Volume 16 Issue 1 2022 AMAE Open Issue Editors Patricia Sánchez The University of Texas at San Antonio Antonio J. Camacho AMAE, Inc. Associate Editors Julie L. Figueroa Sacramento State Lucila D. Ek The University of Texas at San Antonio http://amaejournal.utsa.edu ISSN: 2377-9187 DOI: https://doi.org/10.24974/16.1.470 Association of Mexican American Educators Journal A peer-reviewed, open access journal https://doi.org/10.24974/16.1.470 Hughes Karnes Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2022, Volume 16, Issue1 141 Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 312 pp. ISBN-13: 978-01090634735. Paperback: $39.95 Elizabeth Hughes Karnes Texas Tech University In 2019, Dr. Jonathan Rosa published Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race as the culmination of research that began with his dissertation fieldwork in 2007. The book is organized into three parts: “Introduction: Making Latinx Identities and Managing American Anxieties,” “Part I: Looking like a Language: Latinx Ethnoracial Category-Making;” and “Part II: Sounding like a Race: Latinx Raciolinguistic Enregisterment.” The introduction includes a densely packed theoretical framework that explores the ways communities and individuals construct identity at the socially mediated intersection of language and race. Rosa crafts the theoretical framework to address a specialized audience of linguistic anthropology and educational linguistic scholars. In parts I and II, Rosa grounds these theoretical concepts in detailed ethnographic descriptions of students and administrators, most of whom are Latinx, in Chicago’s New Northwest High School (NNHS). The ethnographic narrative makes this book accessible across multiple fields of study. Fields of study that would benefit from this work are educational leadership, ESL/Bilingual education, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and many more. As an ethnography, the book is not organized in a linear fashion, rather it naturally evolves to represent the complexities that Rosa observed in this community. The end result is an analysis of raciolinguistic ideologies that is extremely useful for pre-service and in-service teachers, and for versatile scholars who are interested in the intersection of race, language, and education. In the introduction, Rosa works to dismantle racial logics that position Latinidad in a spectrum of race and ethnicity that ranges from blackness to whiteness. He asserts that the problem with spectrum-based racialized assemblage is that they position the people within each racial category as homogenous. However, Rosa argues that “there is infinite phenotypic heterogeneity” within all populations (p. 3). Rosa challenges supremacist groups’ fear that an increase in immigration of Latinxs will create a new “mixed-race American future” by explaining Hughes Karnes Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2022, Volume 16, Issue1 142 that this fear erroneously relies on hard-set racial boundaries that never actually existed (p. 3). The racialized population of “Latinidad, in its joint articulation alongside prevailing forms of racialized difference, including Africanness, Asianness, and various American Indigeneities, is more than 500 years in the making, yet always just on the demographic horizon” (p. 15). Rosa explains that social institutions reproduce the fear that, because these groups are the same in their otherness, they will band together and emerge in enormous numbers and overthrow a white supremacy. Rosa purposefully juxtaposes this same otherness by exploring the difference between linguistic practices of Puerto Rican and Mexican immigrants and highlighting how this artificially constructed boundary between racialized groups ignores their diverse realities. Rosa includes the historical perspective to show that the supremacist fear of impending doom never arrives, yet is always present. Rosa explains this fearfully imagined future creates a system that says “always not yet, or perhaps, never quite yet. If you would just learn English; no, unaccented English; no, the right variety of English…” (p. 15). In sum, Rosa elegantly articulates how this never quite yet assemblage creates anxieties for people in socially identified Latinx communities, where institutional practices in the public school system reinforce artificial racial boundaries through language policy. To understand the ways in which “languages are perceived as racially embodied and race is perceived as linguistically intelligible,” Rosa conducted an ethnographic study from 2007-2010 at NNHS in a predominantly Mexican and Puerto Rican community in Chicago (p. 2). After meeting with the principal, Dr. Baez, about doing field work at NNHS, Rosa was hired as a tutor in the school’s AVID program (Advancement Via Individual Determination). The AVID program is a global non-profit organization that trains teachers to support students who are traditionally underrepresented at universities and colleges in the United States. NNHS opened in 2004 with enrollment available to the general public in a neighborhood that was considered low performing on federal and state assessments, yet Dr. Baez restructured the school to have block scheduling and student professional development that mirrored procedures at the city’s magnet (prestigious selective enrollment) high schools. Rosa chose this school because, through the combination of the AVID program and other campus procedures that are typically used in selective enrollment schools, NNHS offered an unusual opposition to institutionally imposed marginalization that is common in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Hughes Karnes Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2022, Volume 16, Issue1 143 Rosa also chose NNHS for the site of his ethnographic study because of the ongoing ways Dr. Baez disrupts the opposing binaries of multicultural identity versus fully assimilated American. Rosa notes that in Baez’s interactions with the students and community, Baez consistently rejects the opposing binaries by drawing on language that recognizes racialized stereotypes of these binaries while simultaneously disrupting this stereotype by mirroring the magnet school program. Dr. Baez states her goal for the students: “When people look at these students they see them as gangbangers and hoes [whores]…I want them to see Young Latino Professionals” (p. 11). She defines the term professional as a high-school graduate who is “economically self-sustaining” and contributes to their communities (12). Rosa is careful to note that Dr. Baez does not limit the financial aspect of this definition to “privileged sectors of the formal economy” (p. 12). Under Baez’s leadership, the graduation rate rose from 50% to 98%, at which point Rosa started his ethnographic research. In the book, Rosa positions Dr. Baez as an example of successful educational leadership, which makes this book an excellent addition to educational leadership courses, as well as an anti-racist book study for in-service public-school administration. Rosa also positions the students of NNHS as experts, particularly at navigating racialized categories because of the ways in which they “contort” their embodied racial identity and language to meet the shifting demands of various cultural situations (p. 72). Instead of focusing on these students’ linguistic performance in isolation, Rosa described the raciolinguistic enregisterment of these students. Rosa defines enregisterment as “the processes through which forms of language become endowed with cultural value” (p. 7). During his years at the school, Rosa adopted this perspective and embedded himself into the students’ daily practices in order to become an active participant in their linguistic realities. He conducted interviews with many 9th-12th grade students to question why and how these authentic linguistic forms were constructed as symbols of race, and why and how the students’ perceptions of race were constructed through language. This book has an extraordinary depth of raciolinguistic theory packed into it and could easily be the central focus of a graduate level class. The introduction in particular is so densely packed with theoretical concepts, instructors would need to carefully scaffold instruction and provide more time for the introduction than the other parts of the book. For in-service teachers, administrators, and teacher educators, multiple readings of this book would Hughes Karnes Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2022, Volume 16, Issue1 144 continuously reveal a wealth of implications. This book has implications across multiple disciplines, but the theoretical density could make the content inaccessible to scholars and educators who have not studied anthropology. Because of the highly technical language of the book, a glossary of theoretical terms would have been beneficial. Chapter 4 will be of great value as curriculum for pre-service teachers and could also be used as professional development for in-service teachers. In this Chapter 4, Rosa describes how social institutions position bilinguals as languageless (neither fluent in their native language nor in English). He explains that educational agencies write accountability assessments from the perspective of monolingual language ideologies, which do not accurately assess the linguistic contortions emergent bilinguals expertly wield to meet the rhetorical needs of the discourse context. Therefore, Chapter 4 carries serious implications for educational policy. Overall, scholars and educators will find great value in this book: it positions community, administrators, and students as expert navigators in a difficult situation of imposed racial, economic, linguistic, and social boundaries. Rosa represents these stakeholders as experts because they deal with the day-to-day realities of education in public schools while they simultaneously implement operational changes that transform the systemically imposed boundaries. The book provides a concrete example through the nuanced details of the school’s operations and uses raciolinguistic theory to show how these operations successfully disrupt the marginalization of NNHS students. By combining the messy realities of public education with raciolinguistic theory, Rosa provides tools for all educators to likewise challenge systemic discrimination at their home campuses. Ultimately, Rosa spotlights the community, administrators, and students of NNHS to provide hope for the future by showing how these stakeholders are already creating more just institutional practices at the intersection of language, identity, and race. AMAE Journal Cover Template (General) Elizabeth.pdf Hughes Final Publish Book Review.pdf