Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (Oxf Studies in 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 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. Review: A new high-water mark for excellence in qualitative scholarship. - For those who are familiar with Jonathan Rosa's work, we have come to expect the highest level of ground-breaking and insightfully erudite scholarship from him. Before reading "Looking Like a Language, Sounding like a Race", I had enormously high expectations, and I am simultaneously surprised and elated to say that this new work wholly surpassed my expectations. From his insightful analysis of the complex intersections of language, race and Latinx identity, to his uncanny ability to produce convincing arguments that often border on poetic in their effectiveness, Dr. Rosa has produced a piece of scholarship that will long be remembered as one of the definitive ethnographic and linguistic works of this generation. This book is more than just a must-read. This book should be a mandatory inclusion on any syllabus for any course that discusses intersections of language, race, and education. I can not overstate the significance of this work and give it my highest possible recommendation. Review: Great Book! - An Amazing book! A must read for a more in depth view of language, culture, identity and relations in the Latin community.