The theme of this Workshop is, apparently, the role of language in the (genesis and exercise of) power: a topic of some antiquity, and one whose very framing in these terms--imagining "language" as something separable enough from other realms of human activity to be assigned its own "role," or the nominalization of yet other realms or aspects of human activity under the rubric of what in Romance linguistics is called (with certain metaphysical confidence) a substantive, that is, a noun, 'power'--is an example of its own referent: the power of language to cast phenomena into a certain shape and nature. This is a matter that linguists spend lamentably little time thinking about, and that anthropologists perhaps find hard even to understand. I come to you today as both linguist and anthropologist....

My empirical focus here is [close] to home. In fact, it is about thirty minutes from my home in Southeast Portland (Oregon). The facts are...complex, though they involve only three 'languages': English, Spanish, and Mixtec, an Oto-Manguean language of Mexico, in this case dialects of Mixtec from the state of Oaxaca. There are language choices involved here...whose terms are set by what we might call the "entry-level" institution of the state political order: the county courtroom. I will describe certain details of a murder trial, conducted in Clackamas County in late 1986, in which a young Mixtec was convicted of the murder of another Mixtec--like the defendant, an undocumented migrant strawberry picker from Oaxaca--and sentenced to life in prison. This man, Santiago V., has now passed his 18th, 19th, and 20th birthdays in the Oregon State Correctional Institution, and, even if he manages parole, he can still expect to spend another ten birthdays on the inside--all for a crime he very probably did not commit.

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