This ethnographic investigation of the vowel system of Mexican Americans in Southwest Michigan addresses several holes in the literature, including the lack of research on Mexican Americans outside in the American South and the interaction of their dialect with regional variation. Sociolinguistics has a long tradition of exploring both the language use of political minorities and the regional variation of those who considered among the mainstream population, but it often ignores interaction between the two. This work addresses such interaction among Mexican Americans in Benton Harbor, Michigan, a town which is 95% African American, in terms of both their production and their perception of vowels. This population, comprised mostly of former migrant workers, is only beginning to form a community, but linguistic patterns similar to Roeder's (2006) study of an established community of Mexican Americans in Lansing, MI are already emerging. Contrary to Labov's (1994) claims that groups like Latinos do not participate in regional variation, the vocalic patterns of Mexican Americans in Benton Harbor and Lansing demonstrate accommodation to the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a regional change found among whites in the Inland North. This work also addresses claims about substrate Spanish effects in the vowel system, showing several of the claims about confusion patterns might be overstated. Finally, it addresses the social situation that is conditioning the developing dialect, addressing racial tensions and patterns of movement that might contribute to these speakers' partial adoption of the NCS as opposed to other available local norms.
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