“Spanish in the linguistic landscape of Eugene, Oregon”

Devin Grammon, Romance Languages and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

The idea that bilingual signage helps to create welcoming and inclusive public spaces for U.S. Spanish speakers is complicated by the inequitable treatment of English and Spanish on many signs in terms of translation quality, text size, fonts, and other factors. My project examines bilingual public signs in downtown Eugene in order to explore how representations of Spanish can reinforce racializing stereotypes about U.S. Latinos and construct a public sphere that is hostile to members of this ethnolinguistic group.