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SETTINGS THAT CURRENTLY FOSTER CONTACT BETWEEN LSM AND ASL
Cities of the southwestern United States that lie along the border with Mexico are fertile areas for the study of language contact, and the most common examples of contact in these areas involve Spanish and English. However, these cities also contain Deaf communities where Mexican Sign Language (la Lengua de Señas Mexicana , henceforth LSM) is used; this results in contact between LSM and American Sign Language (ASL). Unlike contact between spoken languages, contact between two signed languages has been addressed only minimally.
A substantial number of Deaf Mexicans have immigrated to the United States and settled in border towns and beyond; many of these people are in search of employment and/or educational opportunities for their children. Social services for Deaf people in Mexico are not widespread, although there does exist some accommodation for communication (e.g., Spanish-LSM interpreting services), primarily in larger cities such as state capitals. Unfortunately, the number of skilled sign language interpreters appears to be small, and often payment for their services must come from the deaf people themselves, a "patron" who wishes to support the services, or a combination of the two. There also appears to be limited availability of educational programs catering to deaf children who live in rural areas, and schools that do exist in larger cities primarily offer programs for deaf children up to the fifth-grade level. Perhaps as a result of these issues and others, there are various examples of individuals, couples, and even families who have moved north of the border, and this has created settings that foster contact between LSM and ASL.
Early evidence for the existence of Mexican Deaf in the United States came from social service agencies along some parts of the U.S.-Mexico border that provide services to Deaf individuals. For example, agencies that contract interpretation services for Deaf individuals in El Paso and cities of the southern Texas Valley have reported that Deaf Mexicans frequently request interpretation services. Sometimes, the social service agency is not aware that they are providing an interpreter for an event that involves a non-ASL-signing Deaf person until the interpreter arrives at the designated site and finds that the Deaf individual's ways of communicating are unintelligible to the...