Radio Hosts Embracing Community Language Practices: Spanish-English Code-mixing and “Spicy Talk” in Los Angeles

Mega 96.3, a bilingual radio station from Los Angeles, California, has been the subject of analysis for code-mixing in advertisements and call-ins. To this line of research, we contribute analyses of host speech during the segment “Spicy Talk,” investigating how code-mixing is instrumental for audience engagement. This chapter presents both structural and discourse analyses of code-mixing, demonstrating that most of our data occurs in a monolingual mode, and predominantly in Spanish. Furthermore, host code-mixing was influenced by previous interlocutor but not preceding language, indicating the importance of context alongside the (un)markedness of code-mixing for US Latinxs.