LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE AS AN ECOLOGICAL ARENA: Modalities, Meanings, Negotiations, Education

The initial brainstorming of this chapter is taking place between two writers in two locations, a private house in Tel Aviv and the Fertile Grounds café in Berkeley to the playback of a cell-phone conversation conducted in English, Spanish and Spanglish. The conversation is conducted in the space of a wireless café where colored photographs of people working in their fields in remote areas of Mexico are displayed on the walls. These are accompanied by labels of environmental protection and personal narratives of their biographies and of the photographer. The phone conversation centers around a broken water pipe and is peppered with curses and yelling about whose fault it was that the pipe broke. It is then followed by a set of instructions on how to repair the pipe. The person conducting the phone conversation moves around the small café occupying different places and altering the volume level of his speech according to the reactions of the people working intensively at their laptop computers (Color Figure 20.1).