Raciolinguistics & Race and Linguistics

Beyond position statements on race: Fostering an ethos of antiracist scholarship in linguistic research

In response to the arguments and evidence presented in the Hudley, Mallison, and Bucholtz (2019) response to the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race, we extend the calls for increased participation from diverse populations of scholars within the field as well as the call for attention to racial perspectives already being proffered by language scholars across the social sciences. We argue that beyond position statements on race and increased diversity, a concerted effort to produce anti-racist scholarship requires transparent research subjectivities and an engagement with the ways that research questions can and have reproduced structural imbalances.  Through a discussion of a current linguistic debate, our own research trajectories, and the inclusion of race-based perspectives in our own work, we advocate the use of collaborative research in the creation of more nuanced public facing scholarship that can challenge social injustices as they currently exist within the academy and within our society.

Language Ideologies & Education Policies

Benefits vs Burden: A raciolinguistic analysis of World Language Mission Statements and Testimonios of Bilingualism in the United States 

The dominant race and language ideologies that circulate in formal educational spaces in the U.S. often praise Anglo-American Spanish language learners as progressive innovators while marking Latinx and Hispanic Spanish speakers as racialized and “stubbornly unassimilable” (Rosa, 2016, p. 107). The current study explores the ways in which the Spanish of Latinx and Hispanic bilingual students is stigmatized through mission and policy statements as well as through institutional practices. The study employs a critical discourse analysis and a raciolinguistic lens to examine foreign language mission statements in conjunction with testimonios of students who completed these programs. I argue that the stigmatization of Latinx and Hispanic students in Spanish- and English-medium classes is a direct consequence of the racialization of those speakers as non-white, coded in the framing of their Spanish as a burden rather than an asset. While the participants’ ethnic self-identifications served to contest the dominant ideologies that undergird educational practices, each internalized the sense that their Spanish was primarily a burden. In order to respond to an increasing population of Latinx and Hispanic bilinguals, results support a restructuring of discourses that permeate language education policy and planning.

Critical Discourse Analysis

"I thought you were Dominican too": Raciolinguistic profiling and Ethno-racial boundary making

While it has been established that Dominicans’ racial self-identifications often exist in opposition to categorizations that circulate in U.S. consciousness, the question remains: What linguistic strategies do Dominican(-American)s use to mark themselves as racially distinct from the categorizations into which they may be placed? I perform a critical conversation analysis (CCA) on four target interviews to reveal the language ideologies that condition style-shifting, code-switching, and differentiated linguistic performances within the span of an interview. Drawing from Bucholtz and Hall 's framework for the analysis of identity, I theorize the construction of Dominican identity within this particular context as marked by a linguistic boundary that allows for a distancing from both African American and West Indian-American counterparts.

Sociolinguistics

Se comen la [s] pero a veces son muy fisnos: Observations on coda sibilant elision, retention, and insertion in popular Dominican(-American) Spanish

Over the past decades, scholars have devoted significant attention to coda sibilants in Dominican Spanish. While many have attended to the linguistic and social factors that condition the syllable-final /s/ elision that characterizes popular Dominican speech (e.g., las fiestas patronales ‘the patron saints feasts’ pronounced [la-‘fje-ta-pa-tɾo-‘na-le]), others have attended to the elevated production of the prescribed sibilant (i.e., retention) as well as to the appearance of [s] where it is unwarranted (i.e., insertion, as in the pronunciation of the proper name Jaqueline as [dʒas-ke-‘lĩŋ). Variationist sociolinguistic and socio-phonetic analyses have revealed the latter phenomena to be conditioned by phonological factors and by gender and education. The present study seeks to contribute additional insight to our understanding of the latter types of sibilant production—popularly termed hablar fisno ‘to speak in a refined way’—with an examination of the ways in which [s]-maintenance and [s]-intrusion are sanctioned in everyday interaction and in public discourse. The work draws on observations of the incidence of coda [s] in the audio- and visual landscape of the Dominican Republic and on its representation and concomitant evaluation on social media and press outlets in national and diasporic communities.

Dissertation

Situated at the nexus of Linguistics, Latinx Studies, and African Diaspora Studies, her dissertation project critically probes the ways in which racial and linguistic profiling impacts Afro-Caribbean identity construction across a variety of contexts. More specifically, the dissertation calls attention to the ways that categorical boundaries are discursively constructed in the service of the (re)formulation of colonial hierarchies of power and white supremacy. Dominican identities, language usage, and public perceptions are explicated through the interpretative framework of raciolinguistics (Alim 2016; Rosa & Flores 2017). Such an approach allows for an interrogation of the structures in which marginalized peoples linguistically perform their identities rather than merely examining the linguistic characteristics of their language production, which has traditionally resulted in unfavorable comparisons of minority speakers' phonology, syntax, and lexicon to a dominant counterpart.

Funded Projects

American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) Fellow |$60,000 | 2022-2023

Project: Speaking Race: Ethno-Raciolinguistic profiling and the construction of Dominicanidad in the U.S.

NAed/Spencer Research Development Award | $2500 | 2020-2021

Project: Speaking Race: Ethno-Raciolinguistic profiling and the construction of Dominicanidad in the U.S.

Dissertation Fellowship | $800 |  Summer 2020
University of Texas at Austin,  Mellon Mays Graduate Summer Writing Fellowship

Project: Spanish people be like: Dominican ethno-raciolinguistic stancetaking and the construction of Black Latinidades in the United States

Dissertation Fellowship | $20,000 | 2019-2020
University of Texas at Austin, Thematic Continuing Fellowship

Project: Spanish people be like: Dominican ethno-raciolinguistic stancetaking and the construction of Black Latinidades in the United States.

Principal Investigator | $3,500 | 2019-2020
University of Texas at Austin, Paredes Endowed Fellowship

Project: Dominican Language in context