Globalization, transnational identities, and conflict talk: The superdiversity and complexity of the Latino identity

The aim of this paper is to analyze the functionality of conflict talk (Grimshaw, 1990; Bou-Franch and Garces-Conejos Blitvich, 2014) as an ideologically loaded, indirect index of identity construction (Kiesling, 2013). It focuses on the construction of the Latino identity: a transnational (de Fina & Perrino, 2013), top-down identity, that was created in the 1970s by the Nixon administration. The data for this study comprise the comments posted on a CNN discussion forum in response to Soledad O'Brian's question "What did you think about Latino in America?" A cursory look at the corpus indicated that many Latino participants felt insulted arguing CNN with its focus on illegal Latinos had presented the community in a bad light. Thus, transnational identities and the internet, crucially related to globalization, come together in this study. Results show that conflict talk plays a major role in the construction of intragroup dissociation both thematically and at the microlevel. Furthermore, the fact that complex selective dissociation (Garcia-Bedolla, 2003), rather than simpler dis/affiliation processes routinely associated with the construction of social identities (van Dijk 1998) is more at play in the corpus seems to confirm the need for complexity in the study of culture and identity (Blommaert, 2013a). (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.