Acknowledgements

I give my most sincere thanks to each and every one of the individuals who were interviewed for this project. Your insights, honesty, and willingness to share your stories made it all possible. I hope to have done right by you representing your experiences here. I admire your determination, humor, and successes in the face of so many challenges both from within and outside of your communities. ¡Que vivan los MexiRicans and all “mixed” people!

I also thank the talented and chatty University of Illinois at Chicago students who helped me conduct and transcribe the interviews: Doris Alfaro, Rene Diaz, Nancy Dominguez, Isabel Escarpita, Marilyn Gomez, Lillian Gorman, Kim Manzanares, Araceli Martinez, Janine Matts, Alba Morales, Denise Perez, Nancy Perez, Maria Salinas, Melanie Silva, and Massiel Soto. Erika Abad and Rosa Ortiz at DePaul University also contributed to the corpus. GRACIAS mil, you gals and guys were a great team!

The following students provided important help with data coding: Sara Fernandez, Hector Gonzalez, Francisca Jazmín Medrano, Reyna Mendoza Mendoza, Andrea Olmedo, Glafira Padilla Padilla, Sara Stefanich, and Annalee Tomsicek. I also thank Beyza Aksu Dunya and Nicole Colwell at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment Lab for the statistical analyses. Carrie Johnson was the Photoshop guru who generated the maps.

This work was supported in part by grants and fellowships from the Institute for the Humanities and the Office of Social Science Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The following colleagues gave generously of their time and taught me a great deal:

Lourdes Torres

Kirk Hazen

Jeff Siegel

Nydia Flores Ferrán

Naomi Shin

Erin O’Rourke

Naomi Nagy

Danny Erker

Rebecca Ronquest

Marcia Farr

Gracias a Luis Ortiz López y a Erika Liz por recoger los datos léxicos en Puerto Rico.

Espero que este trabajo fomente el interés en el bidialectalismo, la latinidad ‘mixta’ and the lived experiences of Latinxs around the United States.