Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Making Latina/o panethnicity and managing American anxieties

The rapid rise of the U.S. Latina/o population, now the nation's largest demographic minority group, has heightened concerns about the future of American identity and brought increased attention to the institutional management of ethnolinguistic difference. This dissertation analyzes the sociolinguistic fashioning of a panethnic Latina/o category in what I call "New Northwest High School," a newly created public high school on Chicago's hyper-segregated Near Northwest Side whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican. I examine how anxieties surrounding Latina/o identities produce an administrative project that seeks to transform "at risk" Mexican and Puerto Rican students into "young Latino professionals." Students are encouraged to embrace their inherent ethnoracial selves, but only insofar as this aligns them with the school's project of socialization; they must learn to be - and sound like - "themselves" in highly studied ways. I track this negotiation between assimilation and multiculturalism in relation to the emergence of a panethnic Latina/o category and its linguistic indexes.;Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race opens by examining New Northwest High School's project of transforming students and the ethnoracial contortions through which students navigate these efforts. I frame administrative attempts to create "young Latino professionals" in terms of a local politics of intraracial class mobility. I show how this specific context instantiates and reconfigures broader conceptions of race and ethnicity, structuring the school-based creation and enactment of "Puerto Rican," "Mexican," and "Latina/o" models of personhood. I also argue that through its unique (im)migration and social history Chicago becomes a prime site for the experience of Latina/o panethnicity and the creation of emblems of Latinidad. I go on to situate processes of racialized panethnic category-making as counterparts to language ideologies and linguistic practices in this school. I analyze the standardizing ideologies that stigmatize students' Spanish and English linguistic practices and result in the inversion of Latina/o bilingualism through what I describe as an ideology of "languagelessness." I demonstrate how students respond to this stigmatization and how they take up the notion of "young Latino professional" by enregistering particular elements of the English and Spanish languages. I characterize these linguistic practices as "Unaccented Spanglish" and suggest that they play a key role in forging a panethnic Latina/o voice. I end by exploring how similar patterns of stigmatization and voicing are tied to the semiotic operations that render aspects of students' literacy and wider symbolic repertoires as criminalized forms. The engagement with ethnolinguistic category-making that develops throughout the dissertation seeks to provoke broader discussions about the sociolinguistic, historical, and political-economic assemblages through which people come to look like a language and sound like a race across cultural contexts.