- My name is Armando Guerrero Junior,
I am a lecturer in Hispanic Linguistics at UCLA.
I'm going to be looking at different scenes today
in TV and film, that attempt to portray a Latinx identity,
so we're going to be doing linguistic analysis
to see if the actors and actresses
are achieving this linguistically.
Catherine Zeta Jones in the film, The Mask of Zorro.
- Good morning, señor.
Give it back.
- What?
- Whatever it is you have stolen from my father,
I want it back, give it to me.
- Do you surrender?
- Never,
but I may scream.
- She's not a native speaker of Spanish,
this is very evident, more so in consonants,
such as her Ts, for example.
- Whatever it is you have stolen from my father,
I want it back, give it to me,
give it to me, to me.
- English Ts are very explosive,
so there is sort of an aspiration after a T, as in T,
the Spanish doesn't have that,
so we're gonna get something more like T,
as opposed to T. - Not bad.
- Cliff Curtis in Training Day.
- You're under arrest (bleep)
for being a cop,
for dogging me in the mouth in my own pad.
- Uh! - You got the right
to be (bleep), mother (bleep)
- Uh!
- Drag his ass in the tub.
- He's good!
So he does a lot of really interesting things
with his Ts, for example, is what you would see
from someone who has been heavily influenced by Spanish,
so you're not getting like, tell me,
but you're getting, tell me.
- In the tub, in the tub, in the tub.
- And another thing that Cliff sort of has going for him
is the fact that the variety that he's speaking,
though it's very heavily influenced by Spanish,
it's pretty much a standalone English variety at this point,
so Chicano English or East LA Chicano English.
- She's my cousin, homes, she's a civilian,
ain't right involving her.
Back the (bleep) off.
- It is its own variety or its own dialect,
in which the same way that you have Black English
or African-American English.
- You know this shit was just business, right?
- [Armando] This is Wagner Moura
in the Netflix series, Narcos.
- You wouldn't immediately think
that this person speaks Portuguese,
one example that stands out is in the way
that he pronounced “tipo” for example,
so in Brazilian Portuguese,
you're not gonna get “Tipo”,
you're gonna get “Chipo,”
so you're gonna get a palatalization of that first syllable.
He knows these rules very well.
Now as far as it being authentically Colombian,
I think that's arguable.
The only thing that he's doing,
that sort of stands out as Colombian
is probably in the paucity or in the intonation,
that he is speaking Spanish in.
Al Pacino in Scarface.
- Why?
I'm not a,
how you,
how do you say?
Paranoid.
- It's a good movie, but it's so bad.
(laughing)
I see the attempt, the attempt is trying to get
at a sort of Latinx
linguistic structure, if you will,
and one thing that I noticed was in the syntax,
so in the sentence structure,
at some point, he mentions,
I not.
- Don't go too far, Tony.
- I not now.
- As opposed to I am not,
so he sort of removes the verb.
- I not now.
- I'm not catching anything that is Cuban per se,
I can see what they're doing with the sentence structure
and I think that's what they're trying to get,
the immigrant aspect of it,
but there's so many different things
that they could have done, they could have done away
with a lot of the consonants, for example.
- I made what I could on the side,
but I never turned you, Frank!
- [Armando] This is Ronni Hawk
in the Netflix series, On My Block.
- I get to walk away.
- Okay, maybe figure this out now?
- There's nothing to figure out,
Monse and Cesar are backstabbing liars.
- Dude, drop it! - Look,
they're putting Jamal in the game!
- And if I don't, what are you gonna do, homes,
you gonna put a green light out on me?
- No, but I will put you on pause.
- And I'm gonna watch and maybe even get in on it.
- Enough!
All of you behind the bleachers now!
- First and foremost, you can hear
that her native language is not Spanish, it's English,
she's not a heritage speaker of the language either
and you can hear this, when she begins to speak.
She's not speaking as a native speaker
or a heritage speaker, she's definitely speaking
as someone who learned Spanish as a second language
and you can see that in all the different characteristics,
that would be natural to a Spanish speaker,
so for example, implosive B.
Voy a pegar en la boca!
That sort of integral vocalic B
between the two Es in “bebe” is a lot lighter
and that's a characteristic, that really just stands out
as not being from a native speaker of Spanish
and you can see that in the way
that she sort of says the entire statement.
- Trust me,
I know.
- And what is the evolution?
We're seeing more authentic representations,
at least linguistically of these identities,
Al Pacino in Scarface was doing something several years ago,
that I don't think would fly today.
Wagner is not Colombian, nor does he speak Spanish natively,
but he's really still able to get at that performance,
because he's not reliant on stereotypes,
so we're not at the full place, where we need to be,
which is to actually get an actor or an actress
to represent the identity that they are.