transcript excerpts 6a and 6b
illustrate a different exchange between the Pop and Cuc households. As previously
mentioned, members of these households were not related to one another, though
children of each played together. During the day, Horacio Cuc would work with
several unmarried, teenage apprentices in the work area of his courtyard making
coffins. One of the employees was a teenage nephew who went by the nickname
“Chato.” Chato was a renowned trickster to his peers; he often involved them as
audience to his antics or as targets of his mirth.
At the beginning of excerpt 6a, Chato initiates a round of teasing across the two
households. This particular exchange is a mock serenade in which Chato, as falsesuitor, enlists the aid of six-year-old Pedrito to serve as his messenger. In line 2 Chato
orders Pedrito to become the animator of his utterance; Chato remains the author and
principal, the one who crafted and is committed to the truth-value of the proposition.
The recipient of these unsolicited affections is usually one of the young female
weavers (either Leticia or Marisol), but on this particular occasion, the anthropologist
[me] was drawn into the game. His loud talk, by design, is to be overheard by both his
peers at work and by everyone in the courtyard of our adjacent household. The fact
that Pedrito does not have to relay the message, and chooses not to, suggests that he
acknowledges that his role as messenger is rather incidental at the beginning of this
exchange.
Transcript Excerpt 6a—Chingando with Chato
Participants:
Household #1
Household #2
Jeni (adopted daughter/anthropologist)
Pedrito (six-year-old boy)
Quique (four-year-old son of Horacio
[friend to Pedrito])
Marisol (24-year-old sister-in-law to Pedrito)
“Chato” (19-year-old apprentice carpenter)
Horacio (master carpenter, head of adjacent
household)
Approximately three other teenage carpenters present,
overhearing audience to the exchange.
`
L# Participants Behavior
1 Pedrito
((steps in front of the CAMERA after
returning from the planked wall))
2 Chato
decí a la Jeni que me de a mi foto.
3 Quique
el Pedrito heheeheh el Pedrito
((laughing at Pedrito on CAMERA))
4 Jeni
[quitate de allí
((whispering to Pedrito to stop blocking
the CAMERA))
5 C
[(?) una linda.
6 Horacio
HAHAHAHAEHEHE (??)
7 C
(y una de la Marisolita)
8 H
hehehehehehh
9 Q
decí •hh Chato. Chato (?) molestás
10 ?
11 Q
12 H
11 P
12 C
13 P
(????) ((Marisol whispers something
to Pedrito))
[ •hhhhh solo estás chingando.
[hehehehehe?
[Chat o::
[((climbs up the side of the planked wall
to deliver a message.))
sí que?
dice dice la Jeni que ella no es la María,
English Gloss
Tell Jenny to give me my photo
Get outa there
(?) a pretty one.
(and one of Marisolita)
Say, “Chato, Chato (?) you’re
teasing”
You’re only screwing around
Chato!
Yes, what?
Says- Jenny says that she’s not
Maria
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
98
The subtext of Chato’s message in line 2 is to insinuate that he and I have an
ongoing romantic involvement, one which would him entitle him to a keepsake
picture of his sweetheart, “Tell Jenny to give me my photo [i.e., of Jenny].” The
innuendo of a romantic relationship is not immediately apparent to those overhearing the talk; it becomes so only when Chato appends an amendment to his request.
Apparently not any old picture will do; it must be a pretty one (line 5). He then
extends his demands to include a photograph of Marisol, the married woman
co-present at this teasing event. These requests elicit first raucous laughter from the
boss, Horacio, and invite further byplay elaboration not easily discernable on the
tape (lines 6 and 8 respectively). Four-year-old Quique authors a different message
for Pedrito to relay back to Chato (lines 9 and 11) even though he was not addressed
at all in this exchange. His talk reveals awareness that the premise of Chato’s
command is not only false, but also an instance of play, “you’re teasing . . . just
screwing around.”
Not captured on the camera’s microphone or framed in the camera’s shot is a
whispered exchange that takes place between Pedrito and Marisol. After this
exchange, Pedrito, in line 13, rushes back to the planked wall to relay a message to
Chato, “says- Jenny says that she’s not María.” The main inference to be drawn is that
Jenny already knows that Chato has been courting another woman named María.
The quip unmasks Chato’s “other” intentions—he is rendered a charlatan suitor.
Thus, Pedrito with Marisol’s assistance successfully out-maneuvers Chato by exploiting the original participation framework that positioned Pedrito as merely an animator of another’s utterance and me as principal, the participant responsible for its
indexico-referential significance. Chato cannot sustain this particular line of exchange
without risk of being outsmarted again, and without risk that the damning content of
the message be taken seriously by his male peers and colleagues who just overheard
the entire exchange.15
A few minutes later this exchanges flares up again as Pedrito, unbeknownst to
Chato, elaborates a solo chingar performance; it is one that exploits the poetic features
of timing, stress, and parallelism. Pedrito denounces Chato as a thoroughly immoral
character, but this time he adopts a kid-centric perspective.
Transcript Excerpt 6b—Chingando with Chato
L# Participants
1 Pedrito
2
3
4
4
5 Marisol
6 Jeni
7 Marisol
Behavior
`
hhhh (?landrando?era?)
el perri:::::to
y mata:::ste
a mi perrit:::to
•
hhhh so::::s asesi:::::no.
hee[heheheheheh
[heheheheh
aye Pedrito quién te ha dicho (así)
•
English Gloss
Barking (was)
the puppy
and you killed
my puppy
you are a murderer!
aye Pedrito who had to ld you (to say it
that way)
This performance elicits choral laughter from Marisol and me, but Marisol is also
quick to distance herself as co-conspirator in this exchange. Her comment “who told
you to?” reveals the cultural presupposition that adults are actually the official
authors of children’s words.
In both of these final exchanges, Pedrito strikes a particular moral stance, by
manipulating his position within a participation framework, which in turn forges a
different alignment between the overhearing audiences (see Kyratzis 2004) to ultimately turn the tables on 19-year-old Chato. What were the perlocutionary consequences of this exchange? Chato, in an act of vengeance, later nicknamed Pedrito the
chucho guardian (guard dog) and refused to further enlist him as go-between in these
kinds of routine chingar exchanges across households. Marisol’s role as co-author of
the quip was never revealed; her own use of Pedrito as intermediary effectively
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
99
sheltered her from a future mean-spirited chingar attack. However, in the second
follow-up exchange, Marisol also seems to be aware of the potential for “leakage” in
these interactions (Hill and Irvine 1992) and that she might be held accountable for
utterances that she in fact did not utter.16 Finally, I continued to be the butt of all sorts
of jokes; my status as an awkward American female equipped with camera and
camcorder was too irresistible to foreswear in future chingar exchanges.
Conclusions
I have argued that Eugenio’s astute observation quoted at the beginning of this article,
that kids are like puros pericos (little parrots), informs an implicit Antonero theory of
child socialization and development of voluntary responsibility predicated on Maya
Cosmology. Voluntary responsibility is evinced in interactions as young children,
who, originally exempted from being held accountable for the pragmatic impact of
their utterances, learn to respect the actions and beliefs of others who exhibit both
greater and lesser competencies (excerpts 1a, 1b and 2). It is a theory derived from
actual instances of quotidian intergenerational practices where peers and kin engage
each other in rough verbal play (chingar/molestar exchanges) through the assistance
of intermediaries (excerpts 4–6). Ethnographic evidence from other contemporary
Maya towns in Guatemala suggests that this may be a common practice across
language communities, one that relies upon a synthesis of child and situationcentered patterns of language socialization (Pye 1979; Reynolds 2002; Mosier and
Rogoff 2003).
Eugenio’s is also a perspective that holds cross-cultural and cross-linguistic currency. It is one that reflects an adult-centric bias, though the cultural theories informing how or why children are perceived as such certainly vary. For example, Western
Samoans and middle class Americans adopt the same perspective that young children cannot be held responsible for uttering offensive words. Western Samoans
believe that infants are naturally wild and cheeky (Ochs 1988). In the U.S., some
Americans adopt a perspective that reflects Gossen’s (1974b) functionalist approach
to Maya children’s learning, which assumes childhood to be a period for becoming
someone else, and it takes place through the imitation of “adult” activities. Other
American perspectives are informed by the popularized Piagetian concept of egocentricity that presumes the origins of these behaviors are purely driven by biological
processes, not social ones. (For a review of such perspectives see Van Ausdale and
Feagin 2001). Blame is to be assigned to someone else, and children’s participation is
imagined to be that of a passive overhearer absorbing “inappropriate” stimuli from
the environment. Both American expectations reflect adults’ authority from within a
child-centered pattern of socialization, and have been problematically naturalized as
universal. True to the nature of the ethnographic endeavor, the child language socialization and peer talk data presented here imperfectly overlap with these U.S. middle
class expectations of how young children behave and what constitutes “appropriate”
caregiver and peer practices.
I have also suggested that Antonero chingar exchanges are salient in kin and peer
networks, and take place in daily life throughout much of one’s lifespan. They inform
a particular culture-specific social ontology of intentions wherein people continuously test the strength of their relationships by engaging in these routines ambiguously framed as “play.” Situational alliances forged through these types of caregiving
and peer-group interactions are in fact contingent alliances and confrontations that
cross generations, ages, and genders, and which also may in fact subvert and rework
familial hierarchies (de León 2007; Reynolds 2007). In many ways, Antonero quotidian assessments of responsibility enacted in chingar routines follow a similar cultural
logic early observed by Kupiers (1992) in Weyewa ritual speech. Kupiers noted that
the assessment of responsibility was not predicated on personality traits intrinsic to
the individual. Instead, Weyewa, much like Antoneros, enact a social ontology of
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
100
intentions that relies on an assessment of “other” intentions only through the
outcome of particular exchanges between autonomous people who are fundamentally
interdependent on one another.
The type of data examined in this paper confound middle class American cultural
assumptions about child socialization in at least two ways. Some are shocked to see
how Antonero families and peers actually position young children as embedded
speakers in-between two “adults,” prompted to literally parrot back insults and taboo
topics. The second surprise arises when they register that different and positive forms
of collaboration and negotiation are achieved with the active participation of these
kids using forms of conflict talk. This cultural logic clashes with their own, which
presupposes a social ontology of intentions where one’s ability to assess another’s
state of mind informs how they interpret these practices (e.g., those who tease must
be “bullies” who lack self-esteem). This perspective additionally presumes a particular child-centered model of socialization where children are adapted to, but only in
highly circumscribed social contexts. This dominant, idealized model of early U.S.
child socialization is not congruent with Antonero practices of early child socialization. Antonero children are not isolated from adult spheres of labor and leisure and
a period of childhood innocence is not extended through adolescence and early
adulthood. Instead, children are valuable in household forms of production and
reproduction, though they do occupy a low status position due to their relative age.
Nevertheless, young children and their near-peer caregivers are able to cloak
powerful challenges to age-graded and caregiver hierarchies by eliciting the participation of puro pericos. A 19-year-old carpenter mocks courtship practices, teasing
an older outsider and a married woman, an act of male bravado performed for his
overhearing peers, through a chingar routine just as the 16-year-old younger sibling
is able to challenge his older sister’s mothering. Both enlist the participation of a much
younger child to be messenger. Likewise, the child positioned as puro perico is not
passive. She makes decisions regarding with whom she should align, what she
should repeat, and in what key it should be uttered—playful or non-play (Tere in
excerpts 4a and 4b, Pablito in excerpt 5, and Pedrito in excerpts 6a and 6b). She
discovers how power, pleasure, and pain inhere in these forms of play, and in so
doing has a hand in her own learning about when and how to be supportive and
assertive with others (Briggs 1998). Finally, authorship may also be ambiguous and so
responsibility is distributed, which makes for a powerful discursive structure in the
unmasking of other intentions. While Marisol may have assisted Pedrito in crafting a
clever retort to Chato (excerpt 6a), I certainly made no contribution. Pedrito framed
the reported speech as mine and so I was made to be responsible for its content. In
each of these different scenarios, the image of kids as powerful social actors emerges
as they laugh at, challenge, and undermine different relations of power from a relative
position of powerlessness. In this way, these findings contribute both to the literature
in language socialization and peer-talk-in-interaction that examines how power is
displayed and negotiated in families and in peer groups during different kinds of
activities, and with different kinds of discursive and embodied resources.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Funding for this ethnographic research was made possible by grants from
the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Department of Anthropology, UCLA. Variations of this
paper were presented at the Latin American Studies Association Conference, Miami, FL, March
16–19, 2000, the 9th International Pragmatics Conference, Riva del Garda, Italy, July 10–15, 2005,
and at two departmental colloquia for the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at
UNC-Charlotte and the Linguistics Program at the University of South Carolina. I owe a debt
of gratitude to many colleagues for their incisive insights and support at different stages in
the development of this manuscript: Lourdes de León, Elaine Chun, Nora England, Janina
Fenigsen, Marjorie Goodwin, Amy Kyratzis, Elinor Ochs, Chantal Tetreault, and Elinor Zucker.
I would also like to recognize the editor, Paul Manning, and the anonymous reviewers for the
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology for their generous comments. Any remaining errors contained
Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots)
101
herein are solely my own. Finally, a very special thanks to the families from San Antonio Aguas
Calientes, Guatemala who have shared their lives with me for the past 17 years.
1. Puro functions in this variety of Guatemalan Spanish spoken by Kaqchikel Mayas as an
emphatic stance marker. It indexes a high degree of speaker commitment to the propositional
content of the utterance. Brown (1980:127) noted that Tzeltal Mayan speakers from southern
Mexico had grammaticalized the Spanish loan puro or puru into the Tzeltal paradigm of
emphatic discourse particles.
2. The cultural belief that this age range, beginning as early as the age of seven, marks a
significant change in mental capacity has historical precedents in Mesoamerica. During the
colonial era, colonial law deemed children age seven or older to have uso de razón (judgment),
and so were entitled to marry (Gonzalbo Aizpuru 1998:81; Lipsett-Rivera 2002:60).
3. Wee’s (2007) recent analysis of the hunger strike as a particular type of extreme communicative act follows this tradition. His analysis in fact expands the limits of common sense,
actor-centered analyses of intentionality to include cases where there is intentionality without
responsibility.
4. For example, Sheldon’s (1992) paper on teens’ conflict talk was among the papers included
in the edited volume on responsibility and evidence. Other papers (Besnier 1992; Duranti 1992;
Philips 1992) all cited the collective works of language socialization specialists Ochs and
Schieffelin in structuring their arguments about cross-cultural variation in accounting for a
notion of responsibility that is assessed based on the consequences of particular actions rather
than on imputing mental-states.
5. Culture-specific demographic patterns also matter for peer culture. In neighborhoods
where children are encouraged to play with one another, friendships also form outside of
institutional and organizational contexts. However, in the case of the U.S., shifting demographic patterns often preclude children from forming these kinds of relationships. See Tobin,
et al. (1989) for a cross-cultural study of the rise of pre-schools in early child socialization in
response to shifting economies and demographic patterns.
6. Zentella’s 1997 study of peer networks and families is an exception to this rule.
7. The older adults who I talked to in this study claimed that this was a conscious decision
to facilitate their children’s access to and success in primary school. It also appears that
pre-existing localist and utilitarian language ideologies and the town’s concomitant incorporation into a global economy via transnational migration have also contributed to this shift
(Reynolds 2002, in press).
8. Gaskins’ 2003 study of economic change in a Yucatecan Mayan community reveals that the
shifting modes of production tended to retain the same gendered work schedules, thus children’s relationships vis-à-vis their extended families was not altered. Gaskins especially noted
that what remained unchanged in this community was people’s valorization of their home
place, and the distinctive ethnic identity linked to it.
9. Western developmental perspectives often presume that freedom of choice is hampered
when an individual participates in a group (or group activity). Cultural psychologists and
anthropologists in the Vygotskian tradition have leveled two critiques at this presupposition.
First, they challenge the problematic separation of the individual from society. Second, they
challenge generalizations that categorize particular societies as falling along some point in a
continuum between dichotomized poles: individualism versus collectivism or independence
versus interdependence (Rogoff 2003; Strauss 2000).
10. Mosier and Rogoff (2003) have referred to this as a status that received privileged
treatment, and while I agree that indeed this is how it might be viewed by slightly older
sibling-rivals, interactionally it functions as more of an exemption because young children still
do not experience the privilege that goes hand-in-hand with an older status. Thanks to Elaine
Chun for sharing this nuanced distinction.
11. She is either calling him “bad” or uttering a version of the full expression derived from
caerse mal. Me cae mal, is an affect-laden stance evaluating behavior. Cristina often uttered this
expression when she was upset with someone.
12. Miranda’s second response is to shame the children. She layers negative affect paralinguistically (tongue click and loud voice emphasis on “always”) on her assessment (C. Goodwin
and M. H. Goodwin 1987) of the hitting behavior while characterizing it as habitual. She,
however, does not single out which sibling is to blame. Thus, she strikes a moral stance that
denounces the behavior as consistently problematic, but does not intervene beyond this general
shaming strategy.
13. In its various instantiations in Mexico, chingar (and its noun-phrase epithet La Chingada
(The Fucked One)) is a fully incorporated loan word from Nahuatl. Ever since Octavio Paz’s
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
102
publication of The Labyrinth of Solitude, chingar metonymically has been linked to Malintzin, the
indigenous interpreter and concubine of the Spanish conquistador Cortés (Alarcón 1989). The
rhetorical force of Malintzin, as La Chingada, hails forth colonial racial, gender, and sexual
ideologies that have historically given shape to Mexican national identity formation.
14. While cultivating feelings of shame, from a U.S. perspective this might seem destructive
or at cross-purposes for building an individual’s “self-esteem.” Within different ontological
systems for socializing the self, shame can be an important resource for cultivating self-control
and be less coercive than other kinds of social action.
15. Even though this was originally framed as a playful chingar exchange, Chato does have
to face the possibility that his peers might start gossiping about his alleged relationship with
María. In San Antonio, the early stages of teen courtship are clandestine exchanges; any public
allusion to a potential relationship, real or not, is big news that is spread quickly throughout
one’s peer networks.
16. Hill and Irvine also cite an example of an animator who presumes that she still could be
held accountable for what she says, even though she is just quoting. The cited example is of a
Mexicano-speaking woman who valorizes speaking Mexicano so that one can appropriately
respond to vulgar insults. The section in bold highlights the speaker’s orientation to a higher
power, who still might hold her accountable as animator. “Because if I didn’t speak two
languages, someone might say something about my mother, but when I don’t understand what
he is saying to me, even if he says to me, “Fuck your mother,” begging God’s pardon, how
would I know what he is saying to me.” (1992:13).
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Department of Anthropology
The University of South Carolina
Hamilton College, RM 317
Columbia, SC 29208
[email protected]