Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity are maintaining a distinctive, non-Black ethnolinguistic identity in the second generation.The many second-generation Dominican high school students who are phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans regularly show that they can "speak Spanish" in order to counter others' assumptions--in both intra-and inter-ethnic contexts-that they are "Black."Many of their peers, including non-Hispanics, accept this Spanish speaking as evidence of non-Black identity.In many contexts, Dominican Americans are thus reversing the historical precedence of African descent over ethnolinguistic identity for social classification.At the same time that Dominican American high school students use their Spanish language to resist American Black/White categorization, however, their English language varieties frequently contribute to categorization as Black.Their extensive adoption of African American Vernacular English syntax, lexicon, and interactional practices, combined with African-descent phenotype, make many individuals situationally indistinguishable from African Americans, even to other Dominican Americans.This ambiguity of identity and this agency of individuals in identity negotiations are particularly salient among adolescents in multi-lingual, multi-ethnic immigrant high school contexts such as the one described here.Large, urban public schools veil the linguistic and cultural practices that are so evident in immigrant homes and communities, which results in a social arena in which individuals' ethnic/racial identities can be uncertain.In this ambiguous context, the verbal play and trying-out of identities that is typical of adolescence involves the explicit straddling and challenging of ethnic/racial boundaries.The language and identities of the Dominican second-generation in Providence reflect their social reality of growing up in Dominican families with Dominican social networks, but residing and going to school in a low-income, multi-ethnic American inner-city.This socialization results in language and identities that are not just "Dominican" and "American" but distinctively inner-city Dominican American.At the same time that such teen-agers adopt language, dress, and musical fashions associated with low-income African American urban youth, for example, they maintain Dominican linguistic and cultural practices in other spheres of their lives, e.g. by speaking Spanish at home and with adult relatives, attending Spanish-language belie simple "we/they" dichotomies (Gumperz 1982) and one-to-one correspondences between code and social affiliation (e.g.Fishman 1989).AAVE syntax and lexicon, for example, can be used among bilingual speakers to express specifically Dominican national/ethnic pride, as in the phrase, "DR ['Dominican Republic'] in the house," uttered by a male, high school junior.The meanings locally attributed to linguistic forms are intimately intertwined with local Dominican American structural position--lowincome 4 , of African-descent phenotype, Hispanic, and immigrant.The second generations' structural position leads to solidarity with other non-Whites experiencing the same discrimination and same set of disadvantages, particularly African Americans and other Hispanics.Unlike their parents, many in the second generation define their race not just as Dominican, but also as "Hispanic" or "Spanish," categories which do not exist as such in the Dominican Republic.Also unlike their parents, the Dominican second generation do not deny their African ancestry or disparage African Americans, who are their peers and friends at school.Social meanings and identities are locally and interactionally negotiated rather than prescribed by linguistic forms or code choice, and individuals vary in the aspects of identity they treat as most salient to them.Some Spanish forms, for example, are seen as indexing (Silverstein 1976) rural Dominican origins which are associated with poverty and lack of education, and are a source of embarrassment to many teen-agers.While the second generation view Spanish language positively, more recent teen-aged immigrants who have less facility with English are seen as backward and not cool.African American Vernacular English forms, in contrast, are treated by many as indexes of a hip, non-White youth identity.Forms associated with White American speech, in turn, are stigmatized as indexing lack of solidarity and loyalty to roots.Students consciously avoid "talking White" in some situations for fear of social censure, and some make mocking use of registers and speaking styles associated with White Americans.This monograph uses micro-cultural data to analyze the identities of the Dominican second generation, but with consistent reference to macro-social constellations such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class.Micro-social approaches to identity have focused on the dynamics of ethnic identity and identification among individuals, the role of ethnicity in everyday life, and the activities involved in ethnic Rhode Island, decenters deeply naturalized ways of thinking about what it means to be "Black" or "White," and reveals incipient transformation of such categories.Such phenotype-based categories are already superseded by ethnolinguistic identity claims in many local Providence contexts, the result of the everyday enactment of identity by Dominican Americans and other African-descent Hispanics.Dominican American enactment of Dominican or Hispanic identities challenges deeply naturalized American notions of identity and difference.Although academics over the last decades have increasingly emphasized that American notions of race are local, mutable, and contradictory socio-political constructions, race is rarely perceived or challenged as such by Black and White Americans in everyday life.Outside of academic discourse, most Americans treat individuals of African ancestry as "Black" and individuals of only European ancestry as "White."Such categories organize the American social world, e.g. through residential patterns, marriage partner choices, church memberships, and overall social hierarchy, and they are treated by both Black and White Americans as useful guideposts to understanding social reality (Smedley 1993, Omi andWinant 1994).These categories popularly represent and assume "profound and unbridgeable difference" (Smedley 1993:21) between individuals assigned to different categories.United States constructions of linguistic and racial categories rest on implicit notions of purity.Social and linguistic categories, e.g."African American" and "English," suggest uniformity, masking internal variation and the diachronic change that is characteristic of both available social categories (e.g. Lee 1993) and language (e.g.Thomason and Kaufman 1988).Implicit homogeneity of categories is particularly evident in the racial category African American.African descent in America has historically been a totalizing criterion for social categorization, preceding all ethnic or other descent criteria.Despite an ostensibly biophysical basis for the category Black, the "one-drop" rule of racial classification has meant that anyone with an African ancestor has been defined on that basis, even if the majority of an individual's ancestors came from other phenotype-racial groups, e.g.Europeans and Native Americans (Davis 1991).Intertwined with purist constructions of language and race is an assumed primordial unity among language, race, and ethnic/national identity.This assumed unity--explicitly claimed and celebrated by Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity Dominican Americans--drawing on forms from discrete codes and distinctive social varieties of language--embody and recreate a social world which defies purist and monolithic social and linguistic categories.Dominican Americans also confound constructed categories of purity in terms of phenotype and personal and family networks.Over 70% of the Dominican population are of African and European descent, with smaller groups of just European and just African descent.The numerically dominant and socially unmarked phenotype in the Dominican Republic is precisely one that embodies African and European ancestry.This lack of observation of a color line undermines the differences and boundaries constructed between Black and White races 5 in the United States.By asserting a common ethnic identity despite diverse phenotypes, Dominican Americans subvert the myths of difference characteristic of phenotype-race in the United States.Dominican Americans regularly confront the dominant United States notions of race because so many are seen by others in ways, based on both phenotype and language, that are fundamentally different from the ways they see themselves.Rejection of phenotype-based racial ascription is often explicit: "They ask me, 'Are you Black?' I'm like, 'No, I'm Hispanic.'"Such everyday contestation of racial categories is a local form of social action that reveals the historical, contingent, and political nature of race.Dominican American assertion of an identity that is not Black or White, although occurring in everyday contexts, has broader sociopolitical implications.It is an act of resistance in the face of dominant American discourses on race, and it represents a retention of symbolic power.Power resides not only in control of material resources, but also in control over symbolic discourse, the ways in which the world is represented and categories made.Racial categorization and hierarchy are increasingly maintained through relatively symbolic means rather than through the de jure coercion prevalent during slavery, Jim Crow, and pre-Civil Rights times (Omi and Winant 1994).Scholars have referred to symbolic discourses (i.e.ways of representing and thinking about social relations) that mask domination and insidiously reproduce themselves, by a variety of names: Hegel and Marx's ideology/false conscious
Author: Benjamin Bailey
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1831684961