2021 Speaker Series-Zentella

2021 Speaker Series—Defining Latinx in the U.S.: Language, Race, and Ideology


Dime con quién hablas y te diré quién eres:
Defining Latinu identities



Ana Celia Zentella
University of California – San Diego
[in person – location TBA]
October 21, 2021
5 pm


My re-wording of “Dime con quién andas” (‘Tell me who you walk/ hang out with’) highlights the role that language plays in defining quién eres (‘Tell me who you talk with [hablas] and I’ll tell you who you are’).

Linguistic prejudices based on ethnicity, race, and class are part of the baggage that Latin American immigrants bring with them to the USA. Some think they are the best speakers of Spanish and belittle others, usually poorer and darker speakers. But they, and the children they raise here, are subjected to intense linguistic profiling, “the auditory equivalent of visual racial profiling” (Baugh 2003), based on the Spanish they speak, their English, bilingualism, and Spanglish.

Such profiling negatively affects their education, housing, livelihood and health, factors that are crucially related to their personal and group identity and sense of self-worth. They may be identified by members of their in-group—or by outsiders—as belonging to their parents’ country of origin, or as a US product (i.e., Chicanos, Nuyoricans, Mexican Americans or Mexi-Ricans, Afro-Latinos, Latinx, etc.) often depending on how and what they speak.

Lately, it has become acceptable to make disparaging comments that go beyond “the remapping of race from biology onto language” (Urciuoli 2002) meant to avoid overt racist remarks, even in the White House, by Congress members, and across the USA.

As immigrants are increasingly viewed as a threat, Spanish, and other languages—and their speakers—are attacked by English-only advocates. Ensuring the future of democracy requires unmasking the ways in which language is a smokescreen for racial prejudices, and exposing the hidden injuries caused by educational and workplace policies that perpetuate linguistic discrimination. An anthro-political linguistic approach is advocated.