A Good Position for Birth: Pregnancy, Risk, and Development in Southern Belize

By Aminata Maraesa

In order to understand the local realities of health and development initiatives undertaken to reduce maternal and infant mortality, the author accompanied rural health nurses as they traveled to villages accessible only by foot over waterlogged terrain to set up mobile prenatal and well-child clinics. Through sustained interactions with pregnant women, midwives, traditional birth attendants, and bush doctors, Maraesa encountered reproductive beliefs and practices ranging from obeah pregnancy to 'nointing that compete with global health care workers' directives about risk, prenatal care, and hospital versus home birth.

Fear and shame are prominent affective tropes that Maraesa uses to understand women's attitudes toward reproduction that are at times contrary to development discourse but that make sense in the lived experiences of the women of southern Belize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780826504128

Aminata Maraesa

Amínata Maraesa, a medical anthropologist, is co-editor of Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience (also published by Vanderbilt) and director of the documentary film Woman to Woman: Doula Assisted Childbirth.

Book preview

A GOOD POSITION FOR BIRTH

A Good Position for Birth

PREGNANCY, RISK, AND DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHERN BELIZE

Amínata Maraesa

Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville

© 2018 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2018

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number 2017044710

LC classification number RG963.B42 M37 2018

Dewey classification number 362.19820097282—dc23

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017044710

ISBN 978–0-8265–2200–9 (cloth)

ISBN 978–0-8265–2201–6 (paperback)

ISBN 978–0-8265–2202–3 (ebook)

To Kennon Rodney and Miss Margaret Edwards, whose lives—and deaths—have altered my understanding of and relationship with Toledo. And for Afinatou, Safouane, and Douniya, because I love you infinity times pi times the oven you bake the pie in.

Contents

Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Local Values in Action

2. Risk and Blame

3. In a Good Position

4. Fearless Encounters

5. Obeah Pregnancy and the Power of Shame

6. Adoption and Anthropological Complicity

7. Of Birth . . . and Death

Notes

References

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

All photographs are by the author, except as noted.

1. Punta Gorda market with women in Kekchi-style dress selling vegetables

2. Punta Gorda market with Mennonite men selling watermelons

3. The satellite television company in Punta Gorda

4. Stickers affixed to a village shop vitrine

5. The slogan of a popular Belizean brand of purified bottled water reads, The Melting Pot of Races

1.1. A Kekchi woman and her children at a mobile health clinic

1.2. Baby suspended from the rafters in a lepob

1.3. Nurse Ical administering a vaccination on mobile clinic in Branch Mouth. Photo courtesy of Skyler Paccio

2.1. Village buses lined up at midday for their return voyages from Punta Gorda

2.2. Nurse Caal administering prenatal care at the San Juan rural health center

3.1. Miss Margaret’s framed TBA certificate reads, The Ministry of Health certifies that M. Margaret Edwards has satisfactorily completed a course of training, 1987, in Practical Midwifery to enable her to perform efficient service as a traditional birth attendant in Westmoreland Village, Punta Gorda Road, Toledo District

3.2. Miss Margaret standing in the doorway to her home. With limited telecommunications in Toledo, unannounced visitors knew that Miss Margaret was home only if they saw her door open

3.3. Miss Margaret’s hands ’nointing a woman who arrived complaining of excessive postpartum bleeding

3.4. Kekchi woman carrying her baby in a lepob

3.5. Bush doctor identifying plants at Itzama Medicinal Garden, Golden Stream, Toledo. Photograph by Patrycia Sulich

4.1. Wooden-slat, thatched house in rural Toledo

4.2. Rosalia bent over Elizabeth, timing the fetal heartbeat

4.3. Full width of a Kekchi woman’s skirt, hanging to dry on the side of a house in Esperanza village

4.4. Local blue crabs in a barrel

7.1. Sign erected at the entrance of Punta Gorda after the death of MaSauce. Peini is the name given to the area by the first Garifuna settlers

7.2. View of the sign leaving Punta Gorda erected after the death of MaSauce

7.3. The new hospital under construction in rural Toledo (2008)

7.4. Miss Margaret in her home with the author

Tables

1. Ethnic Composition: Belize and Toledo District (2010)

2. Parity of Women Attending Prenatal Clinic at Punta Gorda Hospital (July 2006)

1.1. Rural Health Center Data for the San Juan Catchment Area, pop. 5,150 (2003–2005)

1.2. Rural Health Center Data for the San Juan Catchment Area (2013–2015)

1.3. Maternal Deaths and Maternal Mortality Rates (1998–2013)

2.1. PG Prenatal Clinic Attendance and Parity

2.2. PG Prenatal Clinic Attendance and Marital Status

Acknowledgments

I thank first and foremost the people in Belize who shared their time with me throughout my fieldwork and beyond. To protect their anonymity, I cannot identify individuals by name, but please know that I am grateful for your kindness and your offering of the sensitive and personal information that has contributed to this work on reproduction. I am forever indebted to Shanon Rodney for taking care of my children, taking care of me, and eventually including us in her household and extended family network. I must acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the Ministry of Health and the many officers and personnel who facilitated my quest for knowledge. I also wish to thank GIFT and its employees for opening their doors to my project and giving me an initial start in the field. Finally, I am deeply appreciative of the many individuals who assisted me over the internet (especially Mr. Marvin Moody and the Statistical Institute of Belize) in acquiring last-minute data from archival sources in Belize and Ruth McDonald for hospital logistics and data. Thank you to Santiago Shol and Eduardo Salam for their assistance with the Kekchi-English translations, Ignasi Clemente for Spanish help, and Tyrone Avila for Garifuna grammatical correctness.

I thank my academic interlocutors Connie Sutton, Aisha Khan, Emily Martin, Don Kulick, Ulla Dalum Berg, Jack Murphy, Lauren Fordyce, Alyshia Gálvez, and Kristina Baines who provided continuous encouragement, advice, and critical reflection throughout. I especially thank Rayna Rapp for her unwavering support and confidence in my work and for looking out for me on countless occasions. And thank you Theodore Kirkland, Mark Payne, and Mohammad Hassan for your initial faith in me.

I am deeply appreciative of my many friends who maintained their belief in my madness—without your support this work would not exist (I love you Lynda, Sadiqa, Latá, and Nara). Brigitte et Daniel, je n’y serais pas arrivée sans vous. Nicole, my rock together young until we die. And Madala who was there literally from day one. But of course, Afinatou, Safouane, and Douniya: you never cease to exhibit incredible patience with a stressed-out mom. Thank you for allowing me to uproot you from the City and replant you in the bush. Life begins anew. I dream of fish. Aum Shanti.

Generous funding for various stages of this research and writing was provided by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the International Women’s Anthropology Conference, and internal grants at New York University.

A heartfelt thank you to my editor, Michael Ames.

Portions of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 also appear in Maternal Health, Pregnancy-Related Morbidity, and Death among Indigenous Women of Mexico and Central America: An Anthropological, Epidemiological and Biomedical Approach, edited by David Schwartz and published by Springer (2018).

Introduction

Here we could have as many babies as we want. We no have no laws against that.

Comment I often heard from pregnant women at the prenatal clinics

Mr. Price say mek we build the nation!

Teodora, a thirty-eight-year-old Mopan Maya woman discussing pregnancy¹

It is early Wednesday morning, February 2006, in Punta Gorda, the only town in the southernmost Toledo district of Belize. The sea laps at the rocky coastline, hens shepherd their broods, and schoolchildren join their peers across the country as they stand to start the day with the national anthem. Most wear uniforms, although some do not have shoes, and all learn from a very young age to be proud citizens of this peaceful democratic nation located between Central American and Caribbean political unrest and economic instability. Strolling down the sidewalk and past the open-air classrooms are the many pregnant women who come to shop, visit friends, and attend the prenatal clinic at the town hospital. Some are accompanied by young children, and others must hurry home to cook for those returning from school. For some, this is a first child, while for others who have had four, five, or more children already, this pregnancy confirms their belief that only God knows how many they will have. Although all are eligible for the free prenatal care offered through the Ministry of Health (MOH), most will not take advantage of these services until the second or third trimester, when their bodies have confirmed the existence of the pregnancy, and many will deliver their babies at home without the presence of a trained birth attendant—abiding by the folk-wisdom of the mothers before them who ensured the safe delivery of their babies through a particular kind of prenatal massage believed to set the fetus in a good position for birth.

Since the mid-1900s, the training of village-level health workers and traditional birth attendants (TBAs) by the Belizean MOH has been part of a World Health Organization (WHO) development model to encourage rural-dwelling women to engage with official medical care providers and close the purported ideological gaps between global public health-care initiatives and local practices, thereby legitimating a specific role for traditional practitioners alongside the nurse-midwives who dominate the domain of public health. In 2000, Giving Ideas for Tomorrow (GIFT), a US-based nongovernmental organization (NGO), began a TBA training program in Toledo that sparked the controversies associated with foreign involvement in local affairs observable during my fieldwork in 2006.² On the periphery of mainstream maternity care are bush doctors, the traditional healers who influence the health-care decisions made by pregnant women and their perception and management of perinatal risk.

The chapters that follow focus on pregnant women and maternity care providers in the Toledo district. Despite both cultural and geographical variation in the region, the people hold in common the lowest economic and social indicators countrywide: the greatest poverty, the lowest levels of education, the highest fertility, and the greatest difficulty in obtaining emergency medical services. The maternity services provided by the MOH, the practices of TBAs, and the influence of sociocultural and environmental realities on women’s reproductive decision-making processes constitute the main focus of this book, whose argument is that these intimate processes reflect the wider contexts in which they occur (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991).

Geography of a People

Belize is a small country located in Central America; its territory includes a multitude of small islands and mangrove tangles that dot the Belize Barrier Reef off its Caribbean coastline. According to 2010 Census data, the country’s population of 324,528 individuals comprises at least eight distinct ethnic groups and admixtures thereof, almost equally divided between males and females and found in near equal proportion in both urban and rural settings, with an extremely low average population density of thirty-six persons per square mile (Statistical Institute of Belize 2013). English is the official language of Belize, which is a former British colony, although Belize Creole, Spanish, Garifuna, three distinct Maya languages, and Plautdietsch are commonly heard. Since the 1980s, Belize has experienced an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants. As a result, the ethnic demography has rapidly changed, as has the first language of many Belizeans (Woods et al. 1997; Statistical Institute of Belize 2013).

The territory now known as Belize was originally part of the Spanish claim to the New World. Contact and subsequent conquest dates to 1508, at which time Belize was home to several Mayan civilizations with extensive trade networks from Mexico through Central America and even to the Caribbean islands (Jones 1989; Farriss 1984). Mayan sites, predating Columbus by more than half a century, dot the countryside. These colossal stone structures bear witness to a civilization that inhabited the area fifteen hundred years ago, the decline of which is dated to around 800 CE. Now, these sites are some of Belize’s key tourist attractions and provide the hard evidence cited by contemporary descendants of ancient Mayan peoples in their struggles for indigenous privileges and land rights (Maya People et al. 1997).

The colonial history of the Americas was fashioned from warfare and exploitation. European powers fought for control of human and natural resources through official treaties and declarations. Meanwhile, they also engaged in extralegal activities that played a role in the history of Belize. High demand for the logwood booty of British pirates led to the eventual settlement of Belize in the mid-seventeenth century by British hardwood cutters pursuant to various accords between Britain and Spain. Eventually Spain lost this part of what was ubiquitously called Honduras in 1862, whereupon the territory was renamed British Honduras. To this day, the romanticized entrepreneurial spirit of these settler ancestors is eulogized in the chorus of Belize’s national anthem:

Arise! Ye sons of the Baymen’s clan

Put on your armours, clear the land!

Drive back the tyrants let despots flee—

Land of the free by the Carib Sea!

Early foreign interest in the country’s rainforest ecology meant that the colonial economy of Belize developed very differently from other New World territories under British control that were economically and socially organized around plantation economics and sugar production (Mintz 1985). The British introduced enslaved Africans to the territory, but Belize’s orientation toward lumber exports did not require extraordinary numbers of human laborers. According to Bolland, The extraction of the timber was executed by small gangs of slaves who did not appear to experience the hierarchy of control which characterized the plantation system. . . . [They] were distributed in small groups, with little supervision but great knowledge of the terrain, throughout hundreds of miles of uncultivated and essentially uninhabited land (2003, 23–24). Because of these unique conditions, it has been argued that enslaved Africans in British Honduras enjoyed a freedom greater than their plantation counterparts (Caiger 1951; Metzgen 1928). However, relative liberty cannot be conflated with absolute freedom, and Bolland emphasizes that there is no evidence that enslaved Africans were content to be dominated (2003, 25). Indeed, the colony’s early history is marked by numerous revolts that shook the foundations of the early settler community, while the country’s vast forested regions provided enslaved laborers with opportunities for escape and refuge from colonial control (Bolland 2003, 25–28).

Creoles (who make up 25.9 percent of the total population) are officially defined as descendants of these enslaved Africans mixed with European ancestry. Yet, as a category of difference, Creole has also come to blur ethnic distinction. Belizeans commonly refer to Creole identity as a mixture of any sort—one sometimes referred to as rice and beans. Others, who defy an ethnic label all together, protest what they feel is political manipulation and simply call themselves Belizean (Merrill 1992). Nonetheless, Belizeans must still choose from the colonial legacy of unitary ethnic demographic categories, so some redefine Creole to include ethnic mixtures of all types, as evidenced by the small number of people who categorize their ethnic identity as Other (1.2 percent) and the Census’s disclaimer that Column percentages [of ethnic identity] will not sum to 100, as some persons claim more than one ethnic group (Statistical Institute of Belize 2013:20) (see Table 1).

The Garifuna people comprise 6.1 percent of the country’s population. According to oral testimony, the Garinagu are descendants of shipwrecked Africans who landed on St. Vincent and resisted enslavement by escaping to the peripheral forestry of colonial settlements and mixing with the Carib and Arawak indigenous populations.³ As tension between France and England mounted over the colony’s ownership—and the Garinagu began to assist the French—they were exiled by the British from St. Vincent to the island of Roatan, Honduras, in 1796 (Gonzalez 1988). European colonial warfare again displaced the Garinagu along the Central American coastline where November 19, 1802, is celebrated in Belize as Garifuna Settlement Day. The Garinagu were the first to populate Toledo’s coastal areas and the first to settle what they called Peini—now the town of Punta Gorda (PG), Toledo’s peripherally located urban center. They pride themselves on never having been enslaved, on their fierce independence, and for maintaining their distinctive traditions and language in spite of the anti-Garifuna sentiment of early British settlers and Creole elite (Cayetano and Cayetano 1997).

Table 1. Ethnic Composition: Belize and Toledo District (2010)

(Statistical Institute of Belize 2013)

By the mid-1800s Belize’s timber trade had declined, and economic development shifted to export agriculture. Slavery was abolished in 1834, yet coerced labor continued in the form of an apprenticeship system and later the indentured servitude of Chinese and East Indians who came to the colony via Jamaica and Guyana to work on the new plantations (Ranguy 1999). The territory officially became a British colony in 1862. This coincided with political upheaval in the United States whereupon colonial administrators in British Honduras successfully enticed Southerners to operate plantations in Belize (Simmons 2001). A Louisiana-based company, Young Toledo and Co., and upward of fourteen white families set up large tracts of sugar plantations in what became the Toledo Settlement along the roadway connecting PG to the rest of the district (Hill 1936; Wilk 1997). The company went bankrupt in 1880, and most of the white families moved back to the United States. However, the village settlements along what is now the San Antonio Road continue to be predominantly populated by East Indian descendants of these indentured peoples (Shoman 2000).⁴

Political instability and warfare in neighboring countries as well as economic opportunity led three linguistically distinct Maya groups as well as Mestizos—defined as the descendants of the miscegenation of early Spanish colonists and the indigenous populations and usually referred to as Spanish—to immigrate into present-day Belize. When combined, the Mopan, Kekchi, and Yucatec Maya make up 11.3 percent of the Belizean population; however, they comprise a 66.5 percent majority of the population in Toledo (Statistical Institute of Belize 2013).⁵ Although the Maya are lumped together for Census purposes, each group has a distinct history of immigration and settlement. The Yucatec Maya, found in the northern areas of Belize, are descendants of refugees from the 1847 Caste War, which also displaced large numbers of Mestizos from the Yucatan Peninsula into neighboring Belize. The Mopan and Kekchi are found primarily in the southern Toledo district to whence both migrated in the late 1880s (Rambo 1962). The immigration of Kekchi Maya is ongoing, and many immigrants have a fluid border relationship with family and economic markets in neighboring Guatemala.

Figure 1. Punta Gorda market with women in Kekchi-style dress selling vegetables.

Due to violence and economic hardship, Mestizos also continue to immigrate into Belize from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras at a growing rate, such that they are now the majority (52.9 percent) of the national population (Palacio 1993). In Toledo, the Spanish-speaking Mestizo population constitutes a relatively large segment (19.9 percent) of the district’s inhabitants. However, they are concentrated in a few villages located at the border of the Toledo and Stann Creek districts. There they form a peripheral presence that is economically and socially oriented away from PG toward the plantations and urban centers in the country’s central region.

Figure 2. Punta Gorda market with Mennonite men selling watermelons.

Mennonite groups immigrated to Belize to maintain religious freedom and a way of life based on agricultural production (Sawatsky 1969). They comprise 3.6 percent of the national population and 0.8 percent of the population in Toledo, where they fall into two categories. Recently arrived, proselytizing missionary groups from the United States live in close proximity to PG, while a closed community of Russian Mennonites, who began migrating in the 1940s from Canada, live in a private farm community located at some distance from the town center. Despite their small numbers, the Mennonites are the main producers of all agricultural products for the entire country. In Toledo, the Low German-speaking Mennonites are likewise farmers; however, their lifestyle forbids the use of electrical equipment and machinery. They live a separatist lifestyle and partake little in the social world of the Toledo district except on Wednesdays, when pregnant women attend the prenatal clinic at the PG hospital, or Saturdays, when a few men drive their horse-drawn wagons loaded with watermelons—their primary cash crop—to the town market.⁶

Chinese immigrants also fall into two groups: those whose ancestors were indentured migrants and who have blended into the country’s social fabric, and a recent wave of Chinese immigrants that began arriving in 2000. This latter group dominates ownership of small grocery stores and fast-food restaurants, which stay open through lunchtime and well into the evening hours after most Belizean establishments have closed for the day.

Those categorized in the Census as Caucasian/White or Other may include Lebanese, Syrians, and increasing numbers of expatriate North Americans who are taking advantage of early retirement incentives to encourage English-speaking settlement (no doubt to counter the recent influx of Spanish speakers as well as to capture US pensions). While US retirees are not allowed to seek employment, they are permitted to engage in their own small business ventures and generate employment for native Belizeans. Many in the Toledo district have done just that.

In 1961, at the height of worldwide decolonization struggles, Belize was granted full internal self government (Shoman 2000, 197). British aid and protection remained crucial because of the ravages of Hurricane Hattie in that same year and ongoing border disputes with Guatemala that have yet to be resolved. The Belize Defence Force (BDF) continues to patrol the Guatemalan borders in the Toledo district, where land claims to certain areas remain unsettled.

Full independence was not achieved until 1981 with the establishment of a parliamentary democracy dominated by two political parties: the People’s United Party (PUP) and the United Democratic Party (UDP). No overtly expressed political differences exist between the two parties, and the outcome of elections tends to flip from one party to the next with each successive term or two. Indeed, whenever I tried to elicit an understanding of the differences between the two parties, I was almost always told, One red and the next one blue, referring to the colors used to symbolically represent each party.

Belize, however, remains beholden to US interests. The United States has been the primary source of imported materials since the late 1800s, and by 1920 it dominated Belize’s export economy to become the dominant metropolitan power in Belize (Shoman 2000, 109). Historically tied to the US dollar, the current fixed rate of exchange, two Belize dollars to one US dollar, has been in effect since 1976. In addition to its economic influence and control, the United States exercises much influence over quotidian life via televised images of North American life and culture. During my initial fieldwork period (2006–2008), a videotape of the national evening news arrived by plane for broadcasting in Toledo one day after the information was disseminated to the other districts. Although the delayed Belizean news was still eagerly awaited, real-time satellite images from stations based in Texas and New York had come to dominate the living rooms of most Belizeans with access to a television, as well as the bars and restaurants of public establishments (Wilk 2002). Likewise, country music and hip-hop are liberally interspersed with local punta rock and Jamaican dancehall in the discos and karaoke clubs that dominate nightlife from PG all the way to the generator-powered zinc-roofed bars of the Maya Mountains in the district’s highlands.

Figure 3. The satellite television company in Punta Gorda.

Historically, the social and economic life of Belizeans and the natural environment of this subtropical country have been inextricably connected (Steward 1968). Up to the present, the Belizean economy continues to be influenced by environmental conditions because of its concentration in tropical (bananas, citrus, sugar) and Mesoamerican (corn, beans) agricultural products, wet rice farming, and saltwater seafood. More recently, the natural environment has been marketed to ecotourists and nongovernmental research and conservation organizations alike to make agriculture and foreign money invested in natural attractions the twin pillars of the Belizean economy (Government of Belize 2001, 2004a).

Similarly, the environment profoundly impacts quotidian life. Belize has a hot and humid climate, prone to heavy rains and hurricanes. Imported supplies tend to degrade under these adverse conditions, rivers flood onto roads and bridges causing difficulties in both basic and emergency transportation, and infectious and parasitical diseases are easily spread. Far from taming the forces of nature, local ingenuity has developed a mode of existence accepting of life’s precarious condition. Adversity, misfortune, and death are understood as factual and unavoidable circumstances, and Belizeans of all ethnic groups hold strong religious beliefs in God and the spirit world to which their fates are beholden. Throughout the book, I will refer to the ubiquitous presence of this untamed environment and its influence on women’s reproductive behavior. In the Toledo district—the most rural and underdeveloped region of the country—coexistence with the awesome, yet precarious, natural environment is mirrored in the individual behavior and interpersonal relationships of its residents, which can be characterized by the importance they place on free will, independence, and a heightened sense of personal responsibility to the social collective (Gonzalez 1988, 156; McClusky 2001, 250–51).

Notes on Language

Belize Creole is an English-based language that contains words derived from Amerindian and African languages, as well as words and phrases from Spanish and US English (Young 1995). Among Toledo’s multiethnic and multilingual populations, Belize Creole is also the lingua franca of social life. With the exception of the East Indians who entered Belize already removed from their linguistic ancestry, the languages of the principal ethnic groups in Toledo (Garifuna, Mopan, and Kekchi) continue to be used to communicate within families and among same-language speakers. Garifuna is ubiquitously spoken by older Garinagu. However, the language is reportedly dying as younger generations are favoring Belize Creole as their first language (Bonner 2001; Cayetano and Cayetano 1997; Izard 2005). Some Garifuna household heads try to keep the language alive by insisting that their children speak it at home. In contrast, most of the Garifuna phrases uttered in the household in which I came to live were deployed to intensify inflammatory gossip and not for deep communicative purposes.

In the rural areas predominantly inhabited by Maya populations, Mopan and Kekchi are spoken as first languages of communication. Although most villagers have at least rudimentary primary school English, some older people cannot speak English or Belize Creole at all. Likewise, more recently immigrated Kekchi have the least interaction with ethnic groups outside of their own and have the greatest difficulty conversing in both English and Belize Creole, although they often can communicate in Spanish as a second language. Interestingly, the Kekchi language as spoken in Belize by native-born Kekchi is often referred to as Kekchi-Creole, blending what Belizean Kekchi speakers call pure Guatemalan Kekchi with Belize Creole. Nonetheless, Kekchi-Creole was very dissimilar from Belize Creole, and I remained beholden to translation to understand the rural world around me. Throughout my fieldwork, I gained competency in Belize Creole. However, because of my own inhibitions about my accent, I had difficulty speaking it to those who could understand my US English. I learned to say a few polite phrases in Kekchi and Mopan and a few curses in Garifuna, and my ability to speak Spanish came in handy with recent Kekchi and Mestizo immigrants from Guatemala.

I have transcribed the words of individuals speaking Belize Creole, including those speaking Belize Creole as a second language, as they were uttered to include grammatical structures that do not conform to the rules of Standard English. However, I have minimized phonetic transcription to facilitate the readability of direct quotations. Although the full effect of