Abstract

People frequently display understanding of one another’s goals and actions in conversation. Aside from building a common ground necessary for conversation to take place, this intersubjective understanding can be a means for creating and maintaining social affiliation. For indigenous Mexican immigrants in the U.S., this interactional means of connecting with other members of their community is especially crucial given their marginalized status. This dissertation uses a conversation analysis approach to investigate the interactive construction of social affiliation in a community of indigenous Mexican immigrants in a Spanish-language literacy class in California. These immigrants are native speakers of the indigenous Mesoamerican language Mixtec, and are therefore learning to read and write for the first time in a second language. To uncover the role of social affiliation in this literacy classroom, I focus on the interactional features that contribute to and reveal shared sociocultural understanding — namely, the deployment of epistemic and empathic resources for cultural affiliation. This study illustrates how epistemic and empathic resources serve not only to advance the progressivity of conversation but also to reveal and build sociocultural solidarity among a displaced community. As a project that investigates these particular communicative achievements within a specific community of practice, this study addresses the “problem of intersubjectivity” — i.e., how people understand one another without direct access to others’ minds — as well as the understudied phenomena of adult literacy acquisition and indigenous immigrants’ experiences. Such an investigation, which uses epistemics and empathy as a point of departure from which to study the experiences of adult language-minority individuals in the literacy classroom, can illuminate both the particular experience of indigenous immigrants acquiring literacy, and the very universal endeavor to find common ground through social interaction. Moreover, this study illustrates the potential of ethnomethodological research for understanding how social structures and ideologies are constructed, quietly and continuously, through everyday social interaction.