Language and negotiation of ethnic/racial identity

Abstract

The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as or Hispanic, are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms Black or American, applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US. (Dominican, construction of race, African-descent immigrants, ethnolinguistic identity, Spanish)* Dominican American self-definition of race in terms of ethnolinguistic heritage as Spanish, Dominican, or Hispanic - runs counter to popular and historical US notions of race in which African-descent phenotype has preceded all other criteria (e.g. national origin, language, or religion) for social classification. African-descent RACE has historically been treated as equivalent to Africandescent ETHNICITY in the US (Mittelberg & Waters 1993), with the result that immigrants of African descent have largely merged into the African American population by the second generation (Bryce-Laporte 1972, Woldemikael 1989, Waters 1994). Unlike these other African-descent groups, Dominican Americans are successfully reversing, in many contexts, the historical precedence of African descent over ethnolinguistic identity for social classification.' Dominican American enactment of identity in Providence, Rhode Island, shows that race, which is popularly treated as a static attribute of an individual, can be situational. Although it has long been recognized that an individual can count as a member of different races in different societies (e.g. Hoetink 1967) and that one

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.