“She’s hungarious so she’s Mexican but she’s most likely Indian”: Negotiating ethnic labels in a California junior high school

Jung-Eun Janie Lee

Abstract

Schools in California have become increasingly diverse and the demographic composition of school populations has become heterogeneous in the language, nationality, and ethnicity of students. Using ethnographic and interactional analysis, the present article examines how California youth employ a variety of concepts associated with ethnicity to classify themselves and others. For youth who have peers from multiple national, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, the criteria of citizenship, national origin, language, and phenotype are negotiated interactionally for ethnic labeling. The article further suggests that ethnicity is not a simple category, but rather a concept that youth in a multiethnic context actively construct and co-construct with the help of associated notions. Finally, it is demonstrated that ethnic labeling in interviews may be a dispreferred practice for some interviewees due to its potential connection with racism and discrimination.

Keywords:
Quick links
A browser-friendly version of this article is not yet available. View PDF
Alim, H. Samy
(2004) You know my steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bailey, Benjamin H
(2002) Language, race, and negotiation of identity: A study of Dominican Americans. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Bauman, Richard, & Charles L. Briggs
(2000) Language philosophy as language ideology: John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 139-204.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary
(1999) You da man: Narrating the racial other in the linguistic production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3.4: 443-460. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
(2004) Styles and stereotypes: The linguistic negotiation of identity among Laotian American youth. Pragmatics 14.2-3: 127-147.  BoP DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006) “I guess I’m white”: Interviews, interaction, and ethnic self-classification. Paper presented at the Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, May.
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall
(2008) All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12.4:401-431. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cutler, Cecelia A
(1999) Yorkville crossing: White teens, hip hop and African American English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3.4: 428-442. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Fina, Anna
(2007) Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice. Language in Society 36.3: 371-392.  BoP DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Espiritu, Yen Le
(1992) Asian American panethnicity: Bridging institutions and identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Farley, John E
(1988) Majority-minority relations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Farlie, Robert W., and Alexandra M. Resch
(2002) Is there “white flight” into private schools?: Evidence from the national educational longitudinal survey. The Review of Economics and Statistics 84.1: 21-33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fordham, Signithia
(1999) Dissin’ “the standard”: Ebonics as guerrilla warfare at Capital High. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 30.3: 272-293. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Joseph, John E
(2004) Language and identity: National, ethnic, religious. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kang, Agnes, and Adrienne Lo
(2004) Two ways of articulating heterogeneity in Korean American narratives of ethnic identity. Journal of Asian American Studies 7.2: 93-106. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Jung-Eun Janie
(2006) Representations of Asian speech in Hollywood films. Unpublished master’s thesis. University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics.
Le Page, Robert B., and Andrée Tabouret-Keller
(1982) Models and stereotypes of ethnicity and of language. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 3.3: 161-192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McElhinny, Bonnie
(2001) See no evil, speak no evil: White police officers’ talk about race and affirmative action. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11.1: 65-78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma
(1999) Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of U.S. Latinos. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 375-295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2008) Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Orfield, G., S. Schley, D. Glass, and S. Reardon
(1994) The growth of segregation in American schools: Changing patterns of separation and poverty since 1968. Equity and Excellence in Education 27.1: 5-8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Padilla, Felix M
(1985) Latino ethnic consciousness: The case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Reyes, Angela
(2007) Language, identity, and stereotype among Southeast Asian American youth: The other Asian. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Shenk, Petra Scott
(2007) “I’m Mexican, remember?”: Constructing ethnic identities via authenticating discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11.2: 194-220. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael
(2000) Whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 85-138.Google Scholar
Tuan, Mia
(1998) Forever foreigner or honorary whites?: The Asian ethnic experiences today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Wyman, Leisy Thornton
(2004) Language shift, youth culture, and ideology: A Yup’ik example. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford University, School of Education.