Language, race and work in the Caribbean: a Bakhtinian approach

Abstract This essay is interested in exploring the interconnections between language, race, work and power, particularly as it concerns the Caribbean region. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in the Puerto Rican island-municipality of Vieques, and borrowing theoretical insight from the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, among others, we try to make sense of the linguistic strategies employed by racially marginalized subjects to resist and contest racism, colonialism and labor exploitation in their daily lives, within the context of a tourism economy. We argue that Bakhtin’s approach to language use in conflict-ridden and ideologically-saturated contexts, particularly his treatment of linguistic phenomena like double-voicing, multilingualism and heteroglossia, proves useful in shedding light on the strategic uses of language of, or to the ways in which racially-marginalized subjects create and employ locally-specific linguistic registers as a form of claiming agency and as a mechanism of resistance. In the context of Vieques, we argue, language has become the main vehicle through which Viequense workers resist and accommodate to work in the tourism sector while retaining and preserving a unique ethnic identity.