Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

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 youthsocialization 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' responsesto these forms of marginalization through the contestation of political, ethnoracial, and linguistic borders.

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race is pathbreaking in its focus on how Latinxs are racialized through language. In a moment when the relationship between race and Latinidad is hotly debated, Rosa's text helps us to better understand not only how Latinxs make sense of race but also how they seek to assert racialized difference within white supremacist and colonial structures of power., Whether this work was intended for educators, linguistic anthropologists, or researchers generally, by troubling the otherwise co-naturalized relationships between race and language Rosa challenges all audiences to rethink how we understand and talk about race, language, difference, and belonging. In this way, the book is not so much discipline-specific as an exercise in theoretical reimagining and self reflection that can speak to any reader., Rosa's detailed analysis of language and race in the construction of US Latinidad is illuminating for scholars and students alike who are interested in disrupting naturalized social categories and interrogating their production., Rosa is a gifted storyteller, and a major strength of his project lies in how he writes his student subjects and narrates their identities and experiences. For an ethnographic project reliant on the experiences and vulnerabilities of young human subjects, this storytelling is key ... Rosa's book is a must-read for students and educators interested in scholarship that foregrounds race and interrogates racial categories. It is also an exceptional example of an ethnographic study that analyzes the formation and naturalization of Latinidad in the United States., Rosa's work challenges us to consider the way mainstream notions of academic success might reproduce, not empower marginalized students. This book paves the way, setting in motion new inquiries to imagine an educational otherwise ... Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race dares us to go beyond "practical" theorization into a more critical and imaginative realm.

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, AmericanEthnologist, American Anthropologist, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, as well as media outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and Univision.