Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs . By Norma Mendoza‐Denton . Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. Pp. ix+339. $35.00 (paper) (original) (raw)
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'Crazyghettosmart': a case study in Latina identities
Drawing from recent scholarship that examines schooling and the shifting terrain of youth identities, this study examines the identity constructions of Jessica, a Latina high school student. Our portrait of Jessica is part of a larger longitudinal study in which the middle and high school experiences of three Latinas, including Jessica, were examined. For this paper, we used data gathered from Jessica’s four years in high school, which included interviews from Jessica and her mother, and field observations from shadowing Jessica’s school days during her junior and senior years. Data analysis illustrated two broad themes: Jessica’s relationships with her academics and her social life, including the recent positioning of herself as a mother during her pregnancy in her senior year. Findings suggest that Jessica improvised her positions within various realms of school to both resist and reconfigure discourses that shaped her identities as a student and adolescent. This study argues for more research that examines and explores what youth have to say about their school experiences in order to illustrate the complex ways in which adolescents author themselves in school.
Reading Latina/o images: interrogatingAmericanos
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2004
This essay explores the visual and discursive elements of Americanos, a published collection of photographic images of Latina/o life in the United States. While clearly a mass-market text intended for enjoyment and edification, Americanos also serves as a mass-mediated rhetoric through its location and its representation of Latina/o life and cultural practices. We argue that, in this role, Americanos serves the project of a critical rhetoric by articulating a vernacular rhetoric, and we explore how the verbal and visual fragments in Americanos invent a Latina/o community while reifying Latina/o differences. We conclude that Americanos implicitly critiques how Latina/o identities have been flattened and distorted by dominant discourses. A long-standing tension exists between the persistence of specific Latina/o identities and the pursuit of a pan-Latino identity. As a consequence, the articulation of a unified Latina/o cultural community has been elusive. Geographically situated Latina/o identities-each with their own sense of community and ethnicity-such as Chicanos in the southwest, Cuban-Americans in south Florida, and Boricuas in the northeast, complicate the pursuit of a singular Latino identity, community, ideology, or aesthetic. In terms of politics, these divisions have manifested themselves in party affiliations and political attitudes. In cultural forms (literature and performance) Latina/os have demonstrated their predisposition for attachment to the U.S. as well as a nostalgia for their cultural homes. In the visual arts, the variety of Latinismos has led to tensions resulting from the tendency to totalize Latino-ness through the prism of a particular Latino aesthetic. As Dávila (1999) observes, "in corroborating the Latinness of particular works or artists by relating them to particular Latin cultures
MEXTESOL Journal , 2019
The result of arduous and committed ethnographic work, Rosa's book examines the co-construction of language and race: a key feature of modern governance saturating individuals with contradictory narratives around language and race. With regard to social and institutional expectations for individuals to look like a language, Rosa argues that Latinxs' phenotypic, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity becomes erased by racializing ideologies that homogenize them as racial Others. This erasure, he maintains, is rooted in spectrum-based White supremacist logics of Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness, in which brown bodies become more desirable as they stand between Blackness and Whiteness. Regarding social and institutional expectations for individuals to sound like a race, Rosa demonstrates how Latinx's linguistic practices are constructed as deficient by privileged White perceiving subjects. Throughout his book, Rosa problematizes how particular linguistic practices are construed as emblematic of certain racial categories, and how certain racial categories are constructed as representative of stereotypical linguistic practices. The book is anchored on a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017), comprised of five components. The first references the racialization of subjects and the ranking of languages to justify the imposition of European epistemology. The second points to Whites as privileged subjects that perceive others as different and thus inferior. The third references the reified nature of named languages and racial categories, which allows for the study of how language and race are perceived and experienced in relation to one another. The fourth points to the need to unveil how categories of language and race are intersectionally assembled and discursively co-constructed. Finally, the fifth component centers on the dismantling of White supremacy as a form of struggle for social change. Given that this perspective examines complex phenomena and aims at de-centering and challenging regimented processes, a multi-sited ethnographic research approach that provides thick descriptions proves to be the most fitting. That is, the complexity of Rosa's research enterprise justifies his choice of ethnography as the lens through which he analyzes racializing ideologies and how these were met with resistance at the research site. The ethnographic work described in this book was conducted between 2007 and 2010 at a newly founded public high school on the Near Northwest Side of Chicago. The student population in New Northwest High School (NNHS) was classified as nearly 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican and 10% African American. Within this high school, the principal created an administrative project that redressed racial/class exclusion and intersectional forms of gender/sexual discrimination, which often reflected but also resisted the notions of assimilation to normative American Whiteness and maintenance of cultural authenticity. Overall, students at NNHS often had to learn to showcase their racial and linguistic differences (their Puerto Ricanness and Mexicanness) without overstepping what is tolerable racial and linguistic difference in the US, thereby revealing schools' role in (re)producing legitimate US citizen-subjects. Besides the introductory and conclusion chapters, the book is composed of two parts. In Part I, "Looking like a Language: Latinx Ethnoracial Category-Making", the author includes three chapters. In Chapter One, Rosa discusses how NNHS principal's goal of transforming students from 'gangbangers and hoes' into 'young Latino professionals' reflected broader social anxieties anchored on stereotypes about Latino 1
The Chicana/Latina Dyad, Or Identity and Perception
Latino Studies, 2003
The way some people 'find religion', I found Selena the day she died. 1 Not that I did not already know who she was; I owned two of her CDs and knew all 10 words to the lyrics of 'Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.' It is just that the day she died, the day she became 'Saint Selena' as Ilan Stavans calls her, was the day I discovered the mythic significance of this iconic figure in the popular Chicano/a imagination. It was not until I watched the broadcast of J-Lo's concert in San Juan and saw those thousands of Puertorriqueñ os in the audience crying and singing along to 'I Could Fall in Love' that I truly understood the power of Selena, whose star burns as brightly in the flag of Puerto Rico as it does in the flag of Texas. On the back of Jennifer Ló pez, Selena indeed becomes un puente de latinidad, as Frances Aparicio suggests. Selena-the performer, the myth, the icon-can be read metaphorically, as a bridge that metaphysically (through her myth and her music) and physically (through the body of Jennifer Ló pez) connects Chicano/a and Latino/a popular culture. Perhaps this is one way of responding to the conundrum that Aparicio poses in her talk when she interrogates why 'the music figures that metonymically represent' the Mexican American majority of US Latinos are, in fact, Puerto Rican and Caribbean. Selena as Jennifer Lopez and J-Lo as Selena come together in one representational body not to homogenize 'the Latina' experience-as so many have criticized-but to, in fact, embody the very cultural, linguistic, and racial affinities, the historical realities of colonialism, mestizaje, linguistic terrorism, cultural schizophrenia, territorial displacement, and organic feminism that connect not just the bodies of these two women, but Chicanas and Latinas at large. However, here is my departure from Aparicio's discussion, and actually, not so much a departure as a detour or perhaps a pit stop on
1999
The Julian Samora Research Institute is committed to the generation, transmission, and application of knowledge to serve the needs of Latino communities in the Midwest. To this end, it has organized a number of publication initiatives to facilitate the timely dissemination of current research and information relevant to Latinos. * Research Reports: JSRI's flagship publications for scholars who want a quality publication with more detail than usually allowed in mainstream journals. These are edited and reviewed in-house. Research Reports are selected for their significant contribution to the knowledge base of Latinos. * Working Papers: for scholars who want to share their preliminary findings and obtain feedback from others in Latino studies. Some editing provided by JSRI. * Statistical Briefs/CIFRAS: for the Institute's dissemination of "facts and figures" on Latino issues and conditions. Also designed to address policy questions and to highlight important topics. * Occasional Papers: for the dissemination of speeches and papers of value to the Latino community which are not necessarily based on a research project. Examples include historical accounts of people or events, "oral histories," motivational talks, poetry, speeches, and related presentations.