Amixer detected!: Identities and racism in Peruvian cyberspace

Following a sociocultural linguistics framework (Bucholtz & Hall, 2008), I analyze the https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351062541/874a5d35-5a02-49c6-b0a8-486bdd5d2e24/content/www.Hi5amixer.com">Hi5amixer.com Facebook page as an affinity space where the racializing social category of amixer is replacing the more classic racial identity of cholo. In the first section, I discuss the way the amixer “Other” is constructed as someone who writes poorly and displays spelling mistakes; however, this trait intersects with class, education, geographical origin, and also race. In the second section, I analyze the heteroglossia developed in the page through the alternation among the “amixer,” the “non-amixer” and the “more normative” Spanish, as interpersonal strategies that reproduce hierarchies and reinforce the construction of the amixer subject as inferior. My study reveals that, in the absence of a face-to-face environment in online contexts, racism must reinvent itself. In this way, orthography has turned into a racializing weapon in order to perpetuate a historically established racist social order and keep everything in its place.