Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

The rapid rise of the U.S. Latinx population, now the nation’s largest demographic minority group, has heightened concerns about the future of American identity and brought increased attention to the institutional management of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a predominantly Latinx Chicago public high school and its surrounding communities, this presentation examines borders delimiting Latinx and American identities on the one hand, and co-naturalizations of language and race on the other.

This talk coincides with the publication of Jonathan Rosa's new book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race, in which he 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.

Thursday, February 21, 2019 at 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Gordon White Building (GWB), 2.206
210 24TH ST W, Austin, Texas 78705

Departments

College of Liberal Arts

Target Audience

Students, Faculty, General Public

Website

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/e...

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