The rancho is situated in northwestern Michoacán. The map in Figure 1 shows the drive between Chicago and the rancho and locates Michoacán in western Mexico, bordering Guanajuato and Jalisco, two other states, like Michoacán (and especially northwest Michoacán),with heavy migration to Chicago. | Ways of Speaking in a Mexican Transnational Community Marcia Farr, Ohio State University 9/25/03 Radio announcers on Spanish-speaking stations in Chicago frequently ask those who call in, Where are you calling from? Then, when the caller responds with, for example, Elgin (a city near Chicago) or Chicago itself, the announcer then asks, Where are you from in Mexico? If the caller then says, for example, Michoacán, the announcer then follows a routine similar to the one below (from a station that broadcasts from Aurora, Illinois): he gleefully shouts, Bueno! Y en Chicago, Michoacán, qual manda? (OK! And in Chicago, Michoacán, what (station) rules?), to which the caller responds, La Ley manda! (The Law rules!). La Ley, the most expressively ranchero FM station in the Chicago area, has named itself playfully, with tongue in cheek. “The Law” refers both to the top billing the station claims for itself and to . law enforcement, the latter potentially troubling to migrants living in Chicago without legal papers. By appropriating this source of trouble as the very name of the station, the announcers, and by extension their listeners, enact a typically ranchero assertive stance by joking about such potential danger. This stance, though enacted by both men and women, usually indexes a dominant masculinity, and many well-worn phrases in Mexican Spanish personify “the law” and use mandar and other similar verbs to invoke absolute authority, for example of parents, particularly fathers, within the home: Quien manda aqui? (Who rules around here?). Such hierarchical authority is especially characteristic of ranchero-based societies that valorize order as respeto (see Valdés, 1996: 121; Farr, forthcoming). The radio routine, then, echoes the authority evoked by these phrases, and this is repeated many times each day, which delights and then becomes ingrained in the minds of thousands of listeners. What is taken for granted in this routine is the cohesiveness of
