Bilingualism and glocality in "Cachanilla" urban jargonon Mexico's Northwestern border

Urban language is a phenomenon that has rapidly developed in the city of Mexicali, Baja California, exerting a strong impact on everyday speech. Inhabitants of certain low to middle-low socioeconomic neighborhoods have coined new words and phrases or, in some cases, adopted borrowed verbs and idioms from other Mexican states, partly due to internal migration and, on the other hand, as a result of intense cultural exchange with the U.S. border. This study is based on the construction of a corpus specifically designed to document the urban slang used in Mexicali. The corpus, comprising approximately 50 000 tokens (words and phrases), integrates diverse linguistic data such as written texts from blogs, news sites, and social media, as well as recorded interviews and oral samples. These materials were systematically organized to facilitate linguistic analysis, enabling a clearer description of the role, structure, and function of urban slang in the local speech. The corpus not only highlights the influence of American English through borrowings, calques, expressions, and neologisms, but also illustrates the dynamic processes of linguistic innovation and identity construction among specific social groups.