Volume: 9  Number: 3  Page: 359–373

‘The Thing About Work’: Gendered Narratives of a Transnational, Trilingual Mexicano

Julia Menard-Warwick Department of Linguistics, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

Through narratives taken from life history interviews with an indigenous Mexican male immigrant in California, this paper examines the connection between masculinities and the learning of dominant languages associated with access to economic opportunities. In portraying the teller's engagements with work and education in both countries, these life history narratives index the way changing social contexts have caused him to emphasise different masculinities at different times in his life. Specifically, this paper explores the way a serious work injury led the teller to place new emphasis on learning English and computer skills in order to reconstruct a kind of ‘technical masculinity’’ that he had previously found little scope for in the United States.

Keywords: gender, identity, language learning, masculinities, multilin-gualism, narrative

© 2006 J. Menard-Warwick

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