Jonathan Rosa's Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad might be one of the most powerful books written on race and language of the past few decades, which I do not state with any intended hyperbole, but in a matter-of-fact consideration of how the book ambitiously accomplishes what it sets out to do. Rather than juggling existing ideological tropes of how to understand and study race in relation to language, Rosa makes use of a ‘raciolinguistic perspective’ that he co-formulated with Nelson Flores, which in turn is in conversation with an intergenerational constellation of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists deeply concerned with coloniality and processes of racialization (Alim, Reyes, & Kroskrity Reference Alim, Reyes and Kroskrity2020). Building upon decades of research and theorizing (i.e. specifically Miyako Inoue's theory of the listening subject and Michael Silverstein's analytics, as well as Bonnie Urciuoli and Ana Celia Zentella's considerations of how race maps from biology to language), Rosa broadly interrogates ‘spectrum-based racial logics’. He reconsiders how the relation of race to language can better be understood through interrogating how contemporary and historical power formations ‘organize processes of phenotypic homogenization and differentiation’ (3). Rosa encourages us to move from studying ‘already constituted bodies and language practices of racialized subjects’ to the ‘conditions of possibility for the interpretive practices of racially hegemonic perceiving subjects’ (6). Thus, while the book is concerned with Latinx youth attending a high school in Chicago, Rosa's project holds broader implications for how we pursue and what we imagine as research on race and language.
In his introduction (‘Introduction: Making Latinx identities and managing American anxieties’), Rosa situates the book with a theoretical rumination on a series of stories that were run in the Chicago-Sun Times on ‘How young Hispanics are reshaping the region’ (i.e. ‘Nuevo Chicago’). He locates how Latinx youth moved from being understood in one moment as successfully ‘weaving together elements of their heritage into the mainstream culture’ (i.e. ‘Latino spin’; Dávila Reference Dávila2008), and in the next as a racialized ‘abject Other population’ in need of careful management (i.e. ‘Latino threat’; Chavez Reference Chavez2008). Rosa argues that these seemingly contradictory narratives are a part of larger effort at ‘population management’ of US-based (im)migrants from Latin America and their descendants (i.e. ethnoracial status of Latinx identity). He draws attention to how modern governance has come to colonially pattern languages as ‘racially embodied’ and race as ‘linguistically intelligible’, resulting in the central argument and premise of the book, the notion of looking like a language and sounding like a race.
Chapter 1, ‘From “gangbangers and hoes” to “young Latino professionals”: Intersectional mobility and the ambivalent management of stigmatized student bodies’, explores how Latinx identities were constituted through an administrative project within a public high school on the northwest side of Chicago (i.e. ‘New Northwest High School’, NNHS). Based on an early talk with the principal—who expressed how she intended to transform Latinx students from ‘gangbangers and hoes’ to ‘young Latino professionals’—Rosa triangulates how the school anxiously formulated institutional policies and practices that often led to the question: ‘Does the problem live within the students or within the outside world's recognition of them?’ He argues that the category of ‘young Latino professional’ was mobilized to strategically manage stigmatized Latinx identities and establish institutional commensurability across contexts within the school.
Chapter 2, ‘“I heard that Mexicans are Hispanics and Puerto Ricans are Latino”: Ethnoracial contortions, diasporic imaginaries, and institutional trajectories’, examines how students differentiated themselves through the categories of ‘Mexican’ and ‘Puerto Rican’. Rosa analyzes these categories not as ‘discrete or naturally occurring’, but in relation to the institutional trajectories and broader political-economic dynamics at NNHS. He follows how Mexican and Puerto Rican students relationally experienced ‘difference and solidarity’ with each other as they ‘discursively constructed, identified with, and became oriented in relation to ethnoracial categories’ (72) (i.e. his notion of ‘ethnoracial contortions’). They challenged ideological ethnoracial positionings that often erase or overdetermine differences between Chicago Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Rosa ultimately contends that Mexican and Puerto Rican students discursively created forms of frictive intimacy, whereby they came to mutual understandings that neither category had full access to US economic and political inclusion through their respective citizenship statuses and modes of labor participation.
Chapter 3, ‘“Latino flavors”: Emblematizing, embodying, and enacting Latinidad’, explores how the qualia of ‘ghettoness’ and ‘lameness’ were used to position Puerto Rican and Mexican stereotypes/models of personhood in relation to the dichotomy of ‘gangbanger/ho–young Latino professional’. Rosa reveals how ‘in-group’ knowledge of Mexican–Puerto Rican difference came to reflect intra-Latinx intimacy and repertoires of Latinidad that became central to the embodiment and enactment of Latinx identities. At the same time, Rosa showcases how Mexican and Puerto Rican students came to be positioned as ‘just Spanish’ by ‘out-group’ African American students and White teachers.
Chapter 4, ‘“They're bilingual… that means they don't know the language”: The ideology of languagelessness in practice, policy, and theory’, investigates how Latinxs’ English and Spanish use was delegitimatized through a racialized ideology of ‘languagelessness’. Multiple forms of stigmatization framed the linguistic practices of Latinxs as deficient regardless of their perceived proximity to standardized norms (i.e. inverted conceptualization of bilingualism). Thus, Rosa locates how understandings of Latinxs’ language use had much more to do with processes of racialization than any perceived deficiencies that were mapped onto their bodies (e.g. limited English proficient); which systematically erased Latinxs’ Spanish and English skills across institutional scales at NNHS (i.e. from the principal to students).
Chapter 5, ‘“Pink cheese, green ghosts, cool arrows/pinches gringos vuleros”: Inverted Spanish and Latinx raciolinguistic enregisterment,’ argues that concepts like monolingualism and bilingualism did little justice to apprehending the complex ways Latinx students transformed perceived linguistic boundaries and created sets of language practices to enact identities, prominently including how students found ways ‘to produce Spanish in English without being perceived as having an accent’ (144) (i.e. ‘inverted Spanglish’). While elucidating the linguistic dexterity of Latinx students through a series of sociolinguistic biographies, Rosa concludes that inverted Spanish and modes of linguistic dexterity did not necessarily provide students protection from the ‘double-stigmatization that was mapped on their English and Spanish language use’.
Chapter 6, ‘“That doesn't count as a book, that's real life!”: Outlaw(ed) literacies, criminalized intertextualities, and institutional linkages’, showcases how students concurrently signalled ‘school kid’ (i.e. young Latino professional) and ‘street kid’ (i.e. gangbangers or hoes) identities through intertextual literacy practices, which called into question the binary positioning of the ‘school’ and ‘street’ as contrasting institutional contexts. Rosa contends that what was often constructed as a clear cut and valorized distinction between ‘school’ and ‘street’ masked the lived reality of how students engaged in a range of register usages and ideological perceptions. He reveals how the stakes and pressures of developing literacies between these differing registers was often life and death, which was not considered by NNHS. Rosa invites his audience to reconsider how educational theories and practices shape the lives of students through demarcating institutionalized boundaries around forms of language, identity, and institutionality.
Rosa concludes with a story of NNHS’ June 2010 graduation, and reflects on how the school managed to produce an institutional project that managed to facilitate the graduation of nearly all of its students. Even with his critique of NNHS’ legitimatization of mainstream measures of success and its maintenance of racial capitalism as a colonial-rooted mode of governance, he thinks about how the school became a context where Latinxs were able to strategically contest the terms of Latinx exclusion and reimagine ethnoracial, geographical, and linguistic borders.
Overall, Rosa's book offers an ethnographic study of Latinidad that not only informs, but innovatively pushes forward a number of conversations. In this vein, while the book could be challenged for not offering more substantial takes on how White teachers and African American students shaped Latinidad within his context, this critique must be contemplated in dialogue with his raciolinguistic perspective, which calls for us to reassess how we think about studying processes of racialization. Rosa contests the racialized colonial logics that position Latinx bodies on an ‘imagined phenotypic spectrum’ from Blackness to Whiteness (i.e. as well as on an imagined linguistic spectrum from Spanish to English). He relatedly invites us to push back against modes of research that do not mind how Latinx linguistic practices are often interpreted from the perspective of hegemonically positioned White perceiving subjects, which evade considering the ongoing rearticulation of colonial distinctions and how processes of racialization are related to the modernist projects of racial capitalism and liberal democracy. While theorists of race and language are often accused of not doing the in-depth research and community-based work to situate their theorizations, critics would be hard-pressed to make the same accusation against Rosa with this incredible book, which will likely appear as one of the few unforgettable ethnographies of his generation.
