From “Gangbangers and Hoes” to “Young Latino Professionals”

Chapter 1 focuses on the school administration’s overarching goal of transforming students. It analyzes the contradictions teachers and administrators face as they simultaneously work to validate and transform students’ modes of self-making. The chapter begins by describing the intersectional anxieties surrounding violence, pregnancy, and poverty that are associated with Latinx youth socialization in the Chicago context. It goes on to show how these anxieties are heightened within the context of an open-enrollment neighborhood high school. The chapter argues that the transformation of students into “Young Latino Professionals,” which is formulated as an intersectional mobility project, becomes an ambivalent negotiation that alternately locates the “problem” within the students themselves and outsiders’ perceptions of them.

“Pink Cheese, Green Ghosts, Cool Arrows/Pinches Gringos Culeros”

This chapter analyzes the multiple forms of stigmatization mapped onto students’ English and Spanish language practices and demonstrates some of the complex ways that they attempted to fashion linguistic escape routes from these discriminatory perspectives. Students felt pressured to signal their Spanish language proficiency, but they sought to do so without calling into question their ability to speak “unaccented” English; they were faced with the task of speaking Spanish and English simultaneously without being perceived as possessing an accent. The chapter argues that students combined specific Spanish and English linguistic forms as part of the enregisterment of language and identity in ways that differ from what has been previously described as “Mock Spanish.” This analysis introduces the notion of “Inverted Spanglish” and suggests that it is a racialized index of US Latinx panethnicity and a parodic take on the school-based category of “Young Latino Professional.”

Introduction

The Introduction to this book links popular discourses surrounding US Latinxs across the interrelated contexts of New Northwest High School, the City of Chicago, and the nation. It argues that these discourses are anchored in a figurative debate between multiculturalism and assimilation. This debate is negotiated through the construction of categorical binaries that are tracked throughout each chapter of the book. The chapter synthesizes key insights and debates in Linguistic Anthropology, Education, and Latinx Studies to construct a “raciolinguistic” perspective—an analytical framework with which to investigate the creation of an emergent ethnoracial category and its linguistic indexes. By emphasizing the production of racial categories and linguistic varieties through interrelations among institutions, actors, and ideologies, the author shows how contingent processes rather than naturally occurring cultural essences structure these contexts.

Conclusion

The detailed engagement with the relationship between linguistic and ethnoracial category-making that develops throughout the manuscript seeks to provoke broader discussions about the sociolinguistic, historical, political, and economic assemblages through which people come to look like a language and sound like a race in societies throughout the world. The conclusion articulates questions for future research focused on identity formation in other predominantly Latinx US cities, negotiations of raciolinguistic identities in differing institutional frameworks, and intersections among ethnoracial and linguistic categories in relation to linked axes of difference. By analyzing the construction of Latinx raciolinguistic identities in this Chicago high school and its surrounding communities, it becomes possible to reimagine the ways that race, ethnicity, and language structure everyday life across cultural contexts.

“That Doesn’t Count as a Book, That’s Real Life!”

Chapter 6 demonstrates how students’ literacy skills are not simply erased within the school but also criminalized. Students write their identities in complex ways, highlighting the competing forces that recruit them to signal simultaneously their alignment with and opposition to the school’s project of socialization. Previous analyses of school-based socialization in urban contexts often distinguish between stereotypical “school kids” (who eventually graduate and become upwardly socioeconomically mobile) and “street kids” (who drop out and become part of the racialized American underclass). In contrast, this chapter shows how students in New Northwest High School draw on various literacy practices to signal school kid and street kid identities concurrently.

“Latino Flavors”

Shifting from the previous chapter’s analysis of the contested construction of a Latinx ethnoracial category, Chapter 3 demonstrates how emblems of Latinx identity are made recognizable in everyday life. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which qualities attributed to objects, practices, and bodies are mapped onto one another in the contemporary fashioning of a Latinx US ethnoracial category. By analyzing interrelations among forms of emblematicity associated with a range of cultural concepts, from hairstyles, clothing, and language, to food, dance, and music, the chapter tracks the complex semiotic operations that connect the creation Latinx things to the embodiment of Latinx people. These processes allow actors within New Northwest High School to experience and enact Latinx identities. The chapter concludes by pointing to the close relationship between conceptions of Latinx identity and “Spanishness” as a cultural and linguistic quality, laying the groundwork for the second half of the book.

“They’re Bilingual . . . That Means They Don’t Know the Language”

This chapter links the ethnoracial constructions detailed in the first half of the book to an analysis of language ideologies and linguistic practices associated with Latinx identities. It begins by arguing that monolingual ideologies produce a profound transformation in which bilingualism comes to be equated with the category of “Limited English Proficiency.” Meanwhile, students designated as English Language Learners are positioned alongside special education students as second-class educational figures. It shows how this situation can be productively understood in relation to what is described as a racialized ideology of “languagelessness” that positions students as incapable of using any language legitimately. The double stigmatization that results from standardizing forces surrounding English and Spanish demonstrates how ideologies of languagelessness operate in powerful ways to racialize students as inherently linguistically deficient.

“I heard that Mexicans Are Hispanic and Puerto Ricans Are Latino”

Chapter 2 unpacks the school’s project of creating “Young Latino Professionals” by analyzing the construction of Latinx as an ethnoracial category across contexts. The chapter tracks the contradictory ways in which race and ethnicity are conceptualized in the context of New Northwest High School and demonstrates how these contradictions are systematically linked to broader forms of ambivalence surrounding the interrelated processes of racialization and ethnicization. It argues that “Mexican” and “Puerto Rican” are not merely straightforward identities that students bring with them to school; instead, it shows how students respond to the erasure of Mexican–Puerto Rican difference within the school’s project of socialization by twisting and turning these categories through practices characterized as “ethnoracial contortions.”