Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

Jonathan Rosa

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

The first monograph to use a 'raciolinguistic perspective' that attends to the co-naturalization of language and race
Rosa's raciolinguistic perspective examines the categories of race, ethnicity, and language as products of long-standing colonial distinctions
Challenges distinctions between race and ethnicity in Latinx culture, and argues that the racialization of Latinx (a gender non-binary way of referring to 'Latina/o') language requires a careful consideration of race
Advances a critique of the U.S. as a fundamentally racist society built on histories of settler colonialism and enslavement, and approaches institutions such as public schools as central sites in which white supremacy is enacted and reproduced

Winner of the 2020 AAAL First Book Award

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

Jonathan Rosa

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Description

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 Rica, 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.

Winner of the 2020 AAAL First Book Award

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

Jonathan Rosa

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

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

Winner of the 2020 AAAL First Book Award

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

Jonathan Rosa

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Author Information

Jonathan Rosa, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, Stanford University

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.

Winner of the 2020 AAAL First Book Award

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

Jonathan Rosa

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2020 AAAL First Book Award
Winner of the 2020 Prose Award for Excellence in Language & Linguistics by the Association of American Publishers

"Jonathan Rosas 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. Rosas 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