Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

by Jonathan Rosa

Overview

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of Latinidad. The book draws from more than twenty-four months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a Chicago public school, whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican, to analyze the racialization of language and its relationship to issues of power and national identity. It focuses specifically on youth socialization to U.S. Latinidad as a contemporary site of political anxiety, raciolinguistic transformation, and urban inequity.

Jonathan Rosa's account studies the fashioning of Latinidad in Chicago's highly segregated Near Northwest Side; he links public discourse concerning the rising prominence of U.S. Latinidad to the institutional management and experience of raciolinguistic identities there. Anxieties surrounding Latinx identities push administrators to transform "at risk" Mexican and Puerto Rican students into "young Latino professionals." This institutional effort, which requires students to learn to be and, importantly, sound like themselves in highly studied ways, reveals administrators' attempts to navigate a precarious urban terrain in a city grappling with some of the nation's highest youth homicide, dropout, and teen pregnancy rates. Rosa explores the ingenuity of his research participants' responses to these forms of marginalization through the contestation of political, ethnoracial, and linguistic borders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190634735
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/22/2019
Series:	Oxf Studies in Anthropology of Language
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Rosa is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics, at Stanford University. His research analyzes the interplay between racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and educational inequity. Rosa's work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, as well as media outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and Univision.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Making Latinx Identities and Managing American Anxieties

Part I: Looking like a Language: Latinx Ethnoracial Category-Making
Chapter 1: From "Gangbangers and Hoes" to "Young Latino Professionals": Intersectional Mobility and the Ambivalent Management of Stigmatized Student Bodies
Chapter 2: "I heard that Mexicans are Hispanic and Puerto Ricans are Latino": Ethnoracial Contortions, Diasporic Imaginaries, and Institutional Trajectories
Chapter 3: "Latino flavors": Emblematizing, Embodying, and Enacting Latinidad

Part II: Sounding like a Race: Latinx Raciolinguistic Enregisterment
Chapter 4:"They're bilingual that means they don't know the language": The Ideology of Languagelessness in Practice, Policy, and Theory
Chapter 5:"Pink Cheese, Green Ghosts, Cool Arrows/Pinches Gringos Culeros": Inverted Spanglish and Latinx Raciolinguistic Enregisterment
Chapter 6:"That doesn't count as a book, that's real life!": Outlaw(ed) Literacies, Criminalized Intertextualities, and Institutional Linkages

Conclusion: Hearing Limits, Voicing Possibilities
References

Editorial Reviews

"Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race is pathbreaking in its focus on how Latinxs are racialized through language. In a moment when the relationship between race and Latinidad is hotly debated, Rosa's text helps us to better understand not only how Latinxs make sense of race but also how they seek to assert racialized difference within white supremacist and colonial structures of power." — Marisol LeBrón, American Anthropologist

"Whether this work was intended for educators, linguistic anthropologists, or researchers generally, by troubling the otherwise co-naturalized relationships between race and language Rosa challenges all audiences to rethink how we understand and talk about race, language, difference, and belonging. In this way, the book is not so much discipline-specific as an exercise in theoretical reimagining and self reflection that can speak to any reader." — Kimberly Ann Strong, International Journal of the Sociology of Language

"Rosa's detailed analysis of language and race in the construction of US Latinidad is illuminating for scholars and students alike who are interested in disrupting naturalized social categories and interrogating their production." — Molly Hamm-Rodríguez, Latino Studies

"Rosa is a gifted storyteller, and a major strength of his project lies in how he writes his student subjects and narrates their identities and experiences. For an ethnographic project reliant on the experiences and vulnerabilities of young human subjects, this storytelling is key ... Rosa's book is a must-read for students and educators interested in scholarship that foregrounds race and interrogates racial categories. It is also an exceptional example of an ethnographic study that analyzes the formation and naturalization of Latinidad in the United States." — Sarah Glessner, Language, Discourse & Society

"Rosa's work challenges us to consider the way mainstream notions of academic success might reproduce, not empower marginalized students. This book paves the way, setting in motion new inquiries to imagine an educational otherwise ... Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race dares us to go beyond "practical" theorization into a more critical and imaginative realm." — Omar Davila Jr, Urban Education

"In guiding us through moving ethnographic accounts of Latinx students' lived and embodied experiences of Latinidad, Rosa provides a brilliant contribution to the linguistic anthropology of education. I particularly appreciate his approach of anthropological activism, and his delicate handling of the theoretical, analytical, and ethnographic complexities of his research. His arguments and analyses are thoroughly grounded in linguistic anthropological theory, while simultaneously offering elaborations and expansions on key concepts within the field." — Doğa Tekin, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

"Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race is pathbreaking in its focus on how Latinxs are racialized through language. In a moment when the relationship between race and Latinidad is hotly debated, Rosa's text helps us to better understand not only how Latinxs make sense of race but also how they seek to assert racialized difference within white supremacist and colonial structures of power." — Marisol LeBrón, American Anthropologist

"Jonathan Rosa's Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad might be one of the most powerful books written on race and language of the past few decades, which I do not state with any intended hyperbole, but in a matter-of-fact consideration of how the book ambitiously accomplishes what it sets out to do." — Casey Philip Wong, Language in Society

"Jonathan Rosa's brilliant theorizing of the ideological codependency of race and language, grounded in his rich ethnographic work with Latinx youth, is excitingly fresh and urgently needed. Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race is a powerful rejoinder to researchers, educators, journalists, and politicians who seek to control and contain the complex meanings of Latinidad." — Mary Bucholtz, Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara

"This is the book that scholars of language, Latinx studies and comparative racial studies have been waiting for. It is an essential volume for understanding the co-naturalization of language and race and the key role language plays in the racialization of Latinx youth. Rosa's 'raciolinguistic' approach provides a welcomed pathway for understanding, and transforming, systems of domination and should serve as model for all linguistic analyses." — Arlene Dávila, Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, New York University

From the Publisher