Benjamin Bailey's Language, race and negotiation of identity is the first extensive sociolinguistic study of a Dominican-American communicative community, and is thus a timely and welcome addition to the literature on Spanish/English bilingual situations in the United States. Bailey conducted field work among second-generation working-class Dominican-American high school students in Providence, Rhode Island, from August 1996 to July 1997. (The school at the time of field work was 60% Hispanic, 20% Dominican, and the rest largely Puerto Rican and Guatemalan.) His investigation focuses on the ways in which linguistic deployments by these young people enact ethnic and racial identity. His data are drawn from videotaped activities of six high school students in school and in one nonschool setting, interviews about language use and ethnic/racial issues with high school and college students, and general participant observation in school, home, and community contexts (p. 36).

Bailey locates his consultants in a specific nexus of class, regional, historical, demographic, and institutional relations. He then shows how, within their specific locations, they enact a range of identities through the codes they speak – specific varieties of English and Spanish. Their use of Dominican Spanish functions as an ethnic/racial enactment of a “Spanish” identity distinct from U.S. white or black racial identity. In doing so, they explicitly resist U.S. binary classification, despite the fact that, to non-Dominican-Americans, Dominicans tend to be typified as “black” on the basis of what is perceived as their African-derived phenotype. This resistance is central to their identity. At the same time, they use (in various patterns) African American Vernacular English (AAVE) elements that mark nonwhite peer solidarity motivated by shared positions of economic and racial disadvantage and, at the same time, by a popular culture of hipness powerfully identified as African American. It is the combination of these positions that distinguishes the sociolinguistic identity of the second generation from that of their parents.

The book is organized into seven chapters and a conclusion. The first introduces the central sociolinguistic and racial points. The second lays out the field site and research procedures. The third reviews the linguistic repertoires of second-generation speakers vis-à-vis the community's immigration history. The fourth examines the ways that social and ethnic/racial inequality manifest themselves in linguistic identity enactment. The fifth contrasts Dominican and U.S. racial frameworks, and examines the manifestations of each in second-generation identity negotiations. The sixth examines one particular student's deployment of linguistic varieties and social identities during a school day. The seventh examines ways in which six students play out being Dominican, thus revealing the variation within what is classified as a single ethnic identity. Central to all this is the understanding that racial and ethnic identity become real through social action: Where there is inequality, there are tensions between identities hegemonically imposed and the repertoire of identities that agents enact; the same social actor may enact different identities at different social moments, often but not necessarily in different relationships; any given identity may be enacted in a range of ways; and an identity desirable at one social moment may be less so at another. Language as embodied social process is a critical mode of identity enactment and is synergetic with dress, music, and forms of institutional participation. (For example, Bailey notes that religious participation is central in the establishment of one's identity as Dominican.)

Chapter 3, “Linguistic resources of Dominican Americans,” tackles the thorny problem of what a code consists of and what code-switching means. Over the past half-century, since the work of Weinreich, a number of approaches have been developed to this fascinatingly messy area. As anyone conversant with the literature on bilingual situations knows, there are a few generally agreed-on basic principles and a lot of ethnographically specific treatments, often innovative, and often going in divergent and occasionally incompatible analytic directions. Nor could matters be otherwise. The very term “bilingualism” is misleading, privileging a discrete, bounded conception of language over the messy ambiguities of people's linguistic practices, not to mention the fact that the historical and situational dynamics giving rise to bilingual situations are notoriously fluid. The most ethnographically interesting and informative analyses also tend to be analytically idiosyncratic insofar as they try to illuminate specific dynamics in complex, often ambiguous structural and interactional dynamics. This is the situation Bailey faces in explaining the linguistic repertoires of his high school students. There are the “codes” as they are conventionally understood in the literature: Dominican Spanish (some elements of which are also general Caribbean Spanish), AAVE, standard American English, and forms of English that appear specific to these Dominican speakers. There is no easy isomorphism between any one student and any one code, and Bailey's focus shifts from code in the abstract to the patterns of and among actual speakers, which are illustrated in detail. For example, AAVE-associated forms (59 ff.) that lead others to perceive Dominican-American speakers as African American include habitual be, copula deletion, and use of stressed bin, as well as pronunciation and lexical features. At the same time, their English pronunciation is clearly shaped by Spanish (a point also noted in studies of Puerto Rican bilingualism in New York City). Bailey also notes instances where Spanish and English lexical and semantic formations inform each other, and where Spanish syntactic elements shape English usage. In his discussion of code-switching, he takes issue with Gumperz-style typological approaches, arguing that the important dynamics lie not in the surface forms of the switch but in their interactional functions, which are open-ended and recombinant. He builds his own approach on conversational analysis and ethnomethodological work, e.g. by Schegloff, Jefferson, Sacks, Auer, Goodwin, Heritage, and Atkinson. He pays attention to the ways in which deployment of the linguistic resources under discussion may be marked or unmarked for particular participants.

In his discussion of second-generation identity formation (chap. 4), Bailey details students' personal experiences of the sociohistorical processes through which the Providence Dominican-American community formed, and their perceptions of what white/nonwhite means (as distinct from what it means to their parents' generation). He details the axes along which Dominican-African American friendships form and the ways in which this is linguistically indexed; he then shows how specific though not identical Dominican identities are formed and linguistically enacted. Here he takes up the issue of social meaning arising in unmarked in-group switching, noting that although speakers may not impute intent to their code deployment, their usage does shape how others perceive them. Chap. 5 locates students' understanding of race in an intersection of racial classification in the Dominican Republic and in the United States. These understandings are drawn from student interviews about their own and their families' day-to-day perceptions and experiences of race. Chap. 6 follows one student through a day of classes, in which we see him interact with other students and a teacher. The material presented here shows how code deployment works as a discursive manifestation of relationships structured by role, gender, age, and ethnicity/race. In chap. 7, Bailey takes up the problem of linguistic and racial/ethnic variation within general parameters by comparing the six major participants with whom he worked, in order to demonstrate how the identity of each as Dominican can play out variably.

Bailey's analytical rhetoric sometimes obscures contributions made by previous analysts of U.S. Spanish/English situations. In contrasting what he sees as productive in his own approach to what he sees as unproductive in the work of others, he occasionally sets up “straw interlocutors.” For example, he uses Zentella's classification of switch types as an example of insufficient attention to interactional dynamics, though he notes almost in passing that she does “recognize the significance of sequential context.” She does more than that, in fact: She draws heavily on Goffman's work on footing, which is nothing if not interactional, but Bailey does not note that. Along the same lines, he has a tendency to downplay the degree to which prior ethnographies of U.S. Latino bilingualism try to account for the ways in which social action draws on multiple codes. Analysts in this field have been trying to do this for a quarter-century, and if they have had varying degrees of success, it is because there is so much to account for. Analysts have long tried to reconstruct social dimensions of speech acts, but accounting for outcomes is an indeterminate business. Participants' statements of illocutionary intent are as much about cultural ideology as about causality, and perlocutionary outcomes depend on complexities of action to which no investigator has total access and of which no participant is completely conscious. Bailey is somewhat dismissive of cultural analyses as based on “one-(cultural)-size-fits-all,” but much cultural-linguistic analysis of code-switching and identity formation has sought to relate interactive discourse functions to variations on cultural themes, a point that Bailey passes by.

The strength and value of this book lie in the richness of ethnographic detail and interactional nuance it presents, in its recognition of the effects of generation, age, racial formation, class situation, and geopolitical location on linguistic identity enactment, in its demonstration of the fact that ethnic and racial identities are differentially played out, in its understanding of code-switching as interactional work, and in the ways it addresses the linkage between macro-level socio-historical processes that structure racial classification and micro-level interactional processes through which racial identities become part of one's persona.