When assimilation and multiculturalism, two contradicting styles, are used together, they provide a very well-anchored discourse of a text. Rosa uses these two elements in her book “Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race” to show how language and race impact Latinos in Chicago and the general US. The Latinxs’ cultural, phenotypic, and linguistic diversity is abolished by racializing ideologies which combine them with others. The abolishment of the Latinx’s diversity can be attributed to white supremacy and the anti-blackness because the brown color is between the White and Black (Rosa 35-36). Latinos are predicted to Sound Like a Race in the institutions and social interactions, whereby whites see their English as insufficient. This paper aims to show how specific linguistic practices are symbolic of particular racial categories and by what means the racial categories are established to represent stereotypical linguistic practices.
The book’s main idea is based on a sociolinguistic perspective that is made up of five elements. In the first place, the whites rank languages to force European objectives. In the second element, the whites perceive themselves as superior species and other people as inferior despite their origin or color (Rosa 62). The next element discussed the hypothesized nature of language and race, determining how they relate. The fourth view explains how language and race are put together and co-constructed. The final element explains how white supremacy can be overcome and achieve social equality. Therefore, for the author to be able to challenge white supremacy, she has to explore the issue from a multi-sited view to get both parties’ perspectives. Therefore, this justifies why Rosa used both assimilation and multiculturism when evaluating the race and language of Latinos. Thus, the author has used good ethnographic styles to present her book’s main points.
The book is separated into two distinct parts, whereby the first part is based on “Looking Like a Language,” which comprises chapters one, two, and three, and the second part “Sounding Like a Race,” in chapters four, five, and six. The first chapter discusses how Latinos should be transformed from “gangbangers and Hoes” to “Young Latino Professionals” (Rosa 34). The book demonstrates the stereotype by the Whites that Latinos are mostly involved in gang activities and prostitution and therefore come up with solutions to transform them. However, they base the problem on the Latinos themselves instead of taking the blame for the activities Latinos engage in. The whites do not want to take responsibility for providing unfair learning and social environment, which forces most Latinos to go back to crime. The author gives an example of various incidents where Latino children mess up due to gang-related activities and prostitution but, in this case, does not evaluate the White supremacy contribution to this problem.
Different systemic barriers have been put in place by the US government against minority racial groups such as Latinos. For instance, young Latino girls were not allowed to get back to school after getting pregnant. Whereas white girls received support from the government through universal healthcare insurance when they were pregnant, young Latino girls were left on their own. The whites had a popular slogan for Latino girls “If you got popped, you got dropped,” implying that if Latino girls get pregnant, they are dropped by the system (Rosa, 36). This is a clear indication that systemic barriers hindered the development of Latinos into professionals and instead pushed them into prostitution and gang life.
Rosa writes about “Sounding Like a Race” in the book’s second part. In this section, the author tries to show how bilingual Latinos are incapable of speaking either good English or Spanish. In their socialization or places of employment, the children are not exposed to sufficient language practices, which contributes to their weak language practices (Rosa 127). The US system has marginalized bilingual students, referred to as English learners. Therefore, bilingual skills are made to look like the problem affecting Latinos from having good English proficiency. Hence, the students must learn the good English language as quickly as possible to avoid being profiled or being referred to as language-less. The ideology of language-less-ness is used to strongly racialize students who speak more than one language as linguistically weak. However, to overcome this challenge, the students adopted inverted Spanglish, whereby they could integrate the Spanish language into English and stop the stigmatization.
The author has used interviews and case studies to prove his facts. She uses the interrelated contexts of Northwest Highschool in the City of Chicago. The school has 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican, which makes the data collected valid because, in this case, they can express themselves freely (Rosa 8). Additionally, the school has a diverse pool of students from Mexican, and Puerto Rico improves the validity of the data because they are the ones who experience linguistic challenges. In most cases, the author has used stories such as students’ confessions to describe the experiences of Latino students. However, the author should have used studies from other places with Latino students to ascertain if they still have similar experiences. Using a school in Chicago and generalizing the results may have biased results. Therefore, there is a need for the study to be done in other areas in the US and determine if Latino students undergo the same linguistic problems.
This masterpiece is well organized, whereby the author has divided it into two parts; the first part comprises three chapters that discuss “Looking Like a Language,” and the second part has three chapters that discuss the ideologies of “Sounding Like a Race.” This shows that the two main ideas have been equally covered and well distributed in the book. The book is well-written and outlines everything clearly. The author has avoided repetition in the context of the book and provided her content understandably and consistently. This book can appeal to educators and researchers who want to help come up with ways of solving problems of racialized structures within the learning system and other systems. It was written in 2019, and it is relevant today in showing how Latinos and other marginalized racial groups can overcome the problem of raciolinguistic in society. It also aids the government and system in understanding the challenges faced by minority groups regarding language.
This study is for people who want to understand language challenges for racial minorities. The author proves that although raciolingustic is made to make Latinos feel helpless and victims of oppression, it instead creates a pathway for racial minorities to resist and oblige with the common expectations of “Look Like a Language” and “Sound Like a Race.” Therefore, bilingualism is a symbolic racial category associated with weak English proficiency in educational institutions and the community. There is a need for more research to explore the raciolinguistic perspective in other dimensions such as literacy and culture and their intersectionality with language, power, and race.
Works Cited
Rosa, Jonathan. Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press, 2019.