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.

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9780190634759

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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 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 Davila, Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, New York University

Author Information

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.

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