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

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.

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.

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