Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center.
Van Kempen discusses the songs and traditions of the Saramaccan peoples of the Upper Suriname. The music and lyrics of the Saramaccans depicts the troubles the ethnic groups have experienced in the 1990s from transmigration ordered by the government, typically lamenting or singing the praises of their old African villages, and cursing Western engineers for the uprooting of their cultures.;
Discusses words from Jamaican dread talk that are integrated into the Spanish spoken by Rastas in Cuba. Existence of international dread talk words in lists of Rasta words; Translation of the term Cabeza Creadora as head of family; Categories of Cuban Rastafarian community.;
Studies paralinguistic, pragmatic, and discourse markers of "kiss-teeth" by mapping the distribution of the gesture and its names and exploring previously unresolved problems of their meanings and use
This is a sociolinguistic study of San Basilio, located on Colombia's northern or Caribbean coast and the last surviving community where a Spanish-based Creole language still exists in the whole of the Americas
