¡No manches, güey! Service encounters in a Hispanic American intercultural communication setting

•Friendly stances served the enhancement of social cohesion among Hispanics.•Choice of Spanish helped to display ethnic bounds and express linguistic identities.•When displaying bilingual identities, American customers triggered friendly stances.

This paper analyzes food service encounters of Hispanic service providers and Anglo-American and Hispanic customers in an intercultural communication setting. The paper addresses the question of whether or not Anglo-Americans and Hispanics take different stances during requests. The study used participant and non-participant observation of 350 naturally occurring interactions. Depending on the style of the interaction, two types of stancetaking were analyzed: transactional and friendly. The results show that transactional stances were the majority across both customer groups, as the interlocutors were mainly oriented to the transactional goals of the interaction. Friendly stances were more frequent from Hispanic customers and American females; however, the proportion of these customer groups was small as compared to the proportion of Anglo-American customers and American males in particular. The paper provides empirical evidence for positioning stancetaking as a crucial activity in intercultural communication settings.