People who grow up speaking Spanish in Texas often learn a colloquial variety of Spanish at home or in their communities and have limited abilities to move between different registers in different social contexts. As heritage language (HL) learners' understanding of the value of different language varieties plays an important role in the development of their cultural and linguistic identities, the best methodology for the exploration of register and genre in the HL classroom is a key question that merits further discussion. Research also indicates the need for instruction on discourse, linguistic variation and local uses of the target language in the L2 classroom. In order to address the needs of HL and L2 learners described above, faculty, graduate students and undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin are collaborating to create a database of recordings of authentic conversations between Spanish speakers from Texas. This paper proposes a unit on local uses of Spanish that allows heritage language learners to participate in the development of the database while at the same time exploring and reflecting on language use in local Spanish-speaking communities. (Contains 4 footnotes.) [This project was made possible by funding from the Texas Language Technology Center, the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services at the University of Texas at Austin. This paper was published in: Proceedings of Intercultural Competence Conference August, 2010, Vol. 1, pp. 358-376.]