Latino naming practices of small-town businesses in rural southern Florida

Abstract

This article examines naming practices of Latino grocery stores and restaurants in an eighteen-county area of southern Florida. Business names denote cultural affinity and personal whims, and, like other forms of Latino cultural expression, they are drawn from the cultural roots of owners and clientele to connote the flavor and pride of Latino identity. Unlike other art or literary forms, however, business names reflect a commercial accommodation to the techniques and strategies of marketing more than a defiance of mainstream culture or the statement of cultural resistance to Anglo society. Their choices are strongly influenced by places and experiences that reflect Latino culture outside the local area rather than locales of current residence within rural southern Florida. (Transmigrant business, farm workers, naming practices and sociocultural identity, population expansion and rural settlement, southern Florida) ********** Discussing the shifting ethnicities that accompany the process of globalization, Hall (1991:42) calls identity "the ground of action," suggesting that the way one identifies is what will most influence one's behavior. Rouse (1992) provides additional discussion on what this might mean for Latino immigrants, for whom, he argues, an alternative framework is needed. He suggests that Latino immigrants maintain interests and commitment to family and the town from which they came at the same time that they develop another way of viewing the world through their experience in a new environment. He calls views from these dual experiences "bifocality." This article extends the work of these two authors, first by considering expressions of identity in naming practices for grocery stores and restaurants, and then by expanding the community of interest beyond migrant laborers to the entrepreneurial class within the Latino population. To do this assumes that the individuals who engage in entrepreneurial activities (specifically establishment and management of a business) may include men and women with backgrounds similar to their clientele. By way of a statistical analysis, I examine the formulation of immigrants as members of "multiple communities" (Chavez 1994) by testing the influence of place and experience on naming practices for grocery stores and restaurants. The context for this inquiry is the process of Latinoization in rural areas of southern Florida, chosen for the rapid growth of the Latino population within the southeastern United States and that part of Florida. Increases in Latino and Latino-origin Caribbean people within the southeastern United States are similar to processes of Latinoization in other areas of the country, notably rural California, where persons of Mexican ancestry predominate in many towns and small cities (Allensworth and Rochin 1998). At one time, Chicago had the largest concentration of persons of Mexican ancestry living outside the southwest (de Lourdes Villar 1994), but this has changed. Latinos are increasingly found in metropolitan areas, such as Washington, D.C. (Pessar 1995), and New York City (Sontag 1998) in the northeast, or small towns and cities in the midwest, such as Garden City, Kansas (Stull, Broadway, and Erickson 1992). Another area of the country that draws large numbers of Latinos is rural southern Florida. The term "rural" is to be used with caution. Three counties of interest in this article (Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Hillsborough) have sparsely populated portions that are devoted to highly productive agriculture, but also have metropolitan urban areas (West Palm Beach, Miami, and Tampa, respectively) for which the counties are better known. Residents of Miami-Dade County, for example, distinguish South Dade as the southern, agricultural portion of the county from the northern (Miami) portion (Bryan, pers. comm.; also Greiner et al. 1992:69n). Unlike the phenomenon of past decades of concentrated numbers of a single national origin that settle in one region or area (Allensworth and Rochin 1998), several national origins comprise the Latino population in rural counties of southern Florida. …