This article explores the hypothesis that members of a minority group whose language is other than English are fossilizing their second language patterns in an effort to retain stronger ties with their native culture. An investigation is conducted in which eight undergraduate students of the University of Texas at San Antonio have served as fieldworkers and elicited speech samples from Mexican-American and Anglo-American informants. The data shows that the (lower) middle class Mexican-Americans develop a high degree of sensitivity toward bidialectal strategies; they tend to stress their non-native English features when they are talking to their peers and approximate native English features when they are addressing members of the mainstream population. This situation is described as being the result of a triple continuum of culture, socio-economic status, and language in the sense that only the lower middle class Mexican-American activates the interethnic pendulum that allows him to relate to Hispanic as well as Anglo values. Bibliographical data of the fieldworkers are appended. (Author/NCR)