Copyright by

Aris Moreno Clemons 2021

The Dissertation Committee for Aris Moreno Clemons Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation:

Spanish people be like: Dominican ethno-raciolinguistic stancetaking and the construction of Black Latinidades in the United States

Committee:

Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, Supervisor

Belém López

Jossianna Arroyo Martinez

Jonathan Daniel Rosa

Spanish people be like: Dominican ethno-raciolinguistic stancetaking and the construction of Black Latinidades in the United States

by

Aris Moreno Clemons

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2021 Dedication

To Nancy Preston, my very first translator and friend.

Acknowledgements

They say it takes a village, and if completing this dissertation is any indication of my village, I am truly blessed. First, I could not imagine arriving to this place without the unconditional and unwavering support of my mentor and advisor Almeida Jacqueline Toribio. I have the deepest gratitude to Jacqueline for allowing me to explore language in a way that made sense to me and in a way that celebrated our shared Caribbean heritage.

Thank you for our friendship, your mentorship, for being my biggest cheerleader, and thank you for inviting me into your family when I needed one so much. At least the pandemic has taught us that we can keep up Sunday brunches and life catch-ups online, though I imagine I’ll be back for visits and Pablo cuddles. I would also like to express my gratitude to my other committee members, each of whom has significantly impacted my thinking and understandings of language, race, and identity. Belem López, you have been a teacher, a mentor, a reader, a role model, and a friend, and I could not have asked for a better example of how to do academia. Jossianna Arroyo Martinez, thank you for teaching me what it looks like to be fiercely proud and for grounding me in Caribbean genealogical thought. Lastly, thank you Jonathan Rosa, for giving me a framework from which to situate ideas that had been swirling in my head for nearly 15 years. In addition to my committee, I would like to acknowledge the support and guidance that I have received from teachers and mentors along the way. Thank you to Amanda Brown, Neville Hoad, Rachel Gonzalez,

Richard Reddick, and Anne Charity Hudley for your belief in me and your guidance along the way. And thank you to Barbara Bullock for the walks, the laughs, the cheerleading, and the invaluable advice. I will always cherish our Sunday brunches and pep-talks, may they continue for years to come. v To my day ones: Abeje Maolud-Sneed, Kale Woods, Shervanthi Fairman, Asi-

Yahola Boutelle, Casandra Robinson, and Starr Reese Bryant. You all knew me before I could buy a bottle of wine and you’ve have been my anchors even as I traveled across the world and back! I am stronger because of you and your friendship has made me who I am.

Thank you for teaching me how to do everything with love and the value of self-awareness. Y’all are never afraid to check me and for that I thank you for keeping me grounded during this entire process. Most importantly, you have taught me that love endures and even if I don’t talk every day or check in as much as I should, you will always be there for me and let me yammer about my research even if you have no idea what I am talking about. To the sisters I’ve gained along the way. Danielle McCarthy, you have been my constant over the years. Thank you for jumping on planes to meet me all over the world, for trusting me with our sister secrets, and for keeping it 100 with me at all times. You have shaped me as a person and there is no way that I would have made it through this program without you. Sara Bryant, thank you for being my life coach and keeping my shenanigans in check. Also, thank you for being the kind of educator and woman that I can always look up to. May we have many more adventures to come! Tessa Henry, thank you for our countless conversations, for being dedicated to social justice, and for showing me what direction and dedication gets you when you mix it with just as much adventure and fun. I know we will be playing a game of all fours in some random country soon enough. To my Austin Black Girl Magic Crew, Carlisia McCord, Lakeya Omogun, Rachel Winston, and

Amissa Miller, I don’t know how I would have survived a move from Brooklyn without you all making it feel like home. Your wisdom, the laughs, and the celebrations really got me through. One day, we will do some of our incessant traveling together! Carlisia McCord, I knew that we would be friends from the day we met, even though you weren’t that sure. I can seriously say that you are one of the brightest people I have ever met and vi you inspire me. Thank you for holding me all the way down through some of the hardest points of my life. I cannot thank you enough for your spirit and the joy you have brought me. To my Spanish and MALS support system and intellectual thought partners: Joshua

Baco Ortiz, Alida Perrine, Daniel Nourry, Arno Argueta, Ignacio Caravajal, and Alhelí Harvey. Thank you all for the countless conversations, for always cheering me on, and for figuring out this system alongside me. Alida, you have read more of my work than possibly anyone and I truly appreciate the time, dedication, and thoughtful feedback you have given me. My success is in no small part due to your willingness to always help a friend out. And to my Spanish linguistics cohort, Salvatore Callesano, Brendan Reagan, Amalia Merino, Luis Aviles Gonzalez, and Anna Lawrence, thank you for the support. Salvatore Callesano, you have been the peer mentor of my dreams and we will write together soon and very soon. Thank you for being my linguistic question emergency contact and for trusting me to be Rudi’s aunt! And to my forever co-author, Anna Lawrence! We are seriously a dream team and I truly thank you for being my friend, my writing coach, and even my therapist sometimes. Thank you for lending me your expertise as part of my Clem Consulting team and for making me look good when you do it. I can’t wait to see the work we produce over the years! To my DABS, Christine Roman, Andrew Ketchum, and Joseph Loeffler, thank you for your commitment to being forever learners with me and for the unconditional support you have given me since the day we met. Thank you for being educators and humans that drive me to be better every day and thank you for being my family. Sorry for taking a bite of your muffin the first week I met you Andrew. To my former students. Though each of my students has left an indelible mark on me as a teacher and human, I want to especially thank Chris Peña, Erick Matos, Rajae Clark, Widyveline Taicha Morin, Samantha Jouthe, vii Adalberto Peña, and Chris Laguerre for our continued conversations about life, love, struggle, and solidarity. You continue to inspire me every day! To my DR Peace Corp Peeps, Zachary Gerth, Sara Samedi, and Clare Strange, may we have many more global adventures. Thank you for being truly dedicated to making the world a better place and for questioning the systems we have been a part of in our quest to do that work. It’s not perfect but we keep pushing for it to be better. To my Spain crew, Jorge Martinez, Sam Serrano, Niki Kruse and Sonna Johns. You made my experience in Spain life altering in the best way possible. Thank you for learning Spanish with me and giving me the strength to immerse myself in another culture. Sam, thank you for trying to get me to go to UT Austin for so many years before I decided to take the plunge. Thank you for all being consistent members of my cheerleading squad of for keeping it real Ethpaña in all our encounters. I’m still waiting for our reunion, this time at Niki’s place since she decided to move back for good! To my Global South Collective fam bam. Amrita Mishra, Nicholas Bloom,

Gabriela Rodriguez, Michael Reyes, and Joshua Ortiz Baco, y’all are some serious geniuses and you have taught me what a real life intellectual community looks like. Thank you for the late night library and café conversations and work sessions, the writing sessions, the successful and the failed reading clubs, and the last minute editing of funding applications, publication drafts, and job materials. And thank you for keeping me accountable to the literature! And to my many many scholar groups: NYU Faculty First

Look, LRI Qualitative Boot Camp, Blackademics, Spencer homies, and UCSB’s Black graduate student lab. Each of these experiences gave me invaluable guidance and at least one life-time friend. Jessica López Espino, thank you for all of our chats and for never failing to introduce me to your network. Angela Crumdy, how we just gon’ be in two fellowship groups back to back? Thank you so much for our intellectual conversations and viii our sistah chats alongside them. And thank you for teaching me what it looks like to perform rigorous ethnographic work that considers the humanity of Black womanhood. Gorana Gonzalez, thank you for starting Blackademics and for making sure we are accountable to our community. You are a blessing in every space you are in. Kendra

Calhoun and Joyhanna Yoo Garza, thank you for showing me that we can really do some transformative work within our field. And thank you for commiserating with me to the finish line.

To my writing groups: Thank you to el claustro: Camila Torres Castro, Valerie Osorio, Montserrat Madariaga, and Laura Boria. Mil millones de gracias! Gracias por el apoyo mutuo, the study groups, the barbecues, happy hours, karaoke parties, and the writing groups from the very beginning of this journey. Thank you to my COLA boot camp writing group, Kate Maddox and Kathleen Conti, for the pages and pages of editing and wonderful conversations. Thank you to my #100days of writing fam! Margaret Echelbarger, you are literally one of my favorite people and I’m not sure if you knew what you were doing when you created this group but joining this community has been one of my greatest joys and my greatest assets during my graduate school experience. Thank you Belém López and Eve Higby for joining Margaret in the administration of this group.

Belém, I am forever grateful for the invitation. Thank you, Mary DePascale, Pallavi Sriram, Darwin Guevarra, Sanda Portocarrero, Dani Gilbert, Kendra Calhoun, Joyhanna Yoo Garza, Akshika Wijesundara, and Akshita Sivakumar for the literal hundreds of hours we have spent in zoom rooms commiserating, writing, and keeping each other accountable.

Sorry for being a work and self-care bully. One day, I will see your legs! And last but most certainly not least, to my family who are literally my everything. To my siblings—Jovan Clemons, McKinley Clemons, and Coleman Clemons, you continue to inspire me daily. I have learned from you all things (besides humility). Thank ix you for our ratchet sibling chats and I’m just going to say it here so that it is published and thus the most reliable test of truth, I am clearly the most beautiful and intelligent Clemons of the clan, but you all are a close second. To Stephanie Clemons, I don’t have the words to express the gratitude I have for you and the way that you raised me. Mom, you are the embodiment of sacrifice, passion, and work ethic. You are my rock and you have given me all the tools I need for success in life. I cannot express in words what you mean to me. Thank you for always using your social skills to make sure I had a network of people that would support both my academic and personal trajectory. To Michael Clemons, thank you for being my dad and a best friend. Thank you for being literally the most logical and honest person I have ever met. You have taught me more about perseverance and redemption than any book could. And lastly, I thank you both for teaching me that above all, humanity is key!

x

Abstract

Spanish People be like: Dominican ethno-raciolinguistic stance-taking and the construction of Black Latinidades in the United States

Aris Moreno Clemons, Ph.D

The University of Texas at Austin, 2021

Supervisor: Almeida Jacqueline Toribio

This dissertation is a three study critical discourse analysis and ethnographic evaluation of ethnoracial construction of Dominican(-American)s in the United States.

The dissertation is guided by three major questions: (i) How are boundaries of ethnoracial separation ideologically constructed in public consciousness? (ii) How can we engage linguistic methodologies in the exploration of race, ethnicity, and communities of practice in modern society? (iii) How are social institutions such as schools implicated in the fashioning of ethnoracial linguistic categories and boundaries for second-generation

Dominican(-American)s? I answer these questions through a critical discourse analysis of a variety of data sources, including social media content, semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews, and ethnographic field notes. Drawing on notions of “raciolinguistic enregisterment,” (Rosa and Flores, 2017) I integrate historical, sociological, and

xi anthropological knowledge into my analysis to advance claims about

Dominican(American) language and race.

The dissertation adds to the burgeoning field of raciolinguistics by positioning race as the central unit of analysis. With this in mind, the project reinforces and advances current sociolinguistic investigations of Dominican language variation and (im)migrant language maintenance as intimately tied to the development of second and third generation ethno- racial identities in diasporic contexts. In exploring the Dominican population through a critical race lens, I question the validity of racialization projects which draw lines of mutual exclusivity around Blackness and Latinidad. As such, the project represents a methodological intervention in race studies, prioritizing linguistic data and methodologies in the investigation of ethnoracial formations. I argue that linguistic research should be primary in our understanding of race and ethnicity, expanding the scope of what has traditionally constituted linguistic and ethnic studies research.

xii Table of Contents

List of Tables ...... xviii

List of Figures ...... xix

List of Illustrations ...... xx

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Overarching Considerations ...... 5

1.1.2 Conceptual Terminology ...... 6

1.1.3 “Latino is not a race”: Development of pan-ethnic terminology in the U.S...... 19

1.1.4 Dominican Identity ...... 23

1.1.5 Dominican Linguistic Repertoires ...... 29

1.2 Theoretical Considerations ...... 31

1.2.1 Language and Social Interaction ...... 31

1.2.2 A Raciolinguistic Perspective ...... 33

1.3 Methodological Considerations ...... 37

1.3.1 Intra-racial conflicts and solidarities ...... 37

1.3.2 Dominican Spanish as Black language practice ...... 39

1.3.3 Institutional impacts on the construction of racial categories ...... 39

Chapter 2: New Blacks: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the construction of the African American/Dominican boundary of difference ...... 42

2.1 Introduction ...... 42

2. 2 Frameworks ...... 48

2.2.1 A Raciolinguistic perspective ...... 48

2.2.2 Racialization of Latinidad as mutually exclusive from Blackness in the United States ...... 52 xiii 2.3 The Current Study ...... 54

2.3.1 DNA Ideology...... 54

2.3.2 Category Fallacy (Adapted from Regimentation of linguistic and racial categories) ...... 55

2.3.3 Co-naturalization of language and race ...... 56

2.3.4 Accent Ideology (Adapted from Standard Language Ideology) ...... 58

2.4 Methodology ...... 60

2.4.1 Data ...... 60

2.4.2 Procedures ...... 63

2.4.3 Measures ...... 65

2.4.4 Analyses ...... 67

2.5 Results ...... 69

2.5.1 DNA ideology ...... 70

2.5.2 Categorization fallacy ...... 75

2.5.3 Co-Naturalization of Language and Race ...... 80

2.5.4 Accent ideology ...... 83

2.6 Co-Occurrence Of Raciolinguistic Ideologies ...... 84

2.6.1 Stance Dimension weights by ideology ...... 85

2.6.2 Anti-Haitian and Anti-African American sentiments in conflict and solidarity ...... 88

2.7 Conclusion ...... 91

Chapter 3. “Dominicans be like”: Ethno-raciolinguistic stance-taking and the construction of Dominicanidad in the U.S...... 95

3.1 On The Mutual Exclusivity Of Blackness And Latinidad ...... 95

3.2 We Still Here, Reinventing Ourselves At Every Turn ...... 102 xiv 3.2.1 Black self-determination ...... 102

3.2.2 Racial difference ...... 105

3.2.3 African American English and Dominican Spanish ...... 108

3.2.4 Black Lexical Practices as an extension of African American lexicalizations ...... 112

3.3 When You Know, You Know...... 121

3.3.1 Communities of Practice ...... 122

3.3.2 Raciolinguistic ideologies ...... 123

3.3.3 Speaker Agency, Stance, and Raciolinguistic Enregisterment ...... 125

3.4 Examining Black Lexicalization Processes In Dominican Digital Productions ...... 127

3.4.1 Procedure ...... 127

3.4.2 Data ...... 129

3.5 Black Language As A Model Of Black Self-Determination ...... 131

3.5.1 Dominican Semantic Inversions ...... 131

3.5.2 Dominican Phonological Evolutions ...... 134

3.5.3 Innovative Dominican Abbreviations (acronyms) ...... 138

3.5.4 Dominican Double-Voicing ...... 140

3.5.5 Dominican Naming Practices ...... 144

3.6 Dominican Spanish As Black Language Practice ...... 146

3.7 Conclusion ...... 152

Chapter 4. “They Spanish; they ain’t Black”: Language and culture sharing in the (de)construction of Dominican Blackness ...... 154

4.1 Black History, Black Language, And The Formation Of Self ...... 154

4.2 A Critical Race And Anthro-Political Linguistic Ethnography ...... 158 xv 4.2.1 Methods ...... 158

4.2.2. Ethnographic Sources ...... 160

4.2.3 Socio-political context ...... 163

4.3 Who Gets To Be Black In The United States? ...... 166

4.4 “It’s Black History Month Not Spanish History Month, Right?” ...... 172

4.5 Multilectical Racilizations, Embodied Blackness, And The Negotiation Of Space ...... 180

4.6 Claiming Geographic Place: Language, Space, And Identity Performance .....193

4.7 “No Me Gusta Cuando Me Llaman Negro;” Communicative Ruptures And The Linguistic Policing Of Blackness ...... 200

4.8 Post-Black History Month Initiatives And Culturally Relevant Pedagogies ....211

4.9 Conclusion ...... 219

Chapter 5: Conclusion and Implications ...... 222

5.1 New Blacks Summary ...... 223

5.1.1 New Blacks limitations ...... 226

5.1.2 Future Directions in intra-racial relationship studies ...... 227

5.2 Dominicans Be Like Summary ...... 228

5.2.1 Dominicans be like limitations ...... 231

5.2.2 Future directions: Linguistic models for diasporic solidarities ...... 231

5.3 They Spanish, They Ain’t Black Summary ...... 233

5.3.1 Lessons learned and strategies for justice-oriented anti-colonial frames of education ...... 236

5.4 Implications Or Significance For Differing Fields ...... 237

5.4.1 Raciolinguistics ...... 237

5.4.2 Sociolinguistics ...... 238 xvi 5.4.3 Educational linguistics ...... 239

5.4.4 Cultural and Ethnic Studies ...... 240

5.5 Future Work ...... 240

References ...... 242

Vita ...... 257

xvii List of Tables

Table 2.1: YouTube Video Metadata...... 62 Table 2.2: Focal Raciolinguistic Ideologies...... 64 Table 2.3: Stance Dimension definitions ...... 66

Table 2.4: Scale rating definitions ...... 68 Table 2.5. Raciolinguistic stance foci frequency...... 69 Table 2.6: Co-occurrence of focal raciolinguistic ideologies ...... 85

Table 2.7: Mean stance dimension by ideology...... 86 Table 2.8: Raciolinguistic ideology by subject positionality ...... 87 Table 2.9: Conflict and solidarity by raciolinguistic ideology ...... 89 Table 3.1: Coding Schema ...... 129

Table 3.2: Distribution of Black lexical practices ...... 130 Table 4.1: Interview Metadata ...... 162

xviii List of Figures

Figure 2.1: Coding Example for Standard Language Ideology ...... 66

xix List of Illustrations

Image 2.1: YouTube content producers ...... 61 Image 2.2: Screenshot of comment thread ...... 63 Image 3.1: Yeah that’s my degree/The one that says bad muthafucka on it ...... 114

Image 3.2: Amen Sistah!...... 115 Image 3.3: It’s called Covid-19/He got that rona ...... 116 Image 3.4: Only Black mamas can translate this ...... 117

Image 3.5 All these naps and I still can’t sleep...... 118 Image 3.6: Raymond and Yvonne equals Rayvonne ...... 119 Image 3.7: Tyronesha? Come on Black people. Stop it...... 120 Image 3.8: What are Afrikans who speak Spanish! ...... 125

Image 3.9: Loco dame un chin ...... 132 Image 3.10: Diablo que bachata...... 133 Image 3.11: Entonce tu ere tiguere/comete ete cañon ...... 135

Image 3.12: Y e’te tiguere ...... 136 Image 3.13: Michael Jackson dique ...... 137 Image 3.14: KLK Chapiadora ...... 139

Image 3.15: KLK MMG ...... 140 Image 3.16: El presidente Obama anuncio que los hombres que mantienen una

chapiadora ...... 141

Image 3.17: Donal Trump está guapo ...... 142

Image 3.18: My boss guapo ...... 142 3.19: Deja el coro ...... 143 Image 3.20: Yudy and Amaurys equals Yudeiskilaurys Maria ...... 145

Image 3.21: Danyerson ...... 146 xx Image 3.22: Obama Yo le hago el favor ...... 147

Image 3.23: Obama Dique ...... 148 Image 3.24: Drake Dime aver ...... 148 Image 3.25: Este lambo wish ...... 149

Image 3.26: Esta es tu cara cuando no tienes novia ...... 150 Image 4.1: Curtains opening for the Step Team’s performance ...... 194

xxi Chapter 1: Introduction On June 3rd, 2020, Dominicans and the topic of Blackness began trending across various social media platforms after a video emerged of a crowd of Dominicans engaged in an “anti-looting protest” (@THEEEhottie, 2020). The original post featured a video of what looks to be at least 100 people carrying signs and marching up Dyckman Street in upper Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood. The caption read:

Instead of going out to protest against police brutality & standing with the black

community, they marched for “anti-looting” when nobody was looting in the area.

After they finished their anti-looting rally, they then racially profiled & harassed a

group of black people walking by (@THEEEhottie, 2020).

In the hundreds of comment threads linked to the original tweet, responses generally fell into two ideological camps. On the one hand, commenters noted the civil rights struggles of African Americans that allowed Dominicans to claim the rights they now enjoy. In this group, Dominicans themselves stated how the event evoked a sense of embarrassment, and they disparaged the event as counter-productive to their own advancement. These commenters often attributed the problem to not “knowing our history” and a lack of ability to recognize African heritage as a unifier. Dominicans in this group performed their Blackness as solidarity, noting that African Americans and Black people all over were all branches of the same tree. Ultimately, they viewed any advancement of Black people in the United States as advancement for Dominicans.

1 On the other hand, there were many comments supporting the “anti-looting protests,” claiming that Dominicans had the right to protect their neighborhoods, and that in doing so, they were also protecting the neighborhoods where many African Americans themselves lived. Some even asserted that since most Dominicans are Afro-Latino, they could not possibly be “racist,” taking up the no-Blacks-can-be-racist argument without any comment on the anti-Blackness that occurs within Black communities (Alexander,

2011; Dumas, 2016). One particularly vitriolic video response (re-posted on the

Instagram account West.Indianmade after being deleted by the original user) featured an expletive-laden call for Dominicans to protect their neighborhood from “these fucking jungle people.” Among the hundreds of comments attached to the video, the most prevalent contained mentions of the fact that the speaker, based on outward appearance, was of African heritage. These responses reveal the wide-ranging and disparate beliefs of

Dominicans and non-Dominicans alike about what it means to be Black in the United

States today. They capture notions of citizenship, migration, place, race, ethnicity, belonging, language, and the performance of self.

Inter-ethnic conflict and solidarity in communities of color have become more visible as waves of migration over the past 50 years have complicated and enriched the sociocultural landscape of the United States. The increased migration of those who represent varying Black subjectivities can significantly impact our understanding of how race is structured in this country. Situating Blackness as the prevailing concept of racial organization in the United States, this dissertation explores these phenomena by examining the role that language plays in mapping the margins of identity, ethnoracial 2 categorization, and Blackness for Dominican(-American)s and Black U.S. populations in general. Of particular note is the operationalization of Afro-Latinidad as an identity construct that can serve to both unify and separate Black diasporic populations from one another. As such, the current dissertation functions as an exercise in conceptualizing

Afro-Latinidad for Dominican(-American)s in the U.S. This is a highly complex undertaking for several reasons, some of which are: the differential social constructions of race and ethnicity in contexts of origin and migration, the competition for scarce resources among marginalized groups, and complex relationships with colonial histories.

The dissertation is primarily concerned with how ethnoracial categories come to be, including how these categories are discussed, acquired, and/or contested. Moreover, the work adds to literature at the intersection of language, race, and identity in critical institutions such as mass media and schools.

Three major questions guide the research. I first ask how boundaries of ethnoracial separation are ideologically constructed in public consciousness. I then ask how we can engage linguistic methodologies in the exploration of race, ethnicity, and communities of practice in modern society. Lastly, I ask how social institutions such as schools are implicated in the fashioning of ethnoracial linguistic categories and boundaries for second-generation Dominican(-American)s. These questions are highly relevant in a current society that has seen the results of hyperracialization and linguistic chauvinism. In attending to the questions that I have outlined, I examine three research strands: intra-racial conflicts and solidarities, Dominican Spanish as a Black language practice, and the institutional impacts on the construction of racial categories. These 3 strands access the intersections of language, race, and identity, incorporating transdisciplinary framing and methodologies. In the following sections, I trace the development of each of these research strands, drawing attention to the interdisciplinary frames with which I contend with the overarching questions related to Dominican(-

American) language, race, identity, and cross-ethnic relations in the United States.

In the first of these research strands, intra-racial conflicts and solidarities, I investigate the ideologies and discourses surrounding boundaries of difference between ethnic groups who may be marked as members of the same pan-racial grouping (e.g.,

Afro-Dominicans and African Americans). In the second research strand, Dominican

Spanish as Black language practice, I examine how we assign particular linguistic features and behaviors to a Community of Practice, as defined by Penny Eckert and Sally

McConnel-Ginet (1992). I argue that Dominican Spanish is a Black language in which speakers rely on a set of practices that can be linked to the legacy of surviving the transatlantic slave trade and (subconscious) efforts towards self-determination. In the last research strand, institutional impacts on the construction of racial categories, I interrogate the impact of a prominent societal institution on the construction of Blackness and on the creation of boundaries of racial difference in peer-to-peer and student-to-educator relationships. Though related in their focus on Dominicanidad, Blackness, and language, each strand required me to employ various methodological and theoretical frames. Before reviewing the novel theoretical framing and methodological approaches taken in each of my research strands, I begin with a review of some overarching considerations needed to situate the exploration of Dominicanness and Blackness in the U.S. context. 4 1.1 OVERARCHING CONSIDERATIONS It is nearly impossible to have a comprehensive understanding of Afro-Latinidad from a singular disciplinary lens; rather, the construction of Afro-Latinidad demands an interdisciplinary approach. As such, the project engages literature and theoretical considerations from linguistics, sociology, anthropology, education, and critical race in

Black and Latinx studies to provide an expansive framework for understanding Blackness as it currently exists in the United States. I argue that by applying linguistic frames to the understanding of race, we can deconstruct the racial systems that have resulted in the violent and persistent erasures of marginalized communities. In this respect, my work seeks to make visible and legitimize the language and cultural practices of those who continue to survive the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.

Throughout the dissertation, I privilege the work, theoretical frames, and concepts produced by scholars of color. I rely on this particular body of literature in my constructions of U.S. Afro-Latinidad, not because I do not believe in the value of literature that is deemed canonical, but because I believe that much of the previous research that deals with modernity, humanity, and the structure of society has been written for and by a particular group of people. Further, I believe that much of the colonial and “post”-colonial research has been carried out with the specific aim of reconstituting colonial frames of power. In response, I engage literature primarily offered by scholars of color who have contended with questions of race, power, language, and identity, though much of this literature is grounded in traditional disciplinary theory offered in the multiple fields that I engage in.

5 To situate the conversation, I begin with a brief overview of terms and concepts that will recur throughout the dissertation. I do this with the aim of contextualizing the way we come to understand Dominican racial and linguistic practices within the academy and American society at large. I follow this discussion with a historical overview of the development of pan-ethnic terminology in the United States, targeting my discussion on the development of terms such as Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Afro-Latina/o/x. I then move to a review of scholarly understandings of Dominican identity in the United States. I follow a review of Dominican language practices and ideologies and note how studies of sociolinguistic variation can be relied upon within critical race studies. Within this review, I focus on the social, anthropological, and linguistic aspects of Dominican self- expression. I include in this review a conspectus of Dominican transnational behaviors and the sharing of cultures across ethnic and geographic boundaries.

1.1.2 Conceptual Terminology Throughout this dissertation, I will refer to a number of terms that, on the surface, have intuitive definitions. Since this dissertation attempts to add to knowledge about the interface of language, race, and identity, I rely on terms that circulate broadly in popular speech (e.g., ethnicity, race, ideolog(ies), and nationality). Nonetheless, the socially mediated construction of these terms relies on our ability to agree on what they mean, their naturalization or ideologization. These terms, as well as others, which I

(re)constitute in the service of this dissertation, form the basis for understanding the ways that Dominicanidad and Afro-Latinidad are linguistically constructed in U.S. society.

6 I begin this section with a discussion on the difference between ‘race,’

‘nationality,’ and ‘ethnicity.’ These terms are often the source of confusion and comment in the public sphere. Drawing on the academic literature in anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and ethnic studies, I provide a brief overview of how I utilize these terms as critical concepts rather than static descriptive categories. In order to fully understand the ways that notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality circulate in the U.S. public consciousness, I take a constructivist view, noting the ongoing and ever-evolving construction of race and ethnicity. A constructivist view of race places the concept in the space of constant evolution. Since we have reached a point where most scientists and social scientists agree that there is no biological basis for race, the general consensus is that race is socially constructed and contextually meaningful (Morning, 2007; Williams,

2013; Omi and Winant, 2014).

Race: In using the term ‘race’ throughout this dissertation, I take from Omi and

Winant’s argument that race is a “master category” -- “a fundamental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, and economic structure of the United States” (Omi and Winant, 2014, p. 106). This means that even though other categorizations such as gender, class, and sexuality are fully implicated in the making of

“self” and the intersectional organization of power, ‘race’ has been and is used as a principal organizing category relied upon to determine stratification within all other social categorizations in the United States. In other words, race organizes power into a hierarchical system and allows for its semiotic construction throughout every facet of human life. In this way, Blackness (as a racial concept) can be emblematically linked to 7 poverty with limited attention to individual conditions of sexuality, class, or gender.

Hence, race is understood as a classification system based on the symbolic linking of social characteristics to (sometimes) outward physical expressions. This classification system cannot be separated from the socio-historic and political contexts under which it was developed. Therefore, this linkage does not occur overnight but rather through consistent socialization over time. It is both experienced and created. Thus, to think about race is to think about processes—processes of defining people and then classifying them according to that definition. The manner by which certain features come to be understood is defined through acts of racialization, or “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group” (Omi and Winant,

2014, p. 11). Accordingly, race is the bounded categorical expression of that which has been racialized.

However, adopting race as an organizing principle is not enough to understand how it moves throughout our society. The sheer frequency of conversations about who gets to claim belonging in a racial group points to the complexity of the social construction itself. While many presume genealogical constructions of race (i.e., race as genotype) that rely on familial or genetic inheritance as the primary determinant of racial expression, others presuppose phenotypical constructions (i.e., race as phenotype) that understand physical features as the primary determinant. The choice about what constitutes race for each individual often resides in their historical socialization within a particular time and space, but what persists is that race continues to be an organizer of power and social stratifications within these societies, regardless of its manifestations. 8 For example, the ways that race is understood in the Caribbean has been shown to be at odds with the way race is understood in the United States (Kasinitz, 1992; Torres et al.,

1998; Simmons, 2008; García Peña, 2016).

As each location presents a unique historical and sociopolitical context, racial hierarchies manifest in seemingly different ways. One such manifestation is the use of featurism as a way to distinguish and stratify marginalized peoples. Featurism can be understood as the marking of physical features that approximate typified European characteristics (e.g., thin nose, straighter hair, etc.) as superior to those that mark typified

Afro characteristics (e.g., wider nose, wider hips, etc.). Because of generally forced racial mixing, featurism allows for the stratification of racialized beings beyond skin color and thus adds featurism to the toolbox of racial order. Nonetheless, skin color continues to be a primary tool for the racialization of individuals within both the United States and the

Caribbean (Candelario, 2007). While the United States has historically functioned within a system of hypodescent (i.e., the one-drop rule) by which any percentage of African heritage would place you squarely into the category of “Black” regardless of skin color, much of the Caribbean has evolved from casta systems introduced by Spanish colonizers in Mexico (Katzew, 2005). In the Caribbean, this organization of casta realities has resulted in the reliance on colorism rather than racism as a mechanism for social order.

While colorism operates in both the U.S. and the Caribbean contexts of race and racism, the force that it can exert on individual realities is differentiated. In order to understand the ways that colorism is developed and mobilized, I take up Harry Hoetink’s term somatic norm image, which he defined as “the complex of physical (somatic) 9 characteristics that are accepted by a group as its norm and ideal” (cited in Hall, 2005;

Calendario, 2007). The somatic norm image considers both featurism and colorism to construct a paradigm of racial norms within each society, such that a person with darker features such as olive-toned skin may be considered white within one context and racialized as ‘other’ in a different context. The question thus becomes: How do racialized beings construct their identities when socialized within multiple racial realities? What somatic norms do they rely on, and how do they construct racial categories in their everyday discourses? Further, are somatic norm images fixed in a way that affects self- identification?

Herein, I refer to Ginetta Candelario’s (2007) thoughts on primary, secondary, and tertiary racial identifiers, which occupy different positions in different societies and often result in mismatched racial expectations in diasporic or migrant contexts. In her discussion of Dominicans, Candelario points to hair as a primary bodily signifier of race,

“followed by facial features, skin color, and last ancestry” (p. 223). This ordering of racial identifiers is situationally constructed, and each of these physical markers represents a different ranking based on the ways that race is constructed in that place.

These signifiers are then used to determine not one’s own race but that of others. Again, the dialectical nature of race construction is such that one may claim belonging in a particular group, while others may use racial signifiers to place that person within or outside the bounds of their chosen categorization. In the current dissertation, I look to the ways that language fits into this racializing hierarchy of identifiers.

10 Many research projects rely on self-identified race categorizations that allow participants to indicate the racial category they feel they belong to. While this process is often the most ethical, differences in how individuals establish their understanding of race can result in flawed interpretations of data that end up further essentializing or marginalizing the lived experiences of those who are unable to negotiate their race in public spheres. Herein, I adapt Nancy López’s (2018) concept of street race. Street race is the notion that regardless of how you conceive of yourself racially, how society impacts others’ vision of you is what really matters. In other words, before you can declare your race, the way a person who does not know you (and hasn’t heard you speak) would racially categorize you provides important information about how you can navigate society and its institutions. By implementing López’s concept of street race, I am able to contend with the historical formations of power that reify systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism, two issues that I will discuss below.

Ethnicity: In addition to my view of the multifaceted and dynamic ways that race is taken up and constructed in the United States and the Caribbean, I espouse a constructivist view of ethnicity. Traditional definitions of ethnicity rely on direct ties to land as territory or nation-state (Nagel, 1994, 2003). Nationality was often linked to religious identification, which was also tied to particular locations as a norm. However, considering the colonial and imperial histories that have resulted in mass displacements of human bodies and the inability to bind particular bodies to specific places, any definition of ethnicity must be dynamic. I use the term ethnicity to note the categorical boundaries of belonging established in popular discourse in both the United States and 11 the Dominican Republic. Who gets to be labeled as being of a particular ethnicity is what is under investigation. By taking a constructivist stance in my use of ethnicity, I am able to account for the genesis of emergent ethnic terminology and the mobilization of pan- ethnic terminologies such as Latinx or Afro-Latinx for individuals who occupy multiple spaces.

Nationality: I use the term nationality to refer to a person’s participation and membership in a particular nation-state. I do not equate nationality to the legal, political expression of this membership, which I refer to as citizenship. I take this approach because I recognize that citizenship is many times used as a political mechanism by which those in power are able to strip a person of their right to exist in a particular space, resulting in the dehumanization of individuals who participate in the daily production of the nation. I believe it important to distinguish between the nation-state where someone physically resides and the nation-state where they may be connected through heritage or history. This is not to say that there exist no cases of in-between, where one spends a significant portion of their lives in more than one nation-state. In these cases, I draw upon notions of transnationalism to understand dynamic participation in multiple nation- states.

Diaspora: Over the years, the use of the term diaspora has gained popularity in conversations about displaced populations. Defining the term becomes important not only to contend with ideas of Blackness in the Americas but also as a way to contend with pan-ethnic terminology in general. While I will suggest that diasporic being is

12 intricately linked with dispossession and thus with the condition of Blackness, there are several concepts from which it takes its meaning. Diaspora holds within it concepts of origin, dispersion, exile, return, nostalgia, and memory. For the purposes of this dissertation, focused on the ways that Afro-descended communities negotiate meanings of self within systems of white-supremacy, diaspora is used as a term of unity as well as a term that resists essentializing notions of Blackness as monolithic. A diaspora ties people to a common background but allows connection from the memory of certain cultural segments such as food or religious practices, while others may have forgotten all ancestral histories. Scholars of Black diasporic studies have designated the transatlantic slave trade as a site of departure, from which the massive presence of enslaved Africans and their descendants has led to a certain unity that extends beyond national borders, many of which these descendants had no hand in creating (Gilroy, 1993; Chivallon,

2011). Surviving the transatlantic slave trade, thus becomes a unifying feature. Denys

Cuche (1996) describes this notion of a Black American diaspora perfectly:

The term black Americans designates the entire New World, culturally marked by

the massive presence of African slaves and their descendants. Whether in North

America, Central America, South America or in the archipelago of the Caribbean,

the same historical heritage - slavery and the plantation system - led to a certain

unity, over and beyond the diversity of the black Americas, from both social and

cultural standpoints. (as cited in Chivallon, 2011:xvi)

13 Others further this argument, positing that the central unit of Black diasporic life is innovation and the ability to endure systems of domination while reconstituting traditional forms of being into ancestral forms of Blackness. For me, this centrality is key. The innovation by which Black enslaved populations had to make life under plantation systems dispossessed many of the ability to maintain ties with their African ways of being. Much in the same way that current U.S. linguistic ideologies of appropriateness result in the loss of native language for many second and third-generation immigrants, plantation systems resulted in the dispossession of memory. This occurred in the dehumanizing process of socializing them to their Blackness in order to concretize the social stratification of power.

Blackness and Anti-Blackness: The concept of Blackness is uniquely American, and by American, I intend all of the Americas. As this statement is seemingly brazen I feel obliged to break it down. I do not mean that to deem a skin color as Black is a uniquely American endeavor. I mean that Blackness as a racial concept of difference was born through processes of racialization developed during colonial formations of power in the Americas. This was made clear to me over the years through my relationship with visiting students and recent immigrants from the continent of Africa. Since I had been raised in a Black radical tradition, I considered myself as linked to and identified with these folks. Nonetheless, if I had a dollar for every time one of them told me that they did not consider themselves Black or did not “know” they were Black until they got to the

United States, I would be much better resourced than I am now. For a very long time, when I was faced with this pronouncement, it left me confused. Most of the time, it was 14 said in a very matter-of-fact way, like “why would I need to know I was Black if everyone around me is also Black?” However, more than anything, the concept of

Blackness was not imbued with the reverberations of ‘other’ as it is in the Americas.

Cultural and historical theorist Silvio Torres-Saillant has noted the Caribbean and Latin

America as the cradle of Blackness in the Americas (Torres-Saillant, 2010).

This being said, Blackness is still heavily contested between Black diasporic communities in the United States. In the United States (and I would argue in the

Caribbean), Blackness is both a body politic and a social logic (Shange, 2019). That is,

Blackness is embodied and functions in the service of power, and thus can be organized differently in different social contexts. Blackness is also semiotic; it carries meaning and shapes notions of space, civility, appropriateness, capital, and possibility. Since the Black body in the United States has emerged from systems of control, it is a physical manifestation of that system. Thus, the positioning of the Black body in society —many times independent of agentive self-determination—directly represents the ability of a state apparatus to exert control. Therefore, when we see the policing of Black bodies in public spaces and within social institutions, it is a reflection of that society’s foundational structure.

I understand anti-blackness as the ideological manifestation of white supremacy, whiteness, and white apathy. I define whiteness as a colonial logic whereby all categorizations are created in juxtaposition to a based category marked by European-ness,

15 whiteness, and all that is associated with these qualities. In centralizing these qualities as natural,

[w]hites are permitted to exist outside of racial identity even though non-whites

are constantly assigned racial labels. In other words, to be white enables one to

retain a sense of individuality, while barring people of color from exercising those

same rights. (Lindner, 2018, p. 44)

Blackness stands in opposition to all that is positioned as natural, moral, pure, civil, and modern.

That anti-blackness manifests in violence against the Black body, censure, and ultimately the dehumanization of Black people is a result of these colonial formations of power. Black social theorists have remarked on the ways in which the condition of enslavement has led to Black social death (Brown, 2009), whereby it is impossible to exist within a Black body without it being subject to societal forms of control. In other words, the condition of Blackness is inextricable from the condition of being dominated.

This manifests in the ways that Black bodies are policed within particular spaces, especially social institutions. Anti-Blackness therefore becomes a way to police Black bodies within social spaces, as discussed by Bledsoe and Wright (2019):

With regard to the question of space, anti-Blackness helps us understand how the

afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2007, p. 6) leads to Black populations being

conceptually unable to legitimately create space, thereby leaving locations

16 associated with Blackness open to the presumably “rational” agendas of dominant

spatial actors.” (Bledsoe and Wright 2019, p. 5)

These dominant spatial actors shape space through physical assertions of power and also through discursive and ideological enregisterments, which situate Blackness as a threat to all that is good, pure, and natural. Michael Dumas (2016) speaks about the way racialized discourse impacts perceptions of Black students within school spaces:

I contend that deeply and inextricably embedded within racialized policy

discourses is not merely a general and generalizable concern about

disproportionality or inequality, but also, fundamentally and quite specifically, a

concern with the bodies of Black people, the signification of (their) Blackness,

and the threat posed by the Black to the educational wellbeing of other students.

(Dumas, 2016, p. 12)

I extend Dumas’ assertion by saying that Blackness is thus a threat to the wellbeing of all those who are positioned at the center, in other words, to whiteness. Still, in every instance of anti-blackness that I introduce, there is and must be a case of contestation within the community. Therefore, it is important to think of these concepts not as essentializing but rather as trends that are supported by systematic forms of oppression and marginalization, generally not within the control of an individual. I understand these contestations within a definition of what has been termed Black self-determination, which

I discuss briefly below.

17 Black self-determination is the constant move towards full recognition of Black humanity. Emerging from radical intellectual and liberatory political histories, Black self- determination rests on the idea that Black people are continuously imagining and practicing survival in relation to their place within colonial formations of power (Trotsky,

1978; Combahee River Collective, 1983; Jordan, 2002; Dixson, 2011). In this case, self- determination comes in the form of collective Black self-identification that calls into question the organization of society under colonial logics of power. I argue that in order to discern moments of Black self-determination, we must look beyond the Black/White binary in negotiations of race and identity in the Americas.

Racist/Anti-Racist: Like many of my predecessors, I find it important to make the distinction between racism as individual acts of violence against racialized peoples and racism as the systemic, structural, and institutional policies that are enacted to establish and maintain social order. My use of the term racism reflects the latter and submits the development and promotion of racialized ideologies as central to projects of social stratification of power. Power, in this case, is central to my definitions of race, racism, and anti-racism. I define power, in this instance, as that which allows for the consolidation of material or social wellbeing in every societal institution.

In the now heavily cited book, How to be Anti-racist, Ibram X. Kendi (2019) argues that “there is no such thing as a race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups” (p. 36-37). His use of the term policy is a direct

18 response to a need for distinguishing between discrimination and racism. Where everybody has the ability to discriminate, only a select few have the power to enact policy (or influence the development and enactment of policy). I take Kendi’s notion that racism lies in policy a step beyond to submit that racism extends even further beyond a policy to an ideology. It is the ideologies that allow for the naturalization and acceptance of the policies that result in inequities between racial groups. Therefore, racism is inherently systemic, institutional, and structural, but it is also ideological. Discrimination, on the other hand, functions at the individual level. So, while an institutional agent can discriminate through directed action against a person, they are calling on already established racist policies and ideologies to justify and motivate their behavior. Thus, all discriminatory action and individual violence against racialized communities is upheld by the structural logics of racism. I also maintain that in the United States and the Caribbean, these logics have been formed under colonial logics of white supremacy and whiteness, as described above.

1.1.3 “Latino is not a race”: Development of pan-ethnic terminology in the U.S. The ways that people identify themselves and the ways that others identify an individual have the potential to be at once controversial and political. In many cases, adoption of a particular term of identification can result in the consolidation of political or social power, functioning as terms of solidarity. For example, for African Americans, the shift to Black was a political move brought about by the 1960s and 70s civil rights and Black power movements (Smith, 1992). This political choice moved beyond the

19 nation-state and included the experiences of Blackness as a defining categorizing characteristic. In the United States, the Census Bureau has been integral in introducing, extending, and concretizing racial categories. While the Census Bureau long provided ethnic identifications for varying Euro-descended groups, it was not until very recently that a distinction between race and ethnicity was fully integrated for ‘Hispanic’ groups.

Further, the U.S. census has relied on a two-question format in order to take account of the racial heterogeneity of Hispanic groups in the United States. In this format, which was introduced in 1980, respondents first answered a question regarding their ethnicity, with Hispanic as an ethnic marker, and then they had to complete the unrevised race question, which only included the options of Black, white, Asian, and Native American.

In 2020, the two-question format was again revised to include Hispanic as an option in both the ethnicity and race categories. This change, which apparently came as a result of large survey trials, indicates a shift towards the end stages of an emergent racialization of

Hispanidad (which will be reconstituted into Latinidad as a political unification project described below). I argue that this racialization of ‘Hispanic’ as a category is indicative of a project that centralizes mestizaje as the organizing racial concept for those with origins in Latin America. In shifting to a one-question format that allows for those who consider themselves racially Hispanic to identify as such, the census fails to capture the ways that anti-Blackness and anti-indigeneity can variably impact those who identify as

Hispanic due to origin or heritage in Latin America.

The increasing heterogeneity of ‘Hispanics’ in the United States has been complicated by varying waves of migration over the last hundred years. The development 20 of Latinidad as a pan-ethnic marker of identity has received significant attention in the field of Latino Studies. Juan Flores (1997) suggests that continued and varied waves of migration from Spanish-speaking nations are responsible for a process of pan-

Latinization in New York. In an article examining the use of the term in higher education contexts, Aparicio (1999) describes the term as a site of “competing authenticities and paradigms of identity that, together, and in conflict with each other, constitute the heterogeneous experiences of various Latina/o national groups” (p. 10). She traces the semantic shifts in the ways that Latinidad has been taken up in the field, pointing to the varying critiques of the term for its homogenization of a highly heterogeneous community. Ultimately, she upholds the use of the term as a way to foment solidarity and as a political contestation of hegemonic homogenizations (Aparicio, 2017b), calling on scholars of Latina/o Studies to imagine Latinidad as a site of political contestation, where

“diverse experiences, identities, and power dynamics can be accounted for in the construction of a new social imaginary that transcends old paradigms and nationality- based conflicts” (Aparicio, 2017a, p. 47). Nevertheless, discussions of Latinidad as political and economic power fail to discuss what happens when political empowerment is conferred to those who may already hold positions of privilege vis-a-vis Latino populations (i.e., Spaniards). Furthermore, present conceptualizations of Latinidad represent a conceived boundedness surrounded by nebulous borders that allow for the replication of oppressive social structures. Thus, those who live on the margins of boundaries of Latinidad are often erased, while others are included in the name of political capital. The ubiquity of the notion of Latinidad dismisses the question of who is 21 allowed to benefit from the consolidation and racialization of pan-ethnic terminology; this is evident in the ways that certain individuals utilize preferred identity terminology.

In 2012, the Pew Hispanic Research Center conducted a survey on the preference and use of terms of identification for ‘Hispanic’ populations. The result indicated that, with slight differentiation based on migration generation, nearly half of the participants preferred to use their country of origin as an ethnic label. Preference for the use of pan- ethnic terms increased with generation, education, and wealth. And in the highest echelons of these social categories (i.e., more years of education, more wealth, more generations within the United States), the desire to use terms such as ‘American’ to describe themselves increased. However, when asked about their preference for

‘Hispanic’ versus ‘Latino,’ 51% said they had no preference, while 33% preferred

‘Hispanic’ and only 17% preferred Latino. While research across various fields has addressed the problematic nature of the term ‘Hispanic’ (Jones-Correa and Leal, 1996;

Rumbaut, 2011), its use in official documents and connection to a shared set of linguistic practices keep it circulating among a highly heterogeneous population of Spanish- speaking (im)migrants. Meanwhile, the term Latina/o/x, which Latina/o studies scholars and political activists have posited for its ability to foment political and economic solidarity, still gives individuals pause when choosing how to identify themselves. This may be for several reasons, including the fact that the term seems to privilege white and mestizo people over their Indigenous, Black, and Asian counterparts. Additionally, the term is noted as a U.S. invention, which becomes an issue to the many individuals who

22 fall into the category while still living highly transnational lives (Schiller et al., 1995;

Itzigsohn et al., 1999; Louie, 2006).

1.1.4 Dominican Identity In 2018, the United States Census Bureau estimated the U.S. Dominican(-

American) population to be around 2.08 million, including persons of Dominican origin and ancestry (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018). With a large portion of the population arriving in the United States within the last 50 years, Dominicans have become the fifth largest group of Hispanics, with a significant portion currently under the age of 18 (Zong &

Batalova, 2018). Importantly, the cultural and ideological impact of the United States on the Dominican imaginary began long before waves of migration shaped the current population statistics described above. The complexity of U.S.-Dominican relationships is indicative of the socio-political turmoil that the island nation has endured since the colonial period. With this being said, the presence of Dominicans in New York and the northeastern portion of the United States is not new. In fact, it was a man of Dominican descent who is identified as the “first New Yorker,” having arrived in 1613 and stayed until at least 1614, according to the archival records (Stevens-Acevedo et al., 2013).

While a full brief of the historical background of this relationship is beyond the scope of this introduction, and frankly this dissertation, I note three significant historical moments that impact my understanding of Dominican identity both on the island and in the United

States: (I) The unification period of 1822-1844; (II) The U.S. military occupation between 1916 and 1924; (III) the post-Trujillo-dictatorship migratory wave (Torres-

23 Saillant 1998; Torres-Saillant & Hernández, 1998; Torres-Saillant, 2010; Bullock &

Toribio, 2014b).

The unification period, popularly known as “the Haitian Domination,” lasted for twenty-two years between 1822 and 1844. This period came directly after a period of weak independence originally gained by a criollo leader, José Nuñez de Cáceres, who built his government on the right to free themselves from duty to Spain but not to the abolishment of slavery or transformation of society established during the colonial period. This independence was under constant threat from European invasion, and as such, the recently-established Black republic to the west felt it would be best to unify the island, understanding a return of Europe to be dangerous to their goal of maintaining a slavery-free society. Many people in Santo Domingo welcomed the unification of the island since Haitian ruler Jean Pierre Boyer committed to abolishing slavery and to the elimination of racial privileges in the eastern region of the island. During his reign, Boyer invited a number of freed Blacks in the U.S. to establish a community in the Samaná and

Puerto Plata region of the Dominican Republic. In 1824, nearly 6000 U.S. Blacks arrived in the region, and scholarship has noted the persistence of the culture they brought, with a

1980s survey noting that from the sample surveyed, 50% spoke English as a heritage language. During the unification period, the central goal was to ensure the island would not return to systems of slavery that were still prevalent throughout the Americas. In any case, the unification period ended with a criollo independence movement that gave the eastern part of the island sovereignty from Haiti and marked the beginning of the nation we now call the Dominican Republic. Importantly, the U.S. played a large role in the 24 success of this final moment of independence, convincing Spain and France to recognize the nation as sovereign in order to quell the spread of “negro influence” in the Americas.

Since that time, the U.S. has maintained an interest in the Dominican Republic as a way to control Black sovereignty to the West as well as maintain the favorable conditions the island provided for U.S. expansionist aspirations.

The second significant historical moment was directly related to U.S. imperialism and expansionist aspirations. In response to a rebellion against the U.S.-backed President

Juan Isidro Jimenes, the United States entered the Dominican Republic and declared a state of occupation on November 29th, 1916. When Jimenes resigned instead of taking the advice of the U.S. government,

[t]he American government from that point onward decided not to recognize,

even to allow, the rise of any Dominican chief of state who did not beforehand

pledge to accept American economic and political guidance. (Torres-Saillant &

Hernández, 1998, p. 27)

The U.S. military occupation of the island lasted from 1916 to 1924, significantly impacting the island. Changes included the construction of a major highway system that allowed for increased transportation and communication across the eastern region; an increase in schools and numbers of students being educated; improvements in sanitation, health, and public works. At the same time, the military occupation was vengeful in its disarmament of the civilian population, quelling all attempts at dissent. The military police, who would later become the national police, frequently used its force against the

25 people and continue to execute this authority. Additionally, the U.S. appetite for the sugar industry left much of the economy to the whims of the fluctuating global sugar markets.

And most importantly, for our consideration, foreign investment, propagation of U.S. trademarks, and the import of U.S. goods with no tariffs created a preference for U.S.- produced goods, essentially crushing the possibilities of success for local small businesses. Furthermore, foreign investment had a significant cultural impact, evidenced, for example, by the continued commitment to baseball as a national sport in the

Dominican Republic.

The last significant moment was the post-1965 wave of Dominican migration to the United States. This migration was triggered by the end of the dictatorship of Rafael

Leonidas Trujillo, who governed the nation from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.

Post-Trujillo instability occurred when anti-Trujillo, democratically-elected Juan Bosch attempted to reform the island with democratic and social justice ideals that challenged the remnants of Trujillo’s military oligarchy and the Catholic church. Together, this oligarchy and the church successfully collaborated to overthrow the Bosch government, which culminated in another U.S. invasion in 1965, and a (fake) election was won by the

U.S.-backed Joaquin Balaguer. Balaguer’s return to Trujillista economic structuring increased unemployment and government persecution of dissidents. This, combined with the change in U.S. immigration laws in 1965, resulted in a massive, growing, and continuous migration of Dominicans from the island to the United States. Since then,

Dominicans have continued migrating to the United States, recently becoming the 5th largest Latin American migrant group in the United States. Since 2000, the Dominican 26 population has grown by 159%, indicating a continued and persistent pattern of migration from the Dominican Republic (Noe-Bustamante et al., 2019).

All of these moments contribute significantly to the nature of the Dominican community within the United States. Importantly, the presence of Dominican

(im)migrants has shifted the contemporary linguistic and, more importantly, racial landscape of what was previously considered under the umbrella terms of ‘Hispanic’ and

‘Latino’ in the United States. In the United States, Dominicans, who are often of mixed

Spanish and African heritage, are placed in precarious positions, as they are thrust into a pan-ethnic Hispanic category while simultaneously being raced as black (Toribio, 2000,

2003; Bailey, 2007; Candelario, 2007). This fact, along with the increasing visibility of

Dominican(-American)s in U.S. media-scapes, has led to questions over the ways that

Dominicans fit into U.S. categorizations of Spanish speakers, Latinxs, and Afro- descendants —all of which have been previously marked by mutually exclusive boundaries. For hundreds of years, the United States has functioned on a racialized dichotomy of Black and white, characterized by what is popularly known as the ‘one- drop rule’ or hypodescent, which casts anyone with 1/32 or more African blood into the category of Black (Omi and Winant, 1994). In marked contraposition, in the Dominican

Republic, one drop of European blood casts one out of the racial categorization of Black and into a racialized concept of Mixed, creating a tripartite conceptualization of race in which the labels Black, White, and Mixed co-exist. Thus, while large proportions of

Dominicans (some estimate as much as 90%) are reported to have some sub-Saharan

African ancestry (Haggerty, 1991; Bailey, 2006), Dominicans on the island most often 27 identify themselves as Mulato or Indio, with only 13.6% identifying as Black and 18.3% as White.

Formed within colonial projects of biopower, Dominican identity is multiple and mutable, differing considerably from the rigidity of racial categorization that exists in the

United States. While census data in the United States mark Dominicans as most likely to self-identify as Black, the use of secondary and even tertiary racial identifiers allows

Dominicans to perform their racial identity on a continuum that is not fully recognized in the United States (Candelario, 2007). The incongruence between racial understandings in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic has been a point of interest for researchers as they question what happens to Dominican(-American)s as they navigate their new host society. A body of literature on racial identification showed that even beyond the first generation, conceptualizing race in terms of hypodescent often forces Dominicans into racial categories in which they are not comfortable and actively push against (Duany,

1998; Bailey, 2001, 2006). However, while this line of research has provided particular insights into how Dominicans conceive of themselves racially in the U.S. (Torres-

Saillant, 1997, 2010; Duany, 2008; Bailey, 2006; Candelario, 2007), it has yet to examine whether community and institutional notions of race have shifted in the spaces that Dominican(-American)s occupy (i.e., it remains to be known whether others agree with Dominican racial self-assessments). Further, the ways that intra-racial conflicts and solidarities shape Dominican(-American) understanding has yet to be intricately examined.

28 1.1.5 Dominican Linguistic Repertoires According to Pew Center research, about half of Dominican(-American) adults are Spanish dominant, while 40% are bilingual. Only a tenth of Dominicans are reported to be English dominant, a portion significantly lower than the 25% of overall Hispanics reported to be English dominant (Krogstad and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2015). Combined with the tendency for Dominicans to maintain Spanish proficiency cross-generationally

(Bailey, 2002; Toribio, 2003), the likelihood that the linguistic repertoires (Gumperz,

1964, 1965) of Dominican students enrolled in a U.S. school will include English and

Spanish is generally higher than that of members of other Hispanic groups. Research has revealed Dominican(-American) linguistic repertoires to include multiple varieties of standard and non-standard English and Spanish: American English, African American

Vernacular English (AAVE), Dominican Spanish, and Hispanicized English (Bailey,

2000, 2007; Nilep, 2006; Rubenstein-Ávila, 2007). Looking at Dominican speech in terms of repertoires allows research to move beyond a focus on particular features of

Dominican Spanish, such as the phonological traits of /s/ elision and [s] intrusion or the morpho-syntactic properties of overt expletive subjects and focalizing ser (Alba, 2004;

Bullock and Toribio, 2009, 2014a; Toribio and Clemons, 2019), to a focus on language practices as they are tied to interaction and identity construction. In this regard, research grounded in Speech Accommodation Theory (Giles, 1982) suggests that the ability to accommodate toward or away from an interlocutor is not merely a function of affect; it depends on the linguistic repertoires available to the speaker combined with the relative level of importance of the approval required from the interaction (Gallois et al., 2015;

29 Toribio, 2006). In the case of Dominican(-American) students, the exposure to

Dominican Spanish., AAVE, American English., and Hispanicized English allows for a wide range of linguistic possibilities that they must choose from in a given interaction.

In studies investigating language attitudes toward Spanish varieties, Caribbean varieties consistently find themselves at the bottom of preference hierarchies, with speakers often judging the varieties to be less correct and less pleasant to listen to (García et al., 1988; Alfaraz, 2002, 2014; Urciuoli, 2013; Carter and Callesano, 2018; Callesano and Carter, 2019). As Dominican(-American)s may be aware of these negative evaluations of their speech, style-shifting toward the more prestigious variety of Spanish in interactions with non-Dominican Hispanics may be expected (Toribio, 2000).

Similarly, when trying to show in-group membership with other Dominicans or

Dominican(-American)s, they may produce uniquely Dominican forms. Ochs (1993) argues that “speakers attempt to establish the social identities of themselves and others through verbally performing certain social acts and verbally displaying certain stances”

(p. 288). Consequently, the linking of particular linguistic forms with named identity categories (e.g., copular dropping as a particularly AAVE form) gives speakers the ability to linguistically perform their chosen identity. For Dominican(-American)s, who are able to straddle the boundaries of several named identity categorizations in the United States, moving between linguistic varieties is demonstrative of linguistic dexterity. The current study relies on the linguistic production of Dominican(-American)s in varying contexts in order to evaluate the ways that Dominicanidad is perceived and evaluated in public forums. 30 1.2 THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

1.2.1 Language and Social Interaction The intersection of language, race, and identity has been explored across a variety of disciplines and has shaped the way that each of these concepts is understood colloquially. Scholars have looked to answer questions surrounding the ways that linguistic forms have come to be associated with particular identities; the ways that cultural behaviors shape linguistic output; the ways that language and race map onto each other (Omoniyi, 2016; Rosa, 2019); the ways that ethnoracial identities are imagined and performed; the roles of the nation-state and its institutions in the formation of ethnoracial identities; and the ways that ethnoracial categories are constructed through linguistic discourse—both metalinguistically and performatively (Fishman and García, 2010;

Preece, 2016). Exploration of these questions has led to an extensive body of literature that, in many cases, has resulted in more questions than answers. In an attempt to show how research in the intersection of language, race, and identity has evolved and circulated over time, I look to a number of studies in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, education, and media studies in order to understand how research has impacted folk understanding of all three concepts.

Traditional work in anthropology functioned to cement the ideology of one language, one race. In this vein, language, much like race, could be passed down and inherited genetically, such that your race would determine your linguistic output rather than belonging to a particular socialized community of language practice. Linguists began exploring the social implications and results of racial categorizations on language 31 forms and productions during the age of descriptive sociolinguistics (Charity-Hudley,

2016). Scholars trained in this tradition relied on bounded categorical notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. In doing so, they began to describe the language production of people who fit the essentialized definitions of these categories, which ultimately resulted in the erasure and further marginalization of those who sit at the margins of categorization projects. Further, linguists began engaging the field of linguistic anthropology in the deconstruction of racial logics in order to explore identity. These researchers contend that analyzing language beliefs and usages not only offers the ability to theorize race but also highlights the intersections of race, class, and power in a variety of societal contexts that move beyond the histories of any particular nation (Alim et al.,

2016). In a study conducted in New York City, Toribio (2003) suggests that Black

Dominican immigrants are more likely to maintain Spanish cross-generationally than white Dominican immigrants, partly as a recourse for marking themselves as distinct from African-Americans in the U.S. setting, much as compatriots on the island draw on language in distinguishing themselves from Haitians (Toribio, 2006; Bullock and Toribio,

2014). However, research regarding Dominican language production, maintenance, and change as a lens for understanding racial construction and identification is virtually nonexistent. While it has been established that Dominicans’ racial self-identifications often exist in opposition to categorizations that circulate in U.S. consciousness, the question remains: How do Dominican(-American)s experience and respond to the consequences of the defined racial hierarchies as they exist in the United States?

32 Research exploring the links between identity construction and language performance may provide initial insights into these issues. Since the publication of

Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) seminal essay, “Identity and Interaction,” it is generally understood that identity is constructed far beyond the individual, with outside perceptions affecting identifications as much as personal beliefs and cultural narratives. Further, in an investigation of Spanish and identity among U.S. Latina/os, Showstack (2018) argues that dominant language ideologies provide the frames by which speakers and listeners understand the language meaning within particular contexts. Thus, the conversational frames conditioned by racial and linguistic ideologies have the ability to shape the ways that a speaker represents their identity with language in interaction. Speakers are also able to contest dominant assumptions about their identity through style-shifting (Baugh,

1983), code-switching (Toribio, 2011), and differentiated linguistic performances

(Bailey, 2000). For Dominican(-American)s, access to both English and Spanish language varieties may allow for the representation and maintenance of an ethno-racial identity that falls outside of dominant U.S. formulations.

1.2.2 A Raciolinguistic Perspective I interpret my data through a raciolinguistic perspective, defined by Rosa and

Flores (2017) as a critical method that moves beyond a focus on the behavior of racialized subjects (in our case, Dominicans) toward one that questions the social, historical, and cultural ideologies of the system under which they are performing language and identity. Rosa and Flores (2017) propose five key components of

33 raciolinguistics to approach the study of how language is raced in a particular society: (i) co-naturalization of race and language as part of the colonial formation of modernity; (ii) the positioning of the ‘white listening subject’ as part of the perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) the regulation and regimentation of linguistic and racial categorizations; (iv) the assemblages between interactions of varying social categorizations; and (v) the contestation of racial and linguistic hierarchies.

For the purposes of this dissertation, I position my participants as colonial subjects who continue to survive the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization of the Americas. Additionally, I understand their behavior to be evaluated not only through their relationships with each other but through the structures of whiteness, which regulate that which is seen as the center to which all individuals are marked as either natural or “other.” Further, because race and language are being co- naturalized as a unified category and responding to Rosa and Flores’s call to recognize social assemblages, I consider how linguistic perceptions are mapping onto non-binary racial categorizations, i.e., Black vs. non-Black Latinxs and Black Latinxs vs. Black

Americans. In other words, what happens at the margins of categorical boundaries? It is also important to investigate how systems and policies are instituted based on these perceptions. Moreover, in looking at youth identity development within social media and school spaces, I focus on understanding how students themselves acquire, utilize, and contest raciolinguistic perceptions. In framing the linguistic ideologies that result in different performances and perceptions of Dominican language practices as intricately tied to projects of colonial formations of power, the present project seeks to construct a 34 grounded theory of how language and race function together to create a social condition for a particular group of individuals.

Since I am primarily concerned with the ways that ethnoracial categories come to be, I situate the discursive racializations of Black subjectivities within the concept of raciolinguistic enregisterment, defined by Rosa and Flores (2017) as “an overarching framework with which to investigate relationships among prevailing sociolinguistic concepts that are often approached as distinct phenomena, such as code-switching, style- shifting, footing” (11). Where linguistic enregisterment is defined as the process

“whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized (or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users” (Agha, 2005, p.38),

Rosa and Flores note the “racial emblematization” inherent in many of these processes.

Thus, raciolinguistic enregisterment refers to processes whereby distinct forms of linguistic practices become racialized (Rosa and Flores, 2017). The framework of raciolinguistic enregisterment not only allows for an analysis of identity performances of individuals but also for an analysis of the discourses complicit in the construction of ethnoracial boundaries.

In addition to the linguistic expressions of identities taken up through raciolinguistic enregisterment, the “external validation of individual or group ethnic boundaries” (Nagel, 1994, p. 155) is an important aspect in the discursive processes of ethnic categorizations. According to Bonnie Urciuoli (1995), linguistic forms (i.e., language practices) are “the shape in which border making elements come [to be]” (p.

538). Urciuoli describes “borders’’ as the place where commonalities end and notes the 35 symbolic possibilities for language to do that work. A border can therefore be a place where mutual intelligibility is no longer possible. While this could refer to the actual ability to understand linguistic forms, language performance and perception also provides insights into mutual cultural intelligibility, such that a person may not be able to understand specific linguistic forms, but instead, is able to relate to it through its connection to a cultural heritage to which they allied themselves. Thus, the analysis of language becomes the analysis of the construction of bounded ethnoracial categories and their connected bounded linguistic categories.

Bounded language categories (and racial categories) are folk ideologies concretized by institutions in ways that impact the distribution of resources. This is particularly true for racialized populations that are perceived to have non-standard language practices and are thus classified deficient and ‘other.’ Once classified as ‘other,’ the struggle for resource allocation is no longer between the minoritized group and the dominant group, but rather between individuals who claim boundaries of difference with the ‘other.’ Tracing the multiple histories of studies that interrogate the language, race, and identities interface exposes the trajectory from assumption to ideology and allows for the (de)construction of the interface itself. Additionally, the competition for resources, visibilization, and socio-political power make it necessary to investigate intra-group relationships. While the question of what it means to ‘sound like a race’ persists, the methodologies that we use to explore this question have begun to evolve.

36 1.3 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS As mentioned above, there is no way to make comprehensive claims about the construction of racial categories through a single disciplinary frame. As such, each chapter of this dissertation applies a uniquely constructed and innovative methodological frame, drawing from literature and theory in the fields of linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and education. Race, which was defined above, is taken as the central concept of each chapter. It is understood as mutable and contextual and thus requires an investigation of social histories, ideologies, discourses, and embodied manifestations in order to contend with the three research strands presented at the beginning of this chapter.

1.3.1 Intra-racial conflicts and solidarities Chapter 2, “New Blacks: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the construction of the

African American/Dominican boundary of difference,” examines the ways that raciolinguistic ideologies are reflected in assertions of ethnoracial belonging for Afro-

Dominicans and their descendants in the United States. Framing my analysis at the nexus of language, race, and identity, I ask what mechanisms are used to perform Blackness and/or anti-blackness for Dominican(-American)s and in what ways this behavior contributes to our understanding of Blackness in the United States.

Drawing on literature in linguistic anthropology and ethnic studies, the study is framed in understandings of raciolinguistic ideologies, enregisterment, and stancetaking behaviors. Additionally, the study introduces identity negotiation within the process of

Black self-determination discussed throughout the dissertation. Specifically, I undertake a 37 phenomenological critical discourse analysis on 10 YouTube videos that discuss what I call the African American/Dominican boundary of difference. I investigate the positing of four key raciolinguistic ideologies: 1) the “co-naturalization of language and race” (i.e., bounded racial category as bounded language category); 2) the category fallacy (i.e., the conflation of race and ethnicity); and 3) the DNA ideology (i.e., race as genetic); 4) the accent ideology (i.e., the use of accent to authenticate racial belonging). Using Kiesling et al.’s (2018) online stance-taking methodology, I also conduct an extended critical conversation analysis on threads of between 14 and 25 comments to analyze the positive or negative affect, the strong or weak ‘investment,’ and the strong or weak ‘alignment’ with asserted ethno-raciolinguistic ideologies.

The results show that the primary inter-ethnic conflict between Dominican(-

American)s and African Americans arises in interaction due to the lack of concordance between ethnoracial terminology (i.e., Black interpreted as African American) and the racial construction under notions of hypodescent in the United States and mestizaje in

Latin America. Additionally, there was a moderate distancing from Blackness as a racial category, with the category “Black” being applied to the ethnic grouping of African

Americans by Dominican(- Americans) and through the contestation of Blackness as uniquely African American by Afro Diasporic counterparts. In short, the chapter acknowledges the ways that terminology matters, especially when considering pan-racial solidarities and conflicts.

38 1.3.2 Dominican Spanish as Black language practice In Chapter 3, “‘Dominicans be like’: Ethno-raciolinguistic stance-taking and the construction of Dominicanidad in the U.S.,” I interrogate processes of racialization for

Dominican(-American)s as a representative population of individuals who would be marked and identified as Black in the United States. Specifically, I interrogate Dominican

(youth) digital language practices alongside African American lexicalization processes to argue for the existence of a hemispheric and transnational Black American community of practice. I posit that looking at the language practices of Black subjects across national and linguistic boundaries ultimately shifts notions of race as they exist in the U.S.

Drawing on literature in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and Black studies, I engage theories of community of practice, stance-taking, and Black self- determination. This chapter adds to the flourishing field of raciolinguistics by positioning race as the central unit of linguistic analysis. Additionally, the project points to the mobilization of linguistic practices in the (re)formulation of bounded racial categories, destabilizing notions of Blackness as they have existed in the U.S. for hundreds of years.

Lastly, Dominican language practices and ethnoracial identifications are seen as central points of departure for the construction and mobilization of the emergent pan-ethnic category of Afro-Latinx and the existence of a Black Spanish variety.

1.3.3 Institutional impacts on the construction of racial categories In Chapter 4, “‘They Spanish; they ain’t Black’: Linguistic profiling and the construction of Dominican Blackness in school spaces,” I investigate the racializations of the Spanish language, which influences the boundary between Blackness and Latinidad in 39 a school context. Racial categorizations in the U.S. often serve to highlight differences over similarities, forcing people to make singular identifications: Black, White, Native

American, etc. As immigrants of Caribbean descent begin to occupy classroom spaces, they have to make decisions that not only leave them in grey spaces of identity but also influence policy decisions about the distribution of resources and the inclusion of sanctioned student activities.

In this ethnographic portrait of the planning and execution of a Black History

Month celebration, I explore the ways that teacher subject positionality, language use, and policy decisions impact student understandings of self and others. I present moments of conflict and solidarity between several subjects who may be classified under a pan- racial banner of Black in the United States. I explicate how introducing Caribbean histories to academic administrators and students can result in the building of bridges between heterogeneous Afro-Caribbean populations that occupy the space. I ask: What conditions drive linguistic processes of racialization? I also question in what ways institutional policies and practices reify the bounds of ideological race construction for students who live on the margins of both pan-racial and pan-ethnic identifications in the

United States. I argue that the racialization of linguistic categories often supersedes the physical manifestations of race. Ultimately, I maintain that the inclusion of pan-

Caribbean discourses in educational contexts can be used to unify populations that are often set apart. This final study draws on literature in education, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and Black studies (geographies) in order to construct a theoretical framework for the positing of a hemispheric Black language pedagogy that can be used to 40 educate and visibilize Black heterogeneity. I conclude the dissertation with a review of my findings, a reflection on the scholarly impact across the varying fields that this project engages, and finally I offer a potential way forward, focusing on future work on hemispheric Black language practices.

41 Chapter 2: New Blacks: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the construction of the African American/Dominican boundary of difference1

2.1 INTRODUCTION On Tuesday, June 25, 2019, Belcalis Almánzar, better known as Cardi B, took to

Instagram live to defend her Blackness. Her aim was to clarify confusion about her ethnoracial identity following a wave of criticism resulting from her Black Entertainment

Television (BET) Album of the Year and Best Female Hip-Hop Artist awards. People argued that she should not be eligible for the recognition because she is not Black, maintaining that her use of the Spanish language and her previous claims of Latinidad precluded her from Blackness. This policing of Blackness is not new (consult the early essays of Fanon, 1967 and more recent scholarship surrounding the policing of Blackness by Davis, 2010 and Shange, 2019). However, increased migrations from Latin America and the Caribbean over the last fifty years has enriched and complicated the racial landscapes of the U.S. In her response, Cardi B attempts to dispel the myth of the mutual exclusivity between Blackness and Latinidad:

People don’t be understanding shit. It’s like, ‘Cardi’s Latin, she’s not Black.’

And it’s like, ‘Bro, my features don’t come from…white people f—ing,

ok?’…But because Cardi speaks Spanish to people, she’s not Black even

1 A portion of this chapter was adapted and published while the dissertation research was being conducted and completed. All research is original and conducted by the first author: Clemons, A.M (2021). New Blacks: Language, DNA, and the Construction of the African American/Dominican Boundary of Difference. Genealogy, 5(1), 1. 42 though we have similar features, same skin complexion. But no, they want to

not put Cardi in it because I speak Spanish.

She explains that the problem is a fundamental confusion surrounding the differences between race, ethnicity, and nationality. Attributing this ignorance to a lack of proper education in the U.S. school systems, Cardi B arrives at the core of the matter regarding public discussions of race in the United States. First, that as a society, we have not yet agreed upon set definitions for terms of identity that are used in everyday language; and second, that part of the reason that we have not agreed is that there are societal institutions that either willfully obscure our comprehension or that at the very least have done very little to historicize the rise of these notions (Nagel, 1994, 2003; Telles, 2014).

I recognize these moments of identity negotiations as both personal and political. In my own life, being the child of an African American father and an Afro-Caribbean mother,

I have lived on the margins of identification. Often, these choices were made for me, given my dark complexion and racialized features. Nonetheless, significant travels outside the

United States have shown me that my features can be (and are often) read differently in other locations. Moreover, I have learned that the political projects of race and racialization in different socio-political contexts often bear heavily on my construction of self. The complexity of racial constructions becomes acute when considering the political implications of who can claim authentic identification within a particular group. Consider, for example, the ways that Barack Obama has been situated as the first Black president and

Kamala Harris as the first Black vice president. These politicians and the political

43 institutions within which they have situated their careers have relied on the maintenance of racial formations developed during U.S. colonial formations.

The mutability of racial categories has led most social and natural scientists to agree that race is constructed socially (Boas, 1982; Montagu, 1997; Omi and Winant, 2014).

Literature across the social sciences investigates the use of race as a tool to construct and maintain power within a society (Fanon, 1967; López, 1994; Hall, 1996; Crenshaw, 1991;

Delgado and Stefanic, 2017). It is this organization of power that leads sociologists Omi and Winant (2014) to posit race as a “master category,” noting that race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has influenced the definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of resources and the ideologies and practices of subordination and oppression (107). Moreover, the authors assert that the corporeal aspects of race, i.e., the distinction created between “white men and the others whom they ruled as patriarchal masters” (p. 108), gives “race” its ability to dominate all other social categories, including gender, social class, and sexuality.

Nonetheless, Omi and Winant (2014) note a key conundrum for those who theorize race, in that “race and racial meanings are neither stable nor consistent” (p. 2). The mutability of racial meaning suggests that categories used to define racial identity are in constant flux, with emerging categories alongside the reconstitution of existing categories in the struggle for socio-political, economic, and cultural power. Nevertheless, boundaries exist, and individuals are ultimately unable to escape some form of category ratification— an inevitable click on a U.S. census classification for race and ethnicity, a school or grant application, a health care form. In making these selections, individuals are collectively 44 defining the bounds of these categories. The question remains: How exactly are these boundaries created, and what are the effects of the boundaries? Given the differential social constructions of race and ethnicity in contexts of origin and migration, the competition for scarce resources among marginalized groups, and the complex relationships with different colonial histories, it is nearly impossible to have a comprehensive understanding of

Blackness in the United States from a singular disciplinary lens. This study thus draws from concepts developed in linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and critical race theories from both Black and Latinx studies. In doing so, I attempt to develop a foundational framework for the ideological construction of Dominicanidad and the reconstruction of

Blackness as they are currently understood in the United States.

I situate Blackness as an organizing concept of American life, following scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, and Ibram X. Kendi. That is, Blackness, as a concept, is the tool by which white supremacy can claim social capital. Much like

Hartman’s construction of the subjugated liberal individual that is at once equal yet forever inferior, American society exists within a hierarchy—one that necessitates the continual reconstitution of white supremacy for a reproduction of all that has been defined as

“American life.” This capital, which can be traced back to the rules and regulations that structured the U.S. as a slaveholding society, manifests in the ability to enact policies, both legal and social, over its public. Hartman (1997) notes the ability to dictate policy based on racial logics as central to Black (enslaved) existence in civil society:

Here I want to focus on a singular aspect of the slave’s existence in civil

society—the submission of the slave to all whites…to be sure, the laws of 45 slavery subjected the enslaved to the absolute control and authority of any and

every member of the dominant race. At the very least, the relations of chattel

slavery served to enhance whiteness by racializing rights and entitlements,

designating inferior and superior races and granting whites’ dominion over

blacks. (Hartman, 1997, p. 24)

Hartman describes the condition of Blackness in the United States as always asserted in relation to the dominant, such that allowing Black self-determination becomes a threat to the very existence of whiteness. Moreover, whiteness is forever reliant on

Blackness as a way to re-imagine, re-construct, and re-insert itself as the dominant

(Bloom, 2019). Still, this refashioning of whiteness has never successfully stifled the move toward Black self-determination, evidenced by ever-growing movements such as the Black Power movement of the 70s and, more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement (Hooker, 2016). I argue that to understand Black self-determination, we must look beyond the Black/White binary in negotiations of race and identity in the Americas.

Therefore, the current project explores several moments of cross-ethnic conflicts and solidarities and the role that language plays in mapping the margins of identity and ethnoracial categorizations for Dominican(-American)s in the United States. Throughout this chapter, I use the term ethnoracial to underline the inextricable association between ethnicity, as heritage linked to a particular nation-state, and race, as the corporeal manifestation of colonial categorization projects. In certain cases, I will refer to nationality as a distinguishing characteristic noted in my data. In these cases, nationality refers to the political belonging or citizenship in a particular nation-state as it is currently 46 defined. Lastly, I use the term pan-racial to refer to racial categories that cannot be linked to one particular ethnicity or nationality. What should be noted is that all of these categories are constructed in contextualized and flexible ways. The marking of boundaries of belonging is complex and should be considered in relation to sociohistoric moments, narratives of identity, and political commitments (Yuval-Davis, 2011).

Through investigations of interactions between members of the pan-racial group—Black—we can theorize about how we define boundaries of belonging. We are able to negotiate where Afro-Latinxs, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans and their U.S.-born children fit into the schema of Blackness in this country. More importantly, and for our purposes here, we can begin to theorize race through empirical analyses of language and language ideologies. Specifically, I examine how four raciolinguistic ideologies are reflected in assertions of ethnoracial belonging for Afro-Dominicans and their descendants in the United States. I formulate my investigation with two guiding questions: What linguistic ideologies are implicated in the construction of Blackness for

Dominicans and Dominican-Americans in the United States? And what mechanisms are used to create what I call the African American/Dominican boundary of difference?

In the following sections, I provide a brief introduction to the ideologies as they were developed in the literature alongside the adaptation made for the current study. I will then review some theoretical underpinnings from which I frame the study and present a novel methodology for exploring raciolinguistic ideologies. I examine individual stances toward raciolinguistic ideologies through a critical stancetaking analysis, adapted from Kiesling et al. (2018), which allows me to understand the 47 multilectal nature of ethnoracial performance and negotiation. Lastly, I present the current data and a discussion of their implications in regards to the research questions posed.

2. 2 FRAMEWORKS

2.2.1 A Raciolinguistic perspective Work in the emerging field of raciolinguistics has begun to explore how race is being remapped onto language (Alim, 2016; Zentella, 2016a; Rosa and Flores, 2017).

While it is no longer “appropriate” (or legal) to discriminate on the basis of physical characteristics that have been ideologically bound to notions of race, language still provides an open space for the enactment of racialized violence and discrimination against marginalized groups of people (Alim et al., 2020). In this case, the way we assign value to particular linguistic forms and performances becomes the basis by which we understand a racial category. Several of the notions found in the construction of racialized and linguistic value can be evaluated through what Flores and Rosa (2017) term a raciolinguistic perspective. In their call to action, Rosa and Flores contend that taking a raciolinguistic perspective allows for an investigation of ideological frames that are complicit in the (re)mapping of race from biology onto language as linked to “the colonial formation of modernity” (3). The intimate relationship between language and race has been evidenced across the literature, drawing on scholarship from the fields of anthropology, education, political studies, ethnic studies, and linguistics (Lo, 2020). One of the most impressive examples of the symbolic linkage between what people see and

48 hear was provided in John Baugh’s (2003) study of linguistic profiling, in which over

80% of his participants were able to accurately identify a person’s racial identity after hearing the word “hello.” Thus, the examination of people’s choices in regards to identity

(terms) can and should be taken up through the lens of linguistics.

In order to understand the processes involved in the mapping of language onto identity, it is important to explore how individuals perform their identities linguistically.

In this vein, it has long been accepted that language performances shift in relation to interaction (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992; Fairclough, 2001; Alim, 2016; Rosa and Flores,

2017) and that these interactions are integral in the formation of self and others (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Coupland, 2007). In other words, we have already come to acknowledge that processes of dialectical language production are closely aligned with the processes of dialectical ethnoracial construction (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992; Nagel, 1994; Fought,

2006). Further, as Ochs (1993) argues, we know that “speakers attempt to establish the social identities of themselves and others through verbally performing certain social acts and verbally displaying certain stances” (p. 288). While the idea that identity is a dialectical process is not a new one, I argue that the formation of identity categories and ethnic categorizations is not a dialectical process between two interlocutors but rather a multilectical process of social (re)colonization meant to uphold and normalize already established hierarchies of power. Every interlocutor comes to an interaction with a set of

(subconscious) ideologies drawn into racialization processes. As such, every act of speech is implicated in the confirmation or contestation of white supremacy as the current organizing structure of U.S. society. 49 To explore the combined process of ethnoracial identification and shifting linguistic practices, I call on the concept of raciolinguistic enregisterment defined in section 1.2.2. Rosa and Flores (2017) propose raciolinguistic enregisterment as the processes by which distinct forms of linguistic practices become racialized. In this study,

I expand the concept of raciolinguistic enregisterment to theorize about how certain ideologies that link language, race, and identity become central to our understanding of category binding. The framework of raciolinguistic enregisterment allows for an analysis of individuals’ identity performances and an analysis of the discourses complicit in the construction of ethnoracial boundaries, therefore affording for a more nuanced understanding of Blackness as it currently exists in the United States.

In addition to the linguistic expressions of identities produced through raciolinguistic enregisterment, the “external validation of individual or group ethnic boundaries” is an important aspect in the discursive processes of ethnic categorizations.

The process of boundary creation has been explored extensively in language research.

Urciuoli (1995) asserts that linguistic forms (i.e., language practices) are “the shape in which border making elements come [to be]” (p. 538). She describes “borders” as the place where commonalities end and remarks on the symbolic possibilities for language to accomplish that work. In brief, a border can therefore be a place where mutual intelligibility is no longer possible. While this was originally applied to the ability to understand linguistic forms, I propose that mutual intelligibility also occurs at the ideological level, whereby a disagreement on ideological premises is more difficult to overcome than a linguistic misunderstanding. Thus, the analysis of linguistic ideologies 50 becomes the analysis of the bounded ethnoracial categories and the related bounded linguistic categories.

In positing race—and Blackness in particular—as an organizing principle of

American society, I understand racial construction as an ideological mechanism that informs and maintains hierarchies of power within a particular society (Fairclough, 2001;

Bonilla-Silva, 1997, 2006). These hierarchies are defended by creating strong ideological boundaries of belonging and, more importantly, boundaries of exclusion (Gal and Irvine,

1995; Irvine et al., 2009; García Peña, 2015, 2016). In defining these boundaries, I reprise the concept of stance in the interactional construction of self and others. Stance is defined, in this case, as the way that individuals signal relationships to particular concepts through linguistic choices (Johnstone, 2007, 2009; Du Bois, 2007). I place these interactions in relation to the posited raciolinguistic ideologies as they emerge in the data.

I apply Kiesling et al.’s (2018) notion of stance focus to highlight the frequency and appearance of the ideologies in the data. The stance focus is defined as the “discursive figure, [which can be] the animator, ideas represented in the discourse, or other texts” (p.

687). I position the raciolinguistic ideologies found in conversations about

Dominicanidad, Latinidad, and Blackness as the discursive figure or stance focus of each interaction. Proclamations that suggest one of these ideologies can then be analyzed based on an interlocutor’s affect toward, investment in, and alignment with a particular point of view.

51 2.2.2 Racialization of Latinidad as mutually exclusive from Blackness in the United States In centering Blackness in the United States, I focus on Dominican(-American)s for a variety of reasons: the numerous linguistic repertoires to which Dominicans have access and employ in their daily lives (Bailey, 2000, 2007; Toribio, 2003, 2006; Nilep,

2006; Rubinstein-Ávila, 2007); the ample research that has shown that Dominicans contest socially constructed race in the United States (Bailey, 2000, 2002; Duany 1998,

2008; Itzigsohn et al., 1999; Jensen et al., 2006; Bratini, 2012); and the unique historical situation of the enslaved and freed African populations in the Spanish-controlled region of Quisqueya (the indigenous name of the island which now hosts the Dominican

Republic and Haiti) (Torres-Saillant, 1999; Candelario, 2007). Further, Dominicans have been racialized in the Dominican Republic—as a result of the tumultuous history of colonialism and subsequent imperialism—and in the United States, as transnational beings. Thus, in the move toward Dominican self-determination, there is often an abrupt and contradictory negotiation of the ideological rupture between Blackness and

Latinidad. As such, a focus on Dominican subjectivities allows us to understand how the project of Latinidad is implicated in the refashioning of Blackness as it has historically existed in the United States.

As mentioned in section 1.1.4, the racial logics of the United States and the

Dominican Republic differ in marked ways. The United States continues to function within racial binaries, characterized by what is popularly known as the “one-drop rule” of hypodescent, which forces individuals to adopt the identity of the most racially subordinate group and posits a myth of purity. In the Dominican Republic, there is a 52 tripartite conceptualization of race in which the labels Black, White, and Mixed co-exist.

This conceptualization of race is framed in narratives of mestizaje that promote Latinidad as a perfect composition of European, African, and Indigenous racial mixture

(Candelario, 2001, 2007; Hooker, 2017). Formed within colonial projects of biopower,

Dominican identity is noted as multiple and mutable, differing considerably from the rigidity of racial categorization that exists in the United States (García Peña, 2016).

The incongruence between racial conceptualizations in the U.S. and the

Dominican Republic has been a point of interest for researchers as they question what happens to Dominican(-American)s as they navigate their new host society. I draw on this body of literature (discussed in section 1.1.4) to disrupt the tendency to compare U.S. racial schemas with those of Latin America on simply a one-to-one basis. This research, therefore, examines a transnational population in order to provide insights into the ways that each system of racial categorization relies on the promotion and mobilization of white supremacy and anti-Black racism and thus cannot be disentangled as independent systems. Additionally, though prior studies showed contestations of U.S.-based racial categorizations for Dominican youth (Duany, 1998; Bailey, 2000, 2002, 2007; Toribio,

2003, 2006), I seek to understand the ways that these contestations have reshaped rather than denied the racial logics of the United States—both for Dominicans and the communities in which they interact most frequently.

53 2.3 THE CURRENT STUDY For the purposes of this chapter, I recall four raciolinguistic ideologies that have been previously defined in the literature (Lippi-Green, 2012; Rosa and Flores, 2017), as well as a dominant racial ideology that has structured much of the previous understandings of race in fields such as anthropology and linguistics: (i) Co-Naturalization of language and race;

(ii) Regimentation of linguistic and racial categories; (iii) Standard language ideology; and

(iv) Genetic race. In my preliminary review, I explored how these ideologies appeared in my data set, giving rise to four raciolinguistic stance foci (Kiesling et al. 2018) (i) DNA ideology, (ii) Categorization fallacy, (iii) Co-naturalization of language and race, and (iv)

Accent Ideology. Each of the raciolinguistic stance foci is discussed in turn below.

2.3.1 DNA Ideology Notwithstanding the substantial research conducted in fields such as evolutionary biology and genetics that disproves biological race, notions of personhood as linked to biological factors still circulate in conversations about identity and categorization in the

United States and beyond (Goodman et al., 2012). Stemming from the enlightenment era science of taxonomy and classification, these conversations are buttressed by the pervasiveness of race as natural and definable (Smedley, 1993; Gregory and Sanjek,

1994). While social scientists and the major scholarly organizations to which they belong have generally moved away from race as a biological or scientific concept (Morning,

2007), an adherence to eugenic and scientific projects of race persists (Omi and Winant,

2014; Morning, 2007; Williams, 2013). These notions are reified through public narratives of identity based on DNA testing, drawing eugenics projects from the life 54 sciences into popular culture ( Nelson, 2016; Roth & Ivemark, 2018). As will be explained below, in my data coding, I mark as DNA ideology any references to physical features as indicative of race; blood percentage; how others perceive you as physically belonging to a race (i.e., ascribed or street race) (López et al., 2018); genetic heritage; and/or the mention of race as tied to a historical belonging in an antiquitous landmass.

2.3.2 Category Fallacy (adapted from ideologies of regimentation of linguistic and racial categories) Referencing the notions of regimentation of racial and linguistic categories, Rosa and

Flores (2017) consider the processes by which named language categories and named racial categories are concretized. The authors introduce raciolinguistic enregisterment, an approach to investigating the perception of language varieties and racial categories as coherent sets. The authors argue that the way racial categories have been equated with “empirically distinctive sets of linguistic features” produced by named populations “reflects a reliance upon a metaphysics of raciolinguistic presence—a sense that languages, varieties, and racial groups are empirical

‘things’ in the first place” (p.11-12). Raciolinguistic enregisterment asks researchers to move beyond the description of language practices as production of distinct linguistic features to explore how speakers have been positioned in relation to particular named racial categories and linguistic varieties. I take this a step forward by investigating how speakers have been positioned in relation to named ethnic categories. Furthermore, I look at the ways that named racial and ethnic categories have been conflated in an effort to define individuals as belonging within or outside of contemporary definitions of said categorizations.

55 Drawing on Cardi B’s assertion that “people don’t be knowing the difference between race, nationality, and ethnicity...and it’s not their fault because schools don’t be teaching this shit,” I explore the regimentation of linguistic and racial categories under an ideology which I have termed categorization fallacy. Categorization fallacy is marked as a stance focus any time a person conflates ethnicity with race or vice versa, or any time someone tries to disentangle the concepts in the negotiation of ethnoracial identity for themselves or others.

2.3.3 Co-naturalization of language and race Rosa and Flores (2017) argue that a focus on raciolinguistic ideologies “illuminates the importance of conceptualizing contemporary debates about racial and linguistic authenticity in relation to colonial logics through which boundaries delimiting categories of race and language are co-naturalized in shifting ways as part of broader power formations” (p. 6). The authors describe a process whereby the European project of colonialism functioned as a site where not only phenotypic differences were employed in the construction of power hierarchies between

European and non-Europeans, but also a concerted imposition of language ideologies marking non-European languages as “savage” and “unsophisticated” played a large role in the organization of society. During the colonial period (and as a result of it), speakers of non-

European languages were framed as naturally inferior and, in many cases, subhuman. As time went on, the only way that indigenous populations could become ‘civilized’ was through the mastery of European languages, a mastery only achieved through the complete erasure of their

56 languages. Even then, the linkage of other racial factors such as phenotype impacted the fact that any language produced by racialized beings was deemed deficient.

Stemming from Rosa and Flores description of the context by which linguistic ideologies are mapped onto ideologies about racial inferiority, I argue that the process of co-naturalizing language and race takes many forms in contemporary everyday discursive practices. I adapt Rosa and Flores’s understanding of the “co-naturalization of language and race as part of the colonial formation of modernity” into an ideology whereby ideas about the language practices of an individual are used in the creation of an ethnoracial category for that person, or in the ratification of belonging within an already existing ethnoracial category. In these cases, we can see the co- naturalization of language and race in the use of bounded languages as reference terms for identity among a distinct group of speakers (i.e., “Spanish” as an ethnoracial term for those who have heritage in Spanish-speaking regions of the Americas whether they have maintained the language or not). When referencing Dominicans, this ideology becomes particularly important due to a historical presence in a region where this practice is well known and largely accepted by the people identified by the term and those who do not fall under the category. Though limited work has been done regarding this phenomenon, it is a widely known and accepted practice in

New York City as well as other Northeastern cities where Dominicans traditionally reside

(Morales, 2019).

I mark a stance focus as “co-naturalization” when a speaker uses a bounded language category as a bounded racial term for a specific referent. Additionally, I mark for the ideology when people assign racial belonging based on Spanish “sounding” names, language practices

57 (such as code-switching between Spanish and English), (perceived) language ability, or

(perceived) lack of language ability.

2.3.4 Accent Ideology (adapted from Standard Language ideologies) The Standard Language Ideology is responsible for the formation of beliefs about what is “good” language or “bad” language in a designated language variety (Milroy,

2001; Kroskrity, 2004; Lippi-Green, 2012). Thus, in the same way that value is assigned in the construction of racial boundaries, standard language ideology is implicated in the construction of linguistic boundaries—which I have already indicated is intimately tied to projects of racial formation. Lippi-Green (2012) defines Standard Language Ideology as

“a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogeneous spoken language which is promoted and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and which names as its model written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper- middle class” (p. 67). Situating the study within the colonial formations of the United

States, I understand the ideological enregisterment of a “standard language variety” as necessary for the construction of a white democratic republic (Flores, 2013). In the

United States, notions of democracy, republicanism, and citizenry formed the basis for constructing and disseminating standardized language. These standardization projects have formed the basis for the development of formal education, with thinkers such as

Noah Webster and Horace Mann—often lauded for their role in creating public education—leading the charge to formalize language teaching, including the development of uniquely U.S. linguistic forms alongside the introduction of uniquely “American”

58 terminology in the formation of the American citizen. Noah Webster, the father of the most prominent and hegemonic U.S. English dictionary, promoted the need for a

“common language” as crucial to the building of a nation. Noah Webster was expressly concerned with the “democratic” construction of the nation, often calling on the “public” to inform and ratify the standard forms as they were being written into grammar books.

Nonetheless, his conception of the public was generally white and landowning and therefore formed the basis for a cis white male variety of language as the standard

(Thattai, 2001).

That the United States is formed within notions of standard language ideology immensely informs how people interact with identity at every level of society. Moreover, standard language ideologies are often adopted even by those who would be negatively evaluated based on their natural (or “native”) speech patterns. In these ratifications of the standard language, marginalized speakers become complicit in policing. Language policing takes several forms, but one of the most obvious forms is the policing of one’s

“accent” as correct or incorrect. This policing suggests a standard accent that can be defined and attributed to a concrete group. Thus, the ability to produce a standard accent allows entry or denial of entry into the bounds of that group. For the purposes here, I have reduced the more encompassing notion of standard language ideologies to an accent ideology, evidenced by comments regarding a speaker’s accent or “non-accent” as indicative of belonging to a particular ethnoracial categorization. I mark this stance foci as “accent ideology” when there is a reference to belonging based on the ability to produce a standardized or unmarked form of a language. In this case, standard English 59 would mark one as belonging to the United States, whereas unaccented Spanish would ratify belonging in the pan-ethnic grouping of Latinxs.

2.4 METHODOLOGY The current project relies on comments from Dominicans and those who interact with them on the social media platform YouTube. In this way, I am able to theorize about the shifting conception of race (and specifically Blackness) for Dominicans in the United

States. In fact, if we recall the Instagram live posted by Cardi B, she intended to respond to a Black diaspora who had been engaged in policing her identity. For Cardi, her

Blackness was never in question, but rather the ideas about what constitutes Blackness needed further clarification. To explore the construction of Blackness through the ethnoracial pronouncements of Dominican Americans and other Black diasporic beings, I begin with a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough and Wodak, 1995) of ten YouTube videos and selected comments posted between 2018 and 2020. I follow with a critical conversation analysis of stancetaking in the comment section of the original posts.

2.4.1 Data Video data amounted to 128 minutes of footage, which was transcribed by hand and then entered into the qualitative analysis software Dedoose (Dedoose Version

8.3.35). The videos each treat the topic of Dominican identity and Blackness and are produced by Dominican(-American)s, African Americans, and others who identify as

Afro-Latinx (Image 2.1).

60

Image 2.1: YouTube content producers

The collection of the video data consisted of the transcription of each YouTube video in its entirety and a selection of comment threads from each video. Comment selections were taken from the most recent comments that had between 15 and 50 responses to ensure that there was enough conversation to analyze engagement with the ideologies presented in the parent comments. Parent comments that did not engage any 61 raciolinguistic ideology were excluded from the analysis. A listing of the videos and comment metadata is included in Table 2.1.

Video Title and Tag Time # # words comments

Dominicans are not black explained  (D1) 5:12 1023 75

 Are Dominicans black??? Final answer! (with pictures of my 9:42 2109 94 family (D2)

Why Dominicans say they are not Black they Dominican (C1) 17:06 3094 105

Dominicans- “The Self-Hating Black Latinos…”  (D3) 20:21 4557 82

I’m not Black; I’m Dominican (P1) 11:12 2137 90

Dominican Girl Says SHES NOT BLACK goes viral WHAT ARE 0:59 217 96 YOUR THOUGHTS? (D4)

Cardi Says She’s Afro Latina (US1) 22:03 5400 102

Cardi B is an Afro Latino Now| An Afro Latina Opinion (P2) 8:47 1639 75

Godfrey Impersonates Dominicans Refusing to Accept They’re Black 12:54 3049 85 (Flashback) (N1)

BLACKS VS DOMINICANS (D5) 13:39 3021 84

Table 2.1: YouTube Video Metadata

For each video, five comment threads displaying raciolinguistic ideologies were selected for coding by hand, with between 15 and 25 child comments coded by two independent raters for the parent comment ideology alongside any additional ideologies that emerged in the discussion (Image 2.2). Excerpts were extracted at the sentence level in the content videos, while each comment represented an individual excerpt in the conversation analysis.

62

Image 2.2: Screenshot of comment thread

2.4.2 Procedures To perform the analysis, I adapt the approach developed by Kiesling et al. (2018) in their analysis of Reddit online forums. The concept of stance is defined by Kiesling et al. as “the discursive creation of a relationship between a language user and some discursive figure, and to other language users in relation to that figure” (p. 687). While the authors use a grounded theory approach to investigate the emergence of discursive figures—called stance foci in their study, my adaptation phenomenologically proffers the existence of four raciolinguistic ideologies as the stance foci of investigation, including discussions of Blackness, Latinidad, Spanish or English usage, and competences, or ethnoracial identifications. 63

Raciolinguistic Definition Ideology

DNA Ideology This is any reference to the body, blood, or features in relation to claims of a particular race or ethnicity. This is also any reference to heritage or genetic connections to a particular space. Lastly, this included references to genetic testing and DNA as indicative of ethnoracial identifications.

Categorization This is any reference to a conflation of race and ethnicity; a confusion about how Fallacy to categorize race or ethnicity; or the actual conflation of race and ethnicity.

Co-Naturalization of This is when participants conflate their racial identity with a language category. Language and Race In some cases, this will also refer to someone not belonging to a race because of a lack of ability to speak a language in a specific way.

Accent Ideology This is any reference to increased belonging in a particular ethnic group because of an accent (or lack thereof). Alternatively, it references to accents as indicative of belonging to a particular ethnic group.

Table 2.2: Focal Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Using the themes drawn out from my discourse analysis and the theoretical framework of Rosa and Flores (2017), I demarcate four raciolinguistic stance foci to be analyzed: DNA ideology, categorization ideology, co-naturalization of language and race, and accent ideology. These ideologies were presented above and brief descriptions are provided in table 2.2 for ease of reference. The appearance of these ideologies in explicit pronouncements makes central the stances that individuals have taken towards

Blackness as a named category.

64 2.4.3 Measures To evaluate attitudes toward the stance focus (the focal raciolinguistic ideologies),

I weighed three stance dimensions of affect, investment, alignment for each excerpt on a

1-5-point Likert scale, with higher scores indicating greater alignment and investment or more positive affect toward coded ideologies. These measures are operationalized as follows: Affect represents “the polarity or quality of the [raciolinguistic ideology]”

(Kiesling et al., 2018, p. 688). For this measure, I identify the interlocutor’s positive or negative evaluation of the raciolinguistic ideology. Investment is “the dimension of how strongly invested in the talk the speaker is, [and] how committed they signal their relationship to the [raciolinguistic ideology]” (p. 688). This was indicated through interlocutors’ recognition of and perceived willingness to qualify and take part in a discussion of the indicated raciolinguistic ideology. Last, alignment refers to interlocutors’ agreement with the respective raciolinguistic ideology. Stance dimension definitions can be found in Table 2.3.

Stance Definition Dimension

Affect The positive or negative attitude (or affect) toward the raciolinguistic ideology. Coders take into account additional emoticon symbols for affective power. A score of 1 indicates highly negative feelings toward the ideology, with 5 indicating highly positive feelings toward the ideology.

Investment The level of interaction with the posited ideology. Coders ask whether the commenters exhibit the ideology in their responses. A score of 1 indicates that the ideology did not appear at all. In these cases, the ideology is not marked for affect or alignment. A score of 5 indicates a complete focus on the ideology and received a score for affect and alignment

Alignment The level of support for the posited ideology. Coders asked whether the author agrees or disagrees with the posited ideology. A score of 1 indicates high disagreement, and 5 indicates complete accord with the ideology. 65

Table 2.3: Stance Dimension definitions

The evaluation of these stance dimensions can be illustrated with the YouTube comment in figure 1, which was left on the “Gina Rodriguez Miss Bala (Spanish)” video.

Figure 1. “Her Spanish is good. What y’all talking about? It’s a new era

for me. I came to this country when I was 12 and I have problems with my

Spanish because my goal was to learn perfect English with no accent. So

now I speak Spanglish. It’s a new culture and I love it.”

For this comment, the interlocutor is discussing the public figure’s Spanish-speaking ability, as demonstrated in the content video. The topic is reflective of Standard

Language Ideology as it refers to good or bad language abilities. Thus, “Standard

Language Ideology” is coded as the stance focus or raciolinguistic ideology.

User # of Stance Standard Language Ideology Name Parent Comment replies foci (S.L.) Investment Alignment Affect

Her Spanish is good. What y’all talking about ? It’s a new era even for me. I came to this country when I was 12 and I have problems with my Spanish because my (Redacted) goal was to learn perfect English with no 3 months accent. So now I speak Spanglish. It’s a ago new culture and I love it 0 SL 5 4 4

Figure 2.1: Coding Example for Standard Language Ideology

66 The affect is coded as positive through the evaluation of this ideology expressed through

“good” and “I love it.” The investment is high, as the commenter committed to the evaluation of language as a deviation of certainty toward the ideology. The alignment is high because the commenter is demonstrating agreement with Standard Language

Ideology through the evaluation of the public figure’s language proficiency. Other indicators of affect, alignment, and investment came from the analysis of emojis.

Symbols such as  were evaluated and incorporated into the weighted scores.

2.4.4 Analyses Descriptive analyses were completed for the presence of each ideology. Analyses were also conducted to capture differences in frequency of ideologies based on the subject positionality of the original video posters—Dominican, African American, or

Afro-diasporic. Additional analyses were run to ascertain how ideologies co-occurred and whether co-occurrence differed based on subject positionality. Lastly, each ideology was run separately for the three stance dimensions: affect, investment, and alignment. Co- occurring ideologies were analyzed as sets to indicate shifts in stance dimension when both ideologies were present in a statement. Exemplars were extracted from representative excerpts. Scale rating definitions can be found in table 2.4.

67

Stance 1 2 3 4 5 Dimension

AFFECT This indicates This indicates This indicates This indicates This indicates strong negative negative neither positive strong feelings towards feelings negative nor feelings positive the stance focus towards the positive towards the feelings stance focus feelings stance focus toward the towards the stance focus stance focus

INVESTMENT This This indicates This indicates This indicates This indicates indicates very low investment neither high medium high minimum in the claim nor low investment in investment in investment in towards the investment in the claim the claim the claim stance focus the claim towards the towards the towards the towards the stance focus stance focus stance focus stance focus

ALIGNMENT This indicates This indicates This indicates This indicates This indicates high some neither some high misalignment in misalignment alignment or agreement (or agreement (or the orientation in the misalignment alignment) in alignment) in towards the orientation in orientation orientation orientation stance focus as towards the towards the towards the towards the either the stance focus as stance focus as stance focus stance focus original poster, either the either the as either the as either the or the original poster, original poster, original original commenters or the or the poster, or the poster, or the prior commenters commenters commenters commenters prior prior. prior prior

Table 2.4: Scale rating definitions

68 2.5 RESULTS Much of the construction of racialized and linguistic value can be located in what

Flores and Rosa (2015) term raciolinguistic ideologies. These are ideological frames that conflate racialized bodies to objective linguistic practices. Work in the emerging field of raciolinguistics has begun to explore the remapping of race onto language so that we can begin to understand the ways that language ideologies are implicated in reinforcing already existing hierarchies of power (Lawrence and Clemons, 2021). To understand the ways in which discursive boundaries were created between members of the pan-ethnic categorization Black in the United States, an analysis of ten YouTube videos and five comment threads were selected and analyzed for a total of 933 excerpts, which yielded

925 tokens of the focal raciolinguistic ideologies identified (Table 2.5). The ideologies are discussed in order of magnitude, with the most frequently occurring first.

Ideology Frequency

DNA Ideology 535

Categorization Fallacy 372

Co-naturalization of language and race 16

Accent Ideology 2*

Total 925

Table 2.5. Raciolinguistic stance foci frequency.

69 2.5.1 DNA ideology Genetics as an indicator of racial belonging was the most prevalent ideology found throughout the data set. It seems that despite a shift in academic knowledge about race, the idea of scientific race is not simply persisting, but dominating ideas about identity and belonging. References to DNA, blood, African, Indian, and European ancestry and heritage were all called on to validate or contest Blackness for Dominicans on the island and in the United States (1). DNA ideologies were also produced with assertions of phenotype as indicative of authentic race categorization (2). Here we see dark skin and African features as demonstrative of African heritage and supposed belonging in the ethnoracial category Black. In this way, the commenter is privileging notions of “ascribed race,” i.e., race assigned to an individual by others and “street race,” i.e., the race you think you would be ascribed on the street (López et al., 2018), which cannot be subverted by self-identification since they rely on undeniable physical attributes.2

1. Dominicans acknowledge their African ancestry just like they do their Indian and

European. I’ve never heard a Dominican that has obviously African features say

that he doesn’t have African blood. 2. The Average Dominican has more

European DNA than they do African. Yet we don’t run around saying we’re e

European. 3. I’d be just as ashamed to claim African ancestors as I am to claim

whites/Europeans. Like y’all say “whites were rapist,” but you forget that the

2Examples are represented exactly as drawn from source, including orthographic irregularities. As internet talk allows for the creation of new forms of talk, respecting the original form of the post provides a more nuanced reading. Additionally, it allows for a more pointed understanding of negotiations of meaning occurring at the level of the word. 70 Africans sold their own to the whites making their rape and mistreatment

possible. That’s one of the reason we as well as other nations in Latin America

developed our own identity.

2. la verdad es que hay muchos dominicanos de piel oscura y con rasgos africanos

que rechazan su herencia africana. Si la raza negra estuviera en buenas

circunstancias, apuesto a que más dominicanos se clasificarían como negros

orgullosamente. Sin embargo, como dices, mucha gente latina/dominicana si

tiene herencia mezclada y no quiero decir que TODOS los latinos son

“africanos”. Solo refiero a los dominicanos que se ven muy africanos. Además

muchos españoles son racistas contra los latinos así que no podemos olvidar lo

que hicieron a nuestros ancestros nativos y africanos  no se debe ser tan

orgulloso de tener sangre española cuando a ellos no les importa un carajo de la

cultura caribeña.

[The truth is there are a lot of dark skinned Dominicans with African features who

deny their African heritage. If the Black race was in better conditions, I bet more

Dominicans would identify themselves as proudly Black. In any case, like you

say, a lot of Latin@/Dominican people do have mixed heritage and I don’t want

to say ALL Latin@s are “African.” I am only referring to the Dominicans who

look very African. Plus, many Spanish people are racist against Latin@s so we

can’t forget what they did to our native and African ancestors  We should not

be proud of having Spanish blood when they could give a F—K about Caribbean

culture.] 71

Commenters who subscribed to this ideology often relied on percentages of ancestry ascertained through DNA profiling services such as 23&me® and AncestryDNA® to advance belonging in one group or another, or to contest belonging in any particular group, as in examples (3) and (4).

3. It’s mostly Black Americans who want you to be Black lol, if you go to any

Dominican DNA video you will see Black Americans commenting. Even though

the person is only 30% Black lol. And most Dominicans are too mixed to be

Black. They don’t have the skin or hair texture.

4. I am only 10%African that doesn’t make me only African. Some people are

delusional and thinks Dominican are only black.

In addition to comments about DNA, phenotype, and ancestry, genetic distinctions were invoked in the ratification or contestation of notions of hypo-descent.

As discussed, over hundreds of years, the United States has functioned on a racialized dichotomy of Black and white, characterized by the one-drop rule of hypo-descent. As the organizing principle for racial stratification in the United States, commenters often relied upon these zero-sum categorizations of Blackness indicated by African DNA (5).

Others contextualized the rule of hypo-descent as an American invention that did not function to categorize people in other parts of the world (6).

5. when was the last time you did a DNA analysis? If no Sub-Saharan DNA shows

up I’ll personally call you : a white person, ok.

72 6. yes, IN AMERICA. But America isn’t the entire world. The reason why Obama is

viewed as “black” and not biracial is because of the racist one drop rule that

Americans love holding on to.

Other comments recall the difference between the U.S. and the Dominican

Republic, where one drop of European blood meant that one was cast out of the racial categorization of “Black” and into a racialized concept of “mixed.” Again, “mixed” as a racial category is quite common in Latin America, stemming from notions of mestizaje developed by Vasconcelos as the defining characteristic of Latinidad (Hooker, 2017). In contesting the rule of hypo-descent, many relied on notions of mestizaje as an organizing principle for racial stratification (7). Instead of the racial binary created by the rule of hypodescent, notions of mestizaje are called upon in order to allow for a third category of

“mixed,” referencing Afro, Euro, and Indigenous descended peoples (8). This incongruence between notions of hypo-descent and mestizaje often prompted conflict (9) and (10).

7. there is a such thing as multiracial dumb ass...and the majority of us…almost the

whole island is multi racial

8. ok I am claiming I’m not black but I’m multi racial..... beautiful white lovely

native American..... Gorgeous African...... so is this offensive ... .

9. the problem is when black americans claim mixed race latinos as black” ... we not

black we mixed.

10. why do a lot of them [Dominicans] just refuse to acknowlege that they’re black

though?..or at least have african ancestry? That is wild and bizarre 73 Mestizaje is weaponized against African Americans in a way that does not allow for mixed-ness to be applicable to African Americans. Mestizaje is thus invoked in the construction of Latinidad in a way that reinforces the mutual exclusivity between

Blackness and Latinidad. Additionally, it at once claims a genetic understanding of race while at the same time rejecting it completely. The contradiction must be maintained in order to reinforce the boundary of difference between Dominicans and African

Americans (11).

11. …you self haters are nowhere near as mixed as Dominican are...so stfu..the

average Dominican is more European than they are african..I’m not claiming

black when I’m 60% European and 23% African..the average black American

looks like Whoopi Goldberg and obviously black..most of y’all are 80 to 90%

African, look at the dna videos..slavery in the dr was a breeze compared to

America..there was no segregation or Jim Crow laws and the Spaniards freely

intermixed with the african and indigenous people. The British on the other hand

were ruthless..we have been mixing for more than 500years..mixed and proud

”

Nonetheless, the DNA ideology was also used to promote solidarity between African

Americans and Dominicans (12) and (13).

12. Cardi may not be a 100 percent black like most are these days but she does have

black roots. Look at Cardi and Hennessy’s features, their skin tone and afros as

kids. Once again Google the different races and place them in the one they most

74 identify with. Contrary to what most ignorant people think Spanish is not a race

bc I’m sure we are not English white men and women.

13. that’s not fair to us Afro Latinos who are not mixed. My entire Afro Cuban

lineage has NO white ancestry. We are not mixed but are just as Latino as anyone

else having been in Cuba since slavery. You wanna claim Latino to cover up the

multitude of sins committed against Blacks and Indigenous people by hiding

behind mixed identity. There are more white Latinos than mixed Latinos. Idk why

we lie about this.

The DNA ideology presented a frame for claiming an identity; it was used as a way to place Dominicans both within the boundaries of Blackness that includes African

Americans and other Afro-descended people and also as a way to mark them as separate due to a claimed unique mestizaje not shared by African Americans (or Haitians). The way that commenters interacted with this ideology is explored later in this chapter with stance dimensions that nuance the utilization of this ideology.

2.5.2 Categorization fallacy Just as Cardi B warned, the presence of a categorization fallacy in the data suggests a general discord in the definition of ethnicity, race, and nationality. As such, much of the debate surrounding who was able to claim Blackness or Latinidad was bound up in the conflation of these categorical notions, such that race and ethnicity were often offered up as simultaneous categorizations. Here, “Black” was no longer a racial identification that could be used to promote some sort of solidarity, but rather an ethnic

75 term to create a boundary between African Americans and those who had a claim to another national or ethnic ‘culture’. Many of the comments that demonstrated this ideology were offered to ‘educate’ fellow commenters about the distinction between the categories (14) and (15). Others justified Dominican denial of Blackness as a result of the term being applied as an ethnic rather than a racial label (16) and (17).

14. Dominicans come in variety of races, not just white dummy. There are also black

Dominicans, taino Dominicans and Asian Dominicans. Dominican is only a

nationality. Any race can be Dominican as long as they are native born citizens of

the island.

15. I don’t think you get the point . Dominican is a nationality. If you say you want a

black girl, how do I know if you want Jamaican, Trinidadian, Bahamas, Haitian.

If she’s darker complected then she’s Afro Latina race wise. If your trying make

point with Black & Dominican then you have generalized it with different type of

black women. Its 2019 c’mon man let’s educate each other.

16. Tu tiene razon en mucha cosas k dijiste aki hermano... pero cuando se dice “no

soy black soy dominicano” es cuando los dominicans estan hablando de los

afroamericanos, a ellos se llaman “black” en USA

[You are right about a lot of things you say here brother. But when they say, “I

am not Black, I’m Dominican” it’s when Dominicans are speaking about African

Americans. They are called Black in the United States]

17. Black means African American. I have African in me and that doesn’t make me

100 percent black. Silly Americans. 76 The categorization fallacy was often contested in comment threads where disambiguating notions of ethnicity, race, and nationality were often accompanied by commentary about levels of intelligence (18). It was in these comments that Latinidad was also imagined as a racial category rather than an ethnic one. Additionally,

‘Dominican’ is posited as an all-encompassing category that supersedes race and ethnicity while insisting on nationality as the defining characteristic of racial categorizations (19). Such comments support narratives of racial democracy where

Latinidad gives all those who lay claim to it an ability to transcend ethnoracial categorizations as they exist in the context.

18. They think you telling them they are African Americans, if you call a white

Dominican hey white boy they will tell you I’m Dominican, because they think

you calling them Americans. In Dominican everyone is Dominican black

Dominican or light skin or white Dominicans. In Dominican Republic there is

colorism but is not like in the U.S. that Black and white are divided in D.R.

everyone is Dominican.

19. Dominican is based on territory and culture of a home land which is a nationality

so yeah Dominican is a race.

In her study on race mixture and Blackness in Mexico, Christina Sue (2013) describes the production of an “ideology of non-racism.” Through an investigation of discourses on race and racism produced by the national government as well as individuals in the state of Veracruz, Sue argues that Mexicans are able to distance themselves from claims of racism through the postulation of the U.S. as the only society organized by race. 77 In our case, the prioritization of ethnicity and nationality as the defining category of difference allows Dominicans—or those speaking about race in the Dominican

Republic—to negate the existence of a racial hierarchy and of anti-Blackness as an organizing principle of both societies. These comments rely on a comparison with racial structures in the United States, such that racism is a feature unique to the United States.

Categorization ideologies often relied on citizenship ties in the ratification of ethnoracial belonging (20). Additionally, it allowed for the creation of categories of difference based on historical notions of race in a particular location (21). In this way, the categorization fallacy often called on racialized narratives (or scripts) rather than full historical knowledge in an attempt to create solidarities (22).

20. Obviously you don’t because of what you just said...100% Africans who become

a citizen in America are the true African-Americans.

21. I think Afro indigenous and Latina might be mutually exclusive politically

speaking but let’s consider the implications of putting these three political

locations identities together what we might be referring to is a desire to identify

the ways in which people are of African descent indigenous descent and from

places and geographies that were established through Spanish.

22. love your comment!!!! Thank you for looking at it from the correct perspective.

Many people don’t know that slavery and all that it entailed in America lasted

way longer than it ever did in the Dominican Republic. The British and their

descendants and the Spaniards, French and Portuguese and their descendants did

not act in the same manner. In the Dominican Republic, the initial wave of slavery 78 was brutal. However, the new “criollos, “ which is the name given to the

generation of the children of Spaniards who were born in the Dominican Republic

and all their descendants just continued to mix with each other without any

slavery involved. And this is our real history. So we cannot disqualify one or

embrace one when generationally, we haven’t been taught that. I understand that

in America, the one drop rule has been established and applied as the one and

only rule of thumb for anyone of color. This is not a European concept. The

descendants of the English created that rule! At the end of the day, there is no

such thing as race. We are one race, the human race and the concept of race has

only served the purpose of dividing and not uniting us as a human race. So when I

see ignorant comments about race or even when they concern my people, I don’t

entertain those conversations because they’re useless! However, I really liked

your comment and needed to let you know.

While the DNA ideology provided the basis and justification for racial belonging, the categorization fallacy was more so implicated in the formation of a boundary between

Dominicans and other Blacks. This ideology presupposed Dominican-ness as a racial category in order to blur the stark line between Blackness and Latinidad while also drawing a strong line between themselves and other Blacks both on the island of

Hispaniola and in the United States. This ideology was often accompanied by anti-Black sentiments, which will be addressed in subsequent sections.

79 2.5.3 Co-Naturalization of Language and Race Language is often put forward as the unifying factor in the construction of

Latinidad in the United States (Aparicio, 2017a, 2017b; Flores, 1997). As such, the current project hypothesized a large proportion of Dominicanidad and Latinidad to be attributed to the co-naturalization of language and race—that is, the conflation of race into the bounded notion of a particular language variety such that one who speaks

Spanish takes on “Spanish” as their racial category (23). Nonetheless, only five percent of the tokens were representative of the co-naturalization of language and race ideology.

These comments not only used language categorizations as racial categorizations but also cited language in order to justify belonging to a particular ethnoracial category (24).

23. Spanish is a different category from Black even though obviously we know now

that it’s not it is when people use it it’s a different category from Black…

24. I am Dominican I am Hispanic I speak Spanish you know.

There were also contestations of the co-naturalization of language and race (25). These contestations often called into question the use of other bounded language categorization in the identification of individual speakers who have not traditionally been labeled by their language affiliation.

25. Stop talking about education when you said Spanish people. Spanish is a language

not an ethnicity, nor a race. Wow the ignorance is appalling.

In some cases, the co-naturalization of language in race was used to restrict entry into a particular racial category. In the context of the United States, where English is the dominant language, the manifestation of this ideology was couched in claims of 80 bilingualism, with Spanish representing Dominicanidad and English representing a belonging within the borders of the United States. In comment (26), the speaker was referring to a poster who self-identified as Cuban American and bilingual in the original video (C1). The comment came after another individual asked if the original poster could do a version of the video in Spanish in order to educate more people about the existence of Black Latinos. In another response, racial mixture and bilingualism became the identifying features of Dominicanidad (27). Bilingualism, thus, becomes a mark of mestizaje, where ideals of the tri-racial were transposed onto multilingualism in the U.S. context.

26. Contrary to what most ignorant people think Spanish is not a race bc I’m sure we

are not English white men and women.

27. … He can’t only Dominicans are bilingual.

These comments were often accompanied by anti-Black sentiments as in (28), (29), (30), and (31).

28. … envy jealousy. why. cause y[a] wanna be us ..have our mixture be bilingual..

Dominican men chase Dominican women..black men chase white girls and latinas

.whites [a]re not afraid of us .we mixed with white black native american..no one

sees us as black they see African Americans as black...were never slaves in

America. African American never beat white man british.. Dominican beat both

white man Spain & black man haitians.... Dominican was in usa before

blacks..black men ur men get on planes to travel to date a poor Dominican girl

81 than educated with bling black woman.....dud i answer u.. Dominican women are

desired soooo much.

29. Dominicans need to stop acting black. Y’all are Dominican. Act Spanish.

30. Bro I feel the same way, I get tired of hearing “you don’t look Dominican” or

“say something in Spanish”. Like shut the fuck up with that shit.

31. It has to be jealousy, In all honesty I can’t imagine why else they would take time

out of their day to come here and other platforms to tell Dominicans they should

identify as “black” and not Dominican. That’s why I don’t agree with all these

new terms like “latinx, and Afro Latino.” Latinos who do that are just playing in

to what black Americans want. And Americans are never satisfied. I remember

back in the day when I first moved out here, Americans (specifically black

Americans) would notice a person speaking Spanish and instead of taking the

time to find out where that person was from they would just label them as

Spanish. Now it seems to upset some of them when we say we’re Spanish. Which

isn’t accurate , but that’s one of the labels that America has placed on us. Now

they’re trying to do even more with these new r—d terms. I’m Dominican, I may

go further to identify as Latino, but that’s where it ends.

Considering the fact that Dominicans and African Americans often live in close proximity—sharing classrooms, grocery stores, and other facilities—the attribution of

U.S. racial schemas to an African American invention can be expected. However, in doing this, the commenter in (31) bypasses the structural dimensions of ethnoracial

82 category construction to place blame on those who have had to live with its consequences. As a result, the commenter erases the autonomy of Afro-Latinxs in the creation of novel ethnoracial terminology in response to having lived Black experiences in the United States.

2.5.4 Accent ideology Attributing one’s ethnoracial identity to an accent ideology was limited, but did manifest in two key ways: Some individuals ratified belonging in a particular ethnic category based on accent presentation (32), and others enacted an accent to embody a particular ethnic stance (33).

32. I thought she was a black girl from some random place n not Dominican when I

first click the vid until her accent then...

Other comments focused on the desire to hide accents as a way to assimilate to U.S. culture. Lastly, accent ideology appeared in mocking Dominicans who denied Blackness

(33).

33. hey try to salsa that shit off and be like “no it’s not the same. I no black negro no

no nunca nunca no I no black. “ i’m like no, you’re black. “no no no i no black

Dominican.” I go, I know but you’re black.

While accent ideology did not appear in the data set examined here, notions of language and the performance of language as indicative of belonging were suggested.

83 2.6 CO-OCCURRENCE OF RACIOLINGUISTIC IDEOLOGIES Examinations of ideologies that were presented together give us an indication of

how these ideologies are marshaled in the creation of ethnoracial boundaries between

Dominicans and African Americans. From this analysis, it seems that while language

often functions to create and uphold notions of Latinidad, DNA functions to confirm (or

to disprove) Blackness, as displayed in Table 2.6. The lack of co-occurrence between

these ideologies suggests the stronghold of a mutual exclusivity between Blackness and

Latinidad in this data. Nonetheless, there was a strong co-occurrence between ideologies

that aided in the definition of the African American/Dominican boundary of difference.

Of all of the co-occurrences, the most common co-occurrence of ideologies was

categorization with (or alongside) the DNA ideology, with 106 instances of overlapping

between the ideologies. The second-most commonly co-occurring ideology was the

Categorization Fallacy alongside Co-Naturalization (16), followed by the DNA ideology

with the Co-Naturalization ideology (12).

Accent Categorization Co-naturalization DNA

Accent - 0 0 0

Categorization 1 - 0 0

Co-naturalization 0 16 - 0

DNA 1 106 12 -

84 Table 2.6: Co-occurrence of focal raciolinguistic ideologies

Overall, the co-occurrences reinforced the strength between genetic conceptualizations of race and the terminology that is used to categorize individuals in different contexts.

2.6.1 Stance Dimension weights by ideology While the frequency of ideologies gives us an indication of how racial categories are being constructed, the mention of the ideology does not tell us whether the public is aligned with the ideology in their comments. The following analysis allows for a more refined interpretation of the ways these ideologies were represented in conversations about Dominicans and Blackness. The stance dimensions (affect, investment, alignment) for each excerpt were weighted on a 1-5-point Likert scale, with higher scores indicating greater alignment and investment or more positive affect toward coded ideologies. Across all of the data, the mean scores for each (affect, alignment, investment) reflected a narrow window of variation between each raciolinguistic ideology (Table 2.7).3

Accent Categorization Co-naturalization DNA

Affect 3 2.76 2.762 3.224

Alignment 4 3.01 3.482 3.988

Investment 3.5 3.108 3.798 3.302

3Note, accent ideology was eliminated from this analysis as it only appeared in two instances. 85 Table 2.7: Mean stance dimension by ideology Nevertheless, the variation across dimensions provides interesting information about the ways that the ideologies are being mobilized to create boundaries of difference.

Taking each ideology separately, the notable scores demonstrate some key differences

(Table 2.8). Overall, the categories analyzed for these stance dimensions confirm the strength of the DNA ideology in the construction of race, with alignment being the highest for all subject positionalities. The DNA ideology displayed an average score of

3.988 on alignment, followed by co-naturalization of language and race (3.483) and then

Categorization fallacy (3.01). It is important to note that the scores presented for each ideology do not indicate neutrality but rather a trend toward an equal number of individuals who were not aligned (0-1) alongside those who were completely aligned (5).

In fact, there were rarely times when an explicit score of 3 was given, as most commenters had strong feelings and opinions associated with their posts. That is, for nearly every instance of a negative comment there existed a positive comment in response. The below analysis allows for an understanding of how these conversations were placed in relation to the posited ideologies.

Co-Naturalization Ideology by Subject Positionality

African American Cuban Dominican Nigerian American Panamanian

Affect 3 2.75 2.31 3 2.75

Alignment 4.14 3.5 2.77 3.5 3.5

Investment 3.62 4.5 2.12 4 4.75

DNA Ideology by Subject Positionality

86 African American Cuban Dominican Nigerian American Panamanian

Affect 3.26 3.04 3.2 3.33 3.29

Alignment 3.93 4.02 4.01 3.91 4.07

Investment 3.37 2.95 3.1 3.35 3.74

Categorization Fallacy by Subject Positionality

African American Cuban Dominican Nigerian American Panamanian

Affect 2.84 2.89 2.7 2.71 2.66

Alignment 2.9 3.33 2.85 3 2.97

Investment 2.34 2.87 3.21 3.94 3.18

Table 2.8: Raciolinguistic ideology by subject positionality

Though the co-naturalization of language and race was not as prevalent in the data as hypothesized, investment scores show the ideology to be taken up more by non-

Dominicans than by Dominicans themselves. In fact, the Dominican videos not only elicited minimal participation in the ideology but also, when the ideology was introduced, it was mostly contested, eliciting a slight trend toward disagreement with the ideology

(2.77). These scores indicate a lack of participation in the deployment of co- naturalization of language and race as a valid tool for the construction of racial identity.

Lastly, the video produced by the Nigerian American elicited the most investment in the categorization fallacy (3.94).

87 2.6.2 Anti-Haitian and Anti-African American sentiments in conflict and solidarity Another example of the way boundaries of difference were created was explored through an examination of moments of conflict and solidarity. Codes were developed in order to explore: (i) Anti-Blackness; (ii) inter-ethnic conflict; and (iii) inter-ethnic solidarity. Anti-Blackness referred to moments when there was a combined use of the n- word with derogatory comments against “Black” identity categorizations (34). Inter- ethnic conflicts, on the other hand, were characterized by an explicit mention of disagreement between individuals regarding identification practices (35). Inter-ethnic solidarities were characterized by explicit moments of racial accord between individuals from different Black subjectivities (36).

34. I never seen a Dominican as black or blacker than Godfrey, this n—a burnt y’all

got us confused with Haitians.... the darkest we go is will smith color

35. …parts of our culture may come from West Africa (nothing to do with American

blacks) ..... but American blacks themselves, yes they envy us Dominicans becuz

of our mixed race heritage

36. She never said that she wasn’t black and being that this ignorant ass comment got

pinned disgusted me. You do know that the freeways from West Africa came over

to the Caribbean and Latin America first right? Before the slave trade. How can

black people be so ignorant to black history. Latina is a culture not a damn race.

What is interesting is the ways that these moments of anti-Blackness, conflict, and solidarity appeared in conjunction with the raciolinguistic ideologies explored (Table 2.9).

DNA Co-Naturalization Category Accent 88 Anti-Blackness 40 2 32 0

Inter-ethnic Conflict 26 1 12 0

Inter-ethnic Solidarity 69 3 49 0

Table 2.9: Conflict and solidarity by raciolinguistic ideology

What we see from the data is that genetic explanations of race were employed in order to support pan-racial solidarity as well as to contest it. Genetic race prevailed in

Anti-Haitian sentiments, with comments noting phenotypical differences between

Haitians and Dominicans (37). This strategy was also used to distance Dominicans from

African Americans (38), with African American culture often being aligned with notions of paucity and depravity, even in moments of attempted solidarity (39).

37. Haitian look like Morgan freemen ..so do afro Americans. Dominican look like

Arod

38. If Dominicans are so “racist” and “confused” why do you African-American men

go down there for an orgasm? I never see you self haters visiting Haiti or Africa?

Or predominantly black countries..y’all stay going to Dominican republic to fuck

mixed light skin women with good hair..you guys hate your own black women

you hate black features so much so that you have to go down to a predominately

mixed country to chase after light skin women! You black men need to worry

about your community and being a father! Y’all stay praising light skinned mixed

women but don’t like ur own women..sad existence..worry about your own damn

89 self instead of worrying about people of a different culture and background than

you..

39. I don’t think that they hate Africans or African Americans. I think it is the

negative image given to them by the media many times, especially about African

Americans. What I think many dislike are the street life/culture of African

Americans which gets more promoted everywhere and make people think thats

how all African Americans are or act even though I know thats not the case.

Stupid media just pick the bad apples to represent African Americans just like I

see many African Americans picking the bad apples to represent all of us

Dominicans and say that were like that which is bs.

African Americans contested the anti-Blackness, suggesting that Dominicans (as well as others) benefited from Black culture while also creating a hierarchy of superiority over

African Americans (40). They also contested the idea of mestizaje, re-inserting notions of hypodescent as the prevailing racial ideology (41).

40. Kings n queens of colorism, nationalistic pride and coat tale riding off black

culture but hate Blackness. N feel superior for 0 reason.

41. African American question: why do a lot of them just refuse to acknowlege that

they’re black though?..or at least have african ancestry? That is wild and bizarre.

It is worth noting that the videos represented an even split of Black diasporic solidarity and inter-ethnic conflict and boundary justifications. Of the five videos presented by those who claimed Dominican identities, only two represented inter-ethnic conflict. Nonetheless, the comment sections of each video contained the majority of the 90 discord, with 90.3% of the anti-Blackness and 91.5% of the inter-ethnic conflict being located in the comments. While social media influences and content producers intended to create solidarities, narratives of DNA and categorization fallacies prevailed, ultimately resulting in a strengthened boundary of difference between African Americans and

Dominicans.

2.7 CONCLUSION The subject of interracial conflict forms the cornerstone of many race studies, but inter-ethnic conflict is far less studied in the United States.4 In fact, the boundaries of difference drawn between groups that can exist within one census box is rarely examined, though many have noted the effects of homogenization in studies of Latinidad (Oro,

2016; Aparicio, 2019). Additionally, the way that the terms race, ethnicity, and nationality have been operationalized in these contexts offers a foundation for the development of U.S. racial logics (e.g., Blackness, whiteness, racism, etc.) (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas, 2003; Vielka, 2010). The current study presented several examples of raciolinguistic ideologies from individual YouTube users. While many of these examples seem to come from one user, each excerpt represented a unique assertion by different individuals. Although the methodology did not allow for a survey of the subject positionality of each of these users, the fact that—even down to the phrasing—the ideologies represented were repeated by different users is indicative of the scripted nature of raciolinguistic ideologies in this context.

4For discussions of inter-ethnic conflict in sociolinguistic studies please see (Coupland 1990; Rampton 1995; Milroy 2000). 91 Focusing on the ways that the raciolinguistic ideologies surfaced within inter- ethnic conflict allows for a nuanced understanding of racial construction. Comments were selected based on primacy in the data set (i.e. the first parent comments in the thread that were relevant and with the required amount of comment responses were chosen for analysis). I imagine that a more concerted effort to look for all comments that displayed the focal raciolinguistic ideologies could provide a more in depth analysis. Nonetheless, while the construction of Blackness continues to rely on colonial logics of scientific race, in the DNA ideology, the mobilization of national borders and language allowed for a novel racialization of Latinidad that marked it as distinct from Blackness. The use of language as a distinguishing feature of Latinidad seems to be part of the larger project of

Latinidad, not necessarily adopted by Dominicans themselves, who often recognize that one can fit into the scientific racial logics of Blackness while possessing the cultural norms that are being marked as mutually exclusive. Since language is enregistered as the boundary-making element between Blackness and Latinidad, Dominicans are often forced into a position of either accepting or contesting the boundary in a move towards their own self-determination.

Still, DNA narratives were often posited as objective fact, which contributes to the literature showing the subjective nature of “scientific race” (Morning, 2007;

Williams, 2013). Users invoked DNA as a way to both construct and deconstruct boundaries of belonging. Further, the use of this ideology in conjunction with the

Categorization Ideology was often mobilized in order to promote a conflation of race and ethnicity that supported a mutual exclusivity between Black and Latino as pan-racial 92 categories. This mutual exclusivity was further constructed by the Co-naturalization of

Language and Race Ideology, which posited language ability as the true indication of race. Data from the current study provides evidence of the ways that language is being used to transcend the boundaries of “ascribed” race and “street race,” such that individuals are able to take a stance toward or away from assigned racial categories and even physical representations of race through the use or knowledge of particular language not generally indexed to their ascribed or street race. Although many Latinxs may transcend the boundaries of Blackness and Latinidad, Blackness has been a defining characteristic of U.S. social order, linking individuals to notions of poverty, violence, ignorance, and laziness (Fanon et al., 1995; Yancy 2012). Therefore, it is no surprise that for Dominican(-American)s, a negotiation and possible distancing from Blackness may be employed in the performance of racial identity.

In looking at the data from an anti-racist stance, I turn to the question of social justice and liberation. I ask: What happens when you fight for the visibilization of

African descended people without disrupting the colonial logics under which you were socialized? It seems that without centering decoloniality in constructions of self and others, one ultimately reproduces colonial logics. Ethno-racial logics may manifest differently based on the terminology and language given to the structures; however, the result is the same—erasure and dehumanization via the indexing of Blackness with stereotypes of urban crime (ghetto) and undesirability. In this study, anti-Black stereotypes were most often attributed to African Americans. As the most established

Afro-descended population within the colonial frame of the United States, it makes sense 93 that these ideologies would have taken hold, even for newly arrived populations. The fact that these ideologies occur even within a population that may suffer from negative stereotypes related to anti-Blackness proves the strength of colonial formations of power.

So terminology matters. The way that we marshal identity categories for ourselves and others has an effect on our ability to create inter-ethnic solidarity. When does a person get to claim a Black identity? Do they have to look Black? Do they have to have a certain percentage of African DNA? Do they have to speak a certain language? Or have a certain accent? The debate about Blackness in these forums often called on colonial logics of scientific race and reproduced structures of white supremacy. Those who have limited ability to negotiate Blackness through language or culture because of physical characteristics such as skin color and hair texture were often the ones who engaged in acts of policing Blackness, calling on notions of hypodescent while also questioning authenticity based on linguistic and cultural practices that were seen as mitigating whiteness. The policing of Blackness is a direct re-formulation of colonial structures of power. In trying to fight for pieces of this power, Afro-descended people often rely on the same tools that uphold white supremacy. In doing this, they are often forfeiting liberatory action for debates on description and a place in the already defined system.

94 Chapter 3. “Dominicans be like”: Ethno-raciolinguistic stance-taking and the construction of Dominicanidad in the U.S.

3.1 ON THE MUTUAL EXCLUSIVITY OF BLACKNESS AND LATINIDAD

On August 5, 2020, in an interview hosted by the National Association of Black

Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, then Presidential candidate Joe Biden commented that “unlike the African American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community.”5 While

Biden explicitly referenced the difference between a Florida Latino and an Arizona

Latino, his comments demonstrated a larger discursive construction of Latinidad as mutually exclusive from Blackness. The mere existence of the two attending associations—a Black association and a Hispanic association—further demonstrates the persistence of the boundary between what is considered Black and what is considered

Latino in this country. His comments sparked a social media frenzy, with many questioning his understanding of a Black diaspora as it exists in the United States. In an effort to clarify his stance, Biden’s response, claiming that he had “witnessed the diversity of thought, background, and sentiment within the African American community,” evidenced a continued adherence to an ideological construction of

Blackness equated to an African American history and identity.

Nonetheless, the ease in ability to respond to political comments that is afforded by social media platforms, such as Twitter, allowed for a rapid contestation of Biden’s

5 NABJ-NAHJ Convention and Career Fair - August 6th, 2020 95 views, which suggests a shift in knowledge(s) about the ways that race, ethnicity, and cultural practices interact to inform identity across the Americas. This is not to say that

Black and Indigenous people have been silent in the face of their erasure. Indeed, the work of Miriam Jiménez, Juan Flores, Silvio Torres Saillant, Lorgia García Peña,

Eduardo Bonilla Silva, and countless numbers of Afro-diasporic beings evidence a historical call to recognize the humanity and existence of the spectrum of Black subjectivities across the Americas (for references to scholarly work detailing Black

Dominican histories see Torres-Saillant and Hernández, 1998; Jiménez Román and

Flores, 2010; García Peña, 2016).

Still, on election day and the days that immediately followed, the rhetoric regarding Latinidad as a racial and cultural identity resurfaced with a vengeance.

Newscasters and social media pundits came out to express their shock about how differently Latinx populations engaged their voting powers. Many news commentators sought to educate the masses, sharing their newly gleaned message: Latinos are not a monolith. This apparent surprise was met again with many Black Latinxs screaming, We been told y’all this. I wish to note here that the scale and repetition of the term Latino, incorporating all those with shared histories of hemispheric Western European colonization to the south of the United States, engenders an ideological solidification of a border around Latinidad. This bordering of Latinidad, through the naming and re-naming of an established group of people—namely white, cis-gendered, and middle to upper-

96 class people—reifies the racialization of an ethnic category that ignores the numerical presence of Black Latin Americans (Telles, 2014; Andrews, 2018).

The call from many Black Latinxs to “cancel Latinidad”6 raises a critical question: In what ways do Afro-Latinxs who have been pushed to the margins mobilize

Blackness while maintaining cultural autonomy from the African Americans who have occupied the categorization since its inception in the United States?7 This question is primary when considering the mainstream racialization of Latinidad as mutually exclusive of Blackness (see section 2.1). Further, taking into account the surge of familial and public re-education regarding the Black Atlantic—the migration patterns stemming from the transatlantic slave trade, and the subsequent and persistent imperialist, neo- liberal, and capitalistic control of the Global South by western powers, we might also ask:

How is Blackness mobilized outside the frame of hypo-descent that organizes U.S. racial schemas?

In the current study, I investigate the public stances towards Blackness as an identity category for Dominican(-American)s, a group with a representative population of individuals who would be marked and identified as Black in the United States. I take up the case of Dominican(-American)s for a variety of reasons, among them: previous investigations that note the refusal of Dominicans to identify as and with African

6 The #cancellatinidad movement was spearheaded by Afro Zapoteca poet Alán Pérez in an effort to illuminate the ways that Latinidad functioned to erase the experiences and existence of Black and Indigenous people both in Latin American and with Latin American origins in the United States. 7 See the work and cultural productions of poet Alán Pérez, independent scholars Dash Harris and Javier Wallace to name but a few. 97 Americans (Duany, 1998, 2008; Bailey, 2002); the differential manifestations of racial stratifications developed in the contextualized histories of the Dominican Republic and the United States (Torres-Saillant & Hernández, 1998; Candelario, 2007a; Valdez, 2009); and the contentious relationship that many African Americans have with Dominican stances towards race and identity (Bailey, 2000, 2007). I wish to note here that the popular belief that Dominican(-American)s don’t claim Black identity because they are

“self-hating” is unfounded. Rather, rejection of Black identity (by some Dominicans) may result from a commitment to uphold concepts of racial democracy and mestizaje.

Racial democracy and mestizaje are two concepts that rely on the idea that racial mixture between three cultures—European, African, and Indigenous—resulted in a more perfect being; and that as a result of this mixture, it is impossible to have the kind of racial stratification and racism that exists in the United States (Hooker, 2017; Candelario,

2007b). U.S. projects of Latinidad have transposed systems of hypodescent onto systems of mestizaje, transforming previously defined racial hierarchies from a white/non-white boundary to a Black/non-Black boundary (Yancy, 2012). Socialization within concepts of mestizaje, racial democracy, and Latinidad manifests in a disavowal of the defined racial categorization of Black, which dominates U.S. racial logics. Because Latinidad insists on the purposeful conflation of race, ethnicity, and nationality to strengthen the Black/non-

Black boundary of separation, when a Dominican asserts, “Soy dominicano, no soy negro,” it reflects Latin American racial philosophy and a U.S. project of Latinidad.

98 Moreover, as noted in Chapter 2 and exemplified in Chapter 4, Dominican youth are not unaware of their African heritage and, in most cases, when asked directly, they do not deny African heritage but rather a linkage to the term Black, as it is often used as an ethnic rather than a racial signifier. Therefore, Dominican(-American)s exist in a double- racialization, within the frames of Dominican racial logics and as transnational beings in the United States. For many Dominicans, the move towards self-determination in the

United States often results in negotiations of the structures of Blackness and Latinidad, a process that complicates and reorganizes racial boundaries as they have been considered in this country.

One way to examine the process of restructuring the bounds of Blackness alongside the bounds of Latinidad is through a linguistic examination of the populations that fit squarely within those bounds—as dictated by dominant ideologies—with and against those who occupy the margins. I specifically investigate how Dominican language practices mirror linguistic processes described in sociolinguistic literature on

African American English (AAE), a well-researched linguistic variety. I make explicit the connections between the development of these practices as specific to Black language production as a result of systems of colonization and slavery in the Americas,8 arguing for the marking of Dominican Spanish (and in many ways Dominican English) as Black

Language. Since I am interested in the ways that Blackness is bound and structured by

8I draw on discourse level analysis of Black language practices such as call and response, signifying, and lexical innovations written about by scholars such as Geneva Smitherman, Lisa Green, Walt Wolfram, and John Rickford in making these claims. 99 those who contest the dominant ideological structures of the category itself (i.e., some

Dominicans), I juxtapose my examination of Dominican language practices with the discursive stances taken by the dominant—in this case, African Americans. It is important to note here that dominant does not mean hegemonic. Since U.S. society exists within a racial hierarchy, it necessitates the constant reformulation of white supremacy to reproduce itself; U.S. Black Americans can either acquire or contest hegemonic racializing ideologies. Nonetheless, their historical presence as the formerly enslaved population tied to U.S. territories signifies their position at the center of U.S. constructed

Blackness.

In this chapter, I argue that through an investigation of Dominican digital literacy practices alongside African American linguistic and cultural productions, we can come to appreciate the basis for the formulation of “new Blackness”9 that expands notions of diaspora, race, and Black linguistic practices in the United States. Concomitantly, I acknowledge the persistence of hemispheric anti-Black racism but submit that a more in- depth examination of youth internet and language practices suggests a shift in adherence to racial logics that colonial powers have dictated. This shift calls us to look beyond static here vs. there explanations to reveal more nuanced and dynamic notions of race.10 I also

9 I take the concept of “new Blacks” from Lorgia García Peña’s conceptualization of el nié and bordering dominicanidad (2016). 10 I wish to note that I am not looking at traditional sociolinguistic categories, such as age, gender, level of education as bounded categories, as the nature of the data did not allow for the reliable collection of this information. Nonetheless, I acknowledge that an interactional analysis taking into consideration these factors may lead to a more nuanced understanding of these language practices in relation to Black social practice. 100 understand the facility with which white supremacy reconstitutes itself. Consider again the recent coverage of “Latinx voters” in the 2020 election cycle. It is easy to appreciate the ways that a concept meant to create political unity and representation has ultimately become a gesturing towards whiteness in that it insists on the consistent erasure of Black and Indigenous populations.

In the current chapter, I look to youth internet practices for potential evidence of a rupture in the explicit mobilizations of the raciolinguistic ideologies of mestizaje. More importantly, I think about the ways that youth internet practices can inform us about the contestations and survival against the persistence of hemispheric white supremacy and anti-Black racism. In the following sections, I provide a brief background of the differing constructions of race and, more specifically, Blackness in the United States and the

Dominican Republic. I then provide a brief description of AAE features that are linked to processes of Black self-determination. I follow with a discussion of the theoretical frames under which I examine the linguistic data presented, laying out a framework for the exploration of the intersections of language, race, and identity for the community of practice (CofP) under investigation. I follow with a review of my methods and then discuss how Dominican language practices on social media platforms parallel moves towards Black self-determination, ultimately shifting our understanding of Blackness in the United States.

101 3.2 WE STILL HERE, REINVENTING OURSELVES AT EVERY TURN

3.2.1 Black self-determination

Continuing to place Blackness as an organizing concept of American life (see section 2.1), I argue that those who occupy Black subjectivities are in a constant state of self-determination. I define self-determination in this instance as a process whereby one is able to take full autonomy over their body and destiny in a way that validates and makes visible their humanity (Mckittrick, 2015; Alagraa, 2018). In her edited collection of essays interrogating Sylvia Wynter’s formulations of “Man,” Katherine McKittrick

(2015) draws on Wynter’s theorization of humanness as a verb rather than a noun.

Being human is a praxis of humanness that does not dwell on the static

empiricism of the unfittest and the downtrodden and situate the most marginalized

within the incarcerated colonial categorization of oppression; being human as

praxis is, to borrow from Maturana and Varela, ‘the realization of the living.’

(McKittrick, 2015, p. 4)

In other words, humanity is not and cannot be categorical.

That humanity is in question for certain racialized beings is the central issue here.

It is an issue because society has been formed on the basis of who has authentic claim and control over full humanity. In modern history, racial hierarchies have structured this question in the United States. For Black people, this structuring is evidenced in official policy, where being Black resulted in an official determination of semi-humanity as

102 three-fifths of a human in the 1787 constitution (Henricks, 2018).11 Again, I recall

Hartman’s description of the condition of Blackness in the United States as always posited in relation to the dominant, such that allowing Black self-determination becomes a threat to the very existence of whiteness (Hartman, 1997), and I reiterate that whiteness is forever reliant on Blackness as a way to re-imagine, re-construct, and re-insert itself as the dominant (Bloom, 2019).

By centralizing Black self-determination in studies of language and identity, we can challenge the construction of humanity as white heteropatriarchal capitalist systems have defined it. Black self-determination is the opposite of assimilation into white hegemonic mainstream modes of beings through a continual reconstitution of “self” at the center. June Jordan notes exactly why this type of self-determination is key in regards to acquiring (and or contesting) hegemonic vernacular. She says:

You have won a job, you think because you have “successfully” hidden away

your history—your mother and father and the man or woman that you love and

how you love them, how you dance that love, and sing it. That is a victory by

obliteration of the self. That is not survival. (cf. Jordan ,1972 in Keller and Levy,

2017, p. 32)

11 Scholars and policy makers have argued that the 3/5ths compromise actually referred to representation such that the population of African Americans would at no time be counted as more than 3/5ths the population of white Americans (Feagin, 2000; Henricks, 2018). Nonetheless, this is a generous reading if we are to consider the countless moments of dehumanization documented throughout U.S. history. 103 I argue that linguistic and social actions that contest hegemonic modes of being are acts of self-determination that represent not only survival but also an insistence on one’s full spectrum of humanity; through language, Black people exist as human praxis.

Pursuing this idea, the current chapter explores the role that Black language practices, previously defined as African American English processes, play in mapping the margins of identity and ethno-racial categorizations for Dominican(-American)s in the

United States.12 Through investigations of the positing of Dominican(-American) identity and language use alongside U.S. cultural icons and public perceptions of Black Latinx ethno-racial performances, I aim to create a framework of racial restructuring that breaks the bonds of hegemonic notions of Blackness and Latinidad in the United States. Black language thus becomes an act of self-determination, in which hegemonic categorizations become destabilized. In this way, we are able to negotiate where Afro-Latinxs, Afro-

Caribbeans, and Africans, and their U.S.-born children fit into the schema of Blackness in this country. More importantly, and for our purposes here, we can begin to empirically theorize race through analyses of language production and language ideologies.

12 The terminology used to describe language produced by African Americans has gone through several permutations as researchers attend to theoretical, social, and political goals aimed at the advancement and validation of the variety as a naturally occurring system. The dialect has been referred to as Black Vernacular English (BVE), African American Vernacular English (AAVE), African American Language (AAL). Shifts in terminology used to describe the variety are linked to movements for the recognition of Black subjectivities in the United States as unique. I use African American English to note its connection and history as inextricably tied to Black U.S. subjects as a result of struggle and a movement toward self- determination. I use African American English and Black English interchangeably in this chapter. I use Black Language to speak about hemispheric Black language practices. 104 3.2.2 Racial difference

Geneva Smitherman writes, “Forcibly removed from their native lands, homeless

Africans in America have been on a continual quest for home since 1619” (Smitherman,

1998, p. 220). I would suggest that this quest has been in motion since at least the early

1500s, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the shores of Quisqueya.13 In order to contend with the shift in ideological constructions of Blackness in the United

States, it is important to recognize both the commonalities and differences between race constructions across the Americas. Taking my cues from Gregory and Sanjek (1998), I define race as “the framework of ranked categories segmenting the human population that was developed by Western Europeans following their global expansion” (p. 1). In the

United States, Blackness as a racial category that indexes a particular position on a social hierarchy is represented—in school curricula, media representations, and repeated discourses—as a resultant manifestation of the transatlantic slave trade from a nondescript continental Africa to the shores of territories now considered Virginia.

Students are rarely taught that the slave trade extended throughout the Americas, and even more rarely is their attention brought to the ways that slave society was conducted in relation to material production, which has shaped the modern world. Furthermore, in the fight for access to anglo-education systems, African Americans have been the beneficiaries of a system of (mis)education meant to erase the barbaric nature of U.S. slave society but also to reinscribe a continuation of these systems under different

13 Indigenous (Taino) name for the island that currently holds the Dominican Republic and Haiti. 105 ideological formations—from racial subjugation to a post-racial society. Therefore, the idea that all men are created equal and are indivisible under one flag relies on the erasure of Black and Indigenous bodies as subjugated, oppressed, or non-existent.

Whiteness in the United States emerged from the necessity to maintain a social, political, and numerical majority over the enslaved and marginalized. This necessity called for a racial system of binaries, characterized by a racialized dichotomy of Black and white, otherwise known as the ‘one-drop rule’ of hypodescent (Omi and Winant,

2014). The Dominican Republic, in marked contraposition, adapted a racial system that blurs the boundaries of belonging and introduces the concept of mixed-race as a racial categorization, which allows for any percentage of European heritage to cast one out of

Blackness. As previously mentioned, this conceptualization is grounded in Latin

American concepts of mestizaje (Rodríguez-Silva, 2012; Telles, 2014), which allude to a perfect mixture of European, African, and Indigenous. Still, racial socializations have resulted in highly differing racial identifications than those that would exist in the United

States. In 2020 only 15.8% of the population identified as Black. Meanwhile, 13.5% identify as white, and the majority of Dominicans on the island most often identify themselves as Mulato or Indio (70.4%) (Central Intelligence Agency, 2020).

Again, I note that Dominican identity is consistently multiple and mutable, such that even siblings may be marked within different racial bounds. This differs considerably from the rigidity of racial categorization that exists in the United States, as noted by census results commenting on Dominican election of 'Black' as an identity term

106 (section 1.1.4). The incongruence between racial perceptions in the U.S. and the

Dominican Republic has been a point of interest for researchers as they question what happens to Dominican(-American)s as they navigate their new host society.

While the research regarding Dominican identity produced by scholars such as

Jorge Duany (1998), Benjamin Bailey (2000, 2001), and Almeida JacquelineToribio

(2003) consistently notes the ways that first- and second-generation Dominican(-

American)s resist being classified as African American or Black through overt Spanish proficiency, the research has scarcely been reproduced since it was conducted over twenty years ago. Nonetheless, movements for the recognition that Black lives matter have proliferated across the Americas. In fact, the BLM movement in the United States finds its counterparts in the Dominican Republic with groups such as Reconocidos, Junta de prietas, and Acción afro-Dominicana.14 These groups, much like the grassroots movements here in the United States, have gained momentum through the use of social media and transnational networks of scholars, activists, artists, and educators. As Black diasporic beings’ voices are being amplified, we are forced to consider whether the distancing practices shown in previous Dominican identity projects have persisted. The current project provides linguistic evidence for a theory of expansion that characterizes

Black culture as hemispheric, heterogenous, and contextual. In this way, Blackness marks

14 Reconocidos-https://www.reconoci.do/?fbclid=IwAR3j- LXzc1mLMqJKLdlbDRVEGrl7CbL3XC3rKORh7oD259Rz656iqZ7OhFA; Junta de prietas- https://www.facebook.com/jdeprietas; Acción afro-Dominicana- https://accionafrodominicana.blogspot.com/2016/07/pelo-afro-ondulado-racista-colegio- dice.html?fbclid=IwAR17L8VpxyNz-H_LmJXOMORbkQRIhelAuawsaJwaDTL2nUs1Owqqiu6CDkk 107 off a linguistic community of practice, whereby linguistic forms and cultural icons move and are exchanged in a bi-directional fashion (e.g., when an African American from the

Bronx calls me mami).

3.2.3 African American English and Dominican Spanish

For the purposes of this study, I focus on the use of African American English

(AAE), not as a way to center African Americans as the sole proprietors of a set of linguistic features but rather to signify the ways that language can be mobilized to foment community and social identity. An extensive history of AAE research characterizes the variety as unique and distinctive from the hegemonic vernacular English of the United

States (for review see Charity-Hudley, 2018; Wolfram, 2019). Additionally, due to the extensive research and social justice work regarding the use of the variety, we have generally moved beyond the incorrect assumptions that any differences between Black and European English resulted from imperfect acquisition or imitations (Rickford, 2000;

Green, 2002; Ball et al., 2005). This research has illuminated the linguistic features, structures, and processes that are distinctive to AAE. Smitherman (1998) summarizes

[t]he uniqueness of [AAE] …. in three areas: (1) patterns of grammar and

pronunciation; (2) verbal rituals from the oral tradition and the continued

importance of the word as in African cultures; and (3) the lexicon, developed by

giving special meanings to English words, a practice that goes back to

enslavement and to the need for a system of communication that only those in the

slave community could understand…[T]here are correct ways of saying these 108 words, of talking Black, which depends on knowledge of the rules of [AAE]

grammar and pronunciation. (p. 207)

For the purposes of this study, I focus on lexical practices that are unique to

“talking Black.” In other words, I look to examine Black cultural production evidenced through distinctive lexicalization processes. Drawing on the definition of Black self- determination in section 3.2.1., I understand Black lexicalization processes as a part of a continued negotiation of humanity and desire to be seen. Further, in the age of global communications and rapid sharing and commodification of information, I include a fourth and equally important area of distinction for users of Black language— the speed of innovation across an already heterogeneous linguistic variety.

Unlike AAE, Dominican Spanish has yet to reach the status of recognition as a distinct Black variety, though work in progress looks to demonstrate exactly that

(Bullock and Toribio, 2008, 2014a; Valdez, 2009).15 While extensive research has been conducted on the Dominican language and its unique properties, some of the most popular studies frame the language in comparison to hegemonic varieties of Latin

American Spanish or Castilian Peninsular Spanish typical of variation studies (Lipski,

1994; Willis, 2006).16 This research has also tended to focus on phonological or morpho- syntactic variables rather than lexicalization patterns. In terms of the Dominican lexicon, research has pointed to copious Africanisms in the language (Lipski, 1994; Valdez, 2009;

15 Personal communication with Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (11/2/2020) 16 For exceptions please refer to Toribio 2000; Bullock & Toribio 2008, 2014a, 2014b; Valdez 2009 109 Bullock and Toribio ,2014). However, these studies generally note them as evidence of

Dominican Spanish as a contact variety formed during the colonial period when enslaved

Africans were brought to the island by Spanish colonizers. This research does little to speak of how Blackness and, more importantly, Black self-determination and surviving the transatlantic slave trade and its attendant repercussions continues to shape lexical innovation.

The current chapter seeks to contribute to the linguistic understanding of society, such that lexical patterns provide evidence of how Dominicans assert their personhood.

In the United States, research has revealed Dominican(-American) linguistic repertoires to include multiple varieties of standard and non-standard English and Spanish: American

English, African American Vernacular English, Dominican Spanish, and Hispanicized

English (Bailey, 2000, 2007; Nilep, 2006; Rubinstein-Ávila, 2007). Looking at

Dominican speech in terms of community practices allows research to move beyond a focus on Dominican Spanish features to a focus on language performances as they are tied to interaction and identity construction. Moreover, linking determined linguistic forms with named identity categories (e.g., copular dropping as a uniquely African

American Vernacular English form) gives speakers the ability to linguistically perform their chosen identity. As such, the use of uniquely Dominican Spanish properties may indicate a commitment to Black ways of being, which aids in the construction of Black self-determination as previously described.

110 While I am ultimately concerned with arguing for an overarching Black American

Community of Practices (vs. communities of practice), as evidenced through what I call hemispheric Black language practices, I focus here on a comparison between African

American English for a variety of reasons. First, I recognize the inherent conflict between racialized groups in migrant contexts, such as the case with African Americans and

Dominicans, as evidenced in Chapter 2. Secondly, while creolization and other Black language forms continue to be firmly placed within the morpho-syntactic and phonological theorization realm, African American English has provided linguistic scholars and activists with a basis by which traditional modes of language scholarship and knowledge have been challenged. One need think only of the “father of sociolinguistics,” William Labov, and his study of Philadelphia Black English in cementing his place in linguistics (Labov, 1972). In this study, an entirely new methodological approach to linguistics was introduced, which shaped much of the ways that sociolinguistics has been conducted since then.17 Lastly, I focus on AAE in relation to Dominican digital practices because the juxtaposition breaks down a boundary between an ethno-racial categorization project and between languages as bounded systems (Urciuoli, 1995).

17Other African American English activists and scholars who have shaped our understanding of a racialized language as rule-based and valid include Geneva Smitherman, John Rickford, John Baugh, Mary Hoover, Arthur K. Spears, Walt Wolfram and their successors. These scholars are joined by Black language activists and artists such as June Jordan and Toni Morrison who had clear visions of how Black English was perceived in U.S. society. 111 3.2.4 Black Lexical Practices as an extension of African American lexicalizations

Black lexicon is both the complete set of vocabulary in a Black person’s linguistic repertoire and a set of knowledge that includes the words that are used as well as embodied language such as a head nod or a knowing glance in mixed company. To cite

Smitherman (1998):

[T]he Black lexicon is comprised of idioms, phrases, terms, and other linguistic

contributions from various sub-communities within the larger African-American

community. The language and culture of these various sub-groups reflect the

African-American experience. Thus, while it is the case that on one level, great

diversity exists among African Americans today, on a deeper level, race continues

to be the defining core of the Black Experience. (p. 205)

While Smitherman focuses on Black lexicon in relation to African Americans, I extend the definition to include Black diaspora subjects who are often thrust into African

American categorizations.

Black sociolinguists have long maintained that vocabulary can play a role in the performance of a speaker’s social affiliations and identity (Rickford and McNair-Knox,

1994; Bell, 1994; Fought, 2006). In this way, language reflects the social while at the same time creating the social. Taking into consideration the socio-political landscape in which many Black subjects exist, I see Black lexical practices as a manifestation of Black self-determination. Additionally, Black language is responsive, always shifting in reaction to current geo-political realities. The constant and rapid pace at which Black 112 people are able to introduce, transform, and develop language that can mark one off while inviting those who have similar experiences of generational erasure allows for the reassertion of one’s humanity (Wolfram and Waldorf, 2019). When these practices are taken up on a larger scale in the digital age—notwithstanding the constant reproaches of limited recognition for the Black labor involved—it affirms Black existence, power, and beauty. Several lexical practices have been defined in the literature about African

American English. In the following sections, I provide a review of the Black lexical practices that I will explore throughout this chapter.

Semantic Inversions: Semantic inversion is a process of taking a word and changing its meaning to the opposite of its literal meaning. This is also a process by which something that was originally given a negative connotation is now given a positive connotation or vice versa. One of the most easily recalled examples of this in African

American English is shown in Image 3.1. Here, we see a group of Black men with the man in front dressed in a suit. The meme reads, “Yeah that’s my degree, the one that reads bad mothafucka on it.” I point to the use of the word “bad,” which in hegemonic vernacular English is used to indicate something negative. Nonetheless, in this case, the word “bad” is used to indicate that he is resilient, strong, and intelligent, evidenced by his getting a degree and him looking all sharp in the streets. Further, “bad” complements

“mothafucka,” which also conveys a negative connotation in hegemonic vernacular

English. In this case, “mothafucka” would also represent a semantic inversion since it is

113 indicating strength and someone who is not to be messed with, rather than the traditional pejorative definition that the term carries in Hegemonic Vernacular English.

Image 3.1: Yeah that’s my degree/The one that says bad muthafucka on it

Additionally, “mothafucka” points to a Black phonological practice of final consonant deletion, which has possibly undergone a phonological evolution, which will be described in the following section. In this case, the pronunciation of “mothafucka” with the deletion of syllable-final /r/ may indicate a variable but generally positive connotation in Black English, though an empirical sociolinguistic analysis would provide more concrete evidence.

Phonological evolutions: Phonological evolutions also play a large role in the creation of Black vocabulary. This is a process by which the Africanized (or innovative) pronunciation results in the lexicalization of that word, or in other words, a new meaning 114 is attached to the word when it is pronounced in that way. One example of this is African

American use of “Brothah” and “Sistah” as a term of endearment for any community member regardless of their biological connection to you (Image 3.2).

Image 3.2: Amen Sistah!

This term is uniquely African American in that it is mobilized in efforts to build solidarity and community. For this reason, the use of this term across racial boundaries is often censured or met with a prompt, “I ain’t ya sister”.

Innovative abbreviations (acronyms): African Americans have also been known for their innovative abbreviations. This is when shortened versions of words or acronyms take the place of full vocabulary in spoken and digital productions (e.g., ig for ignore or diss for disrespect). The practice was clearly shown in a recent tweet (Image 3.3). In this timely example, the meme reads, “It’s called COVID-19,” to which a sly cat replies, “He got that Rona.” Here we see the shortening of the term CoronaVirus to speak about 115 COVID-19. The shortening of words for African Americans is not only related to the creation of codes only legible to the community, but also to a finding of levity within struggle often brought on by the legacies of enslavement in the United States.

Image 3.3: It’s called Covid-19/He got that rona

Innovative abbreviations have also led to the use of innovative acronyms. These innovations can again me linked to the practice of creating codes that are only legible to

Black people and those involved in the community of practice. This process was evidenced recently with an explosion of memes that featured a long series of letters and a message claiming that only Black people could decipher the meaning. In Image 3.4, we see an explicit reference to this coding process in the meme that reads, “Only Black

Mamas Can Translate This” followed by a series of letters.18

18GYBAITGDHRNBIBYMFA translates to “Get yo’ Black ass in the Goddamn house right now before I beat yo’ mothafuckin ass.” 116

Image 3.4: Only Black mamas can translate this

I want to point out that using “translate” in this meme also points to a recognition of these forms as legitimate and productive language.

Double-voicing: Black lexical practices also include the process of double- voicing. This is a process whereby common words are given unique Black meanings.

These meanings sometimes enter the mainstream culture; however, for the most part, the

Black meanings have been given value in the Black community because of contexts that are not transferable to hegemonic practices (e.g., kitchen, which refers to the hair that grows at the nape of one’s neck). The meme in Image 3.5, which reads “All these naps, and I still can’t sleep” employs double voicing in the use of the word naps, which in this case not only eludes to the hegemonic meaning of a short moment of sleep alongside images and the double-voiced Black meaning, which is tightly curled hair.

117

Image 3.5 All these naps and I still can’t sleep

Double-voicing is especially effective in terms of creating and responding to embodied

Blackness. In this case, the cultural contexts that do not transfer into hegemonic contexts are intimately felt on the body.

Black Naming Practices: Lastly, Black self-determination is promoted through one of the most basic and fundamental vocabulary practices, and that is naming. Black naming practices come from an expression of freedom and a lack of desire to be connected to the plantation names that they were given under the system of chattel slavery. This includes the integration of nicknames and the practice of inventing names by combining the father and mother’s name (e.g., Tre for a person who is the third generation with a familial name, or Tyrone+LaShawn resulting in the name Tyeshawn). 118 In image 3.6, we see the practice of inventing a name by combining the mother and father’s name in action, with one video showing how you could combine Raymond and

Yvonne to name a child Rayvonne.

Image 3.6: Raymond and Yvonne equals Rayvonne

It is important to note that these creations need not be true, but the hypothetical name points to a larger practice of combining names as a Black naming practice. In a second example (Image 3.7), we see a tweet that reads: “Tyronesha. Come on Black people. Stop it,” followed by the hashtags #tyroneshalaw, #dababy, and #blacknames and a picture of Bobby Brown with the words “Wow. Really?” on the image.

119

Image 3.7: Tyronesha? Come on Black people. Stop it.

The reproaches to Black naming practices function alongside ideologies that understand

Black English as broken or messy. I argue that these evaluations are more indicative of attitudes about Black language and the ideologies that have been attributed to Black populations themselves. Nonetheless, there is still a need for individualizing Blackness as part of Black self-determination. This is illustrated by the in-group reproach of this practice from the Black author of the tweet in Image 3.7, despite the couple that is being referenced having already gained access to the economic stability that defines American success.19

19Da Baby is an African American rapper from North Carolina who recently gained widespread success in the music industry. 120 While these lexical practices have been attested in African American English, I again submit that parallel practices in other Black communities that have a shared experience of anti-Black discrimination provide evidence for a more robust conceptualization of Blackness. In the following section, I provide the theoretical basis for which I make a claim about language practices in the shaping of racial categories.

3.3 WHEN YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW

Research exploring the links between identity construction and language performance may provide initial insights into the expansion and restructuring of

Blackness in the United States. Drawing on the summary of language and social interaction (section 1.2.1), I again affirm the interactional nature of identity construction.

While identity can be analyzed as a performance, the ways that the performance is received and indexed through our social understandings provides the basis for several categorization projects. These projects are intimately tied to ideologies about language and race, such that listening to a person allows for immediate judgement and placement along a spectrum of identifications. Moreover, since these judgements are usually occurring on the receiving end of linguistic identity performances, many times they do not match the self-identifications offered by those who may have acquired their categorizations from varying or transnational societies. Again, for Dominican(-

American)s, the use, understanding, and access to a range of English and Spanish language varieties provides a way to perform identity both within and outside the dominant U.S. formulations of Blackness and Latinidad. As such, I center these practices

121 as a way to understand Dominican ethno-racial performances in a way that transcends national boundaries and racial schemas.

3.3.1 Communities of Practice

For the purpose of this chapter, I define Black diasporic beings as a community of practice (CofP). Eckert and McConnel-Ginet (1992) describe a linguistic community of practice (CofP) as

an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an

endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations -

in short, practices - emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor. As a social

construct, a CofP is different from the traditional community, primarily because it

is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that

membership engages. (p. 464)

CofP focuses on practice, marking linguistic behaviors as indicative of belonging to a group and of the extent to which one belongs. In other words, you are what you do.

Bound in the notion of CofP are ideas about authenticity, identity performance, and inheritance. And while these ideas have been taken up many times over in linguistic research, they have rarely been investigated within communities with overlapping but misaligned characteristics of categorization—such as aligned phenotype or street race

(López et al., 2018) and a shared but differing experience of colonization, enslavement, racial and religious restructuring, and forced migration.

122 I believe that an examination of this Black American CofP will illuminate the structures of white supremacy under which Black people in the United States are operating and reveal the genesis of moments of conflict that have marked these intra- racial relationships for much of our recent history. I contend that conflict within this CofP is a product of whiteness as the organizing structure of society. Further, I posit moments of cultural and linguistic solidarity as the contestation of these structures. An investigation of the genesis of language productions as forms of resistance evidences authentic belonging in a hemispheric Black American CofP. Moreover, the persistence of what has been deemed stigmatized or broken versions of the generally white and hegemonic varieties of both English and Spanish evidence an active engagement with this built community.

3.3.2 Raciolinguistic ideologies

The emerging field of raciolinguistics also allows for an insight into race as deeply integrated with linguistic processes. Alim (2016) notes a central concern of raciolinguistics with a defining question, “what does it mean to speak as a racialized subject in contemporary America” (p.1)? Since this question was posed, scholars have extended the call to incorporate notions of racialized identity as intricately tied to global colonial formations of power, which have marked modern society. The basis of much of raciolinguistics relies on contextualization of language production within observed language ideologies, defined as shared and common-sense notions about language in society (Rumsey, 1990). Drawing on foundations in linguistic anthropology, sociology,

123 and critical race studies, raciolinguistics extends the concept of language ideologies to refer to the inseparable nature of ideas about language and ideas about race in modern society. Importantly, raciolinguistic ideologies function below the level of consciousness, often appearing to be natural and “true.” Therefore, the mobilization of these ideologies through discourse often takes the form of knowledge, fact, or personal assertion.

Recalling the ideologies examined in Chapter 2, I note four previously defined raciolinguistic ideologies: (i) conflation of language and race; (ii) standard language ideology; (iii) categorization fallacy; and (iv) the DNA ideology (Rosa and Flores, 2017;

Lippi-Green, 2012; Clemons, 2021). While a discussion of the ways that these ideologies occur across a variety of contexts is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that each is a manifestation of the negotiation of what is appropriate “behavior” for individuals who exist within racialized bodies. Additionally, many of these ideologies co- occur, often in ways that make it difficult to separate them from each other. Furthermore, we cannot disentangle these ideologies from the linguistic performances characteristic of what I argue is a Black American Community of Practice.

While the majority of these ideologies are not taken up in the current study, they help to situate the context in which many Dominicans are performing their identity. As

Dominican youth participate in digital practices, many of the practices break from previously held ideologies about appropriate linguistic and racial behaviors. Nonetheless, the ideologies often persist in interaction, evidenced by assertions that evoke traditional

124 raciolinguistic ideologies. In image 3.8, we see the de-linking of language and Blackness answering to the presupposition that Spanish can re-racialize someone of African descent.

Image 3.8: What are Afrikans who speak Spanish!

This meme (Image 3.8), which appeared in a pro-Black instagram account

(@realqueens_overbitches) and was then reproduced on Dominican account

(@Dominican_negro), is intended to provide a moment of racial solidarity between those who are both of African descent and with origins in former colonies of Spain.

3.3.3 Speaker Agency, Stance, and Raciolinguistic Enregisterment

A third wave of sociolinguistics research has been interested in how the use of linguistic resources allows for the indexing of social characteristics such as in-group and

125 out-group membership in defined social categories as they exist in society. According to

Eckert, “The first two waves viewed social locations and their social evaluations as broadly consensual and stable, while the Third Wave views them as emergent” (Ekert,

2016). In other words, the third wave of sociolinguistics destabilizes the social as static by noting changes in both language content and form as intimately related to societal and ideological shifts. Additionally, as human beings have the unique ability to not only hear linguistic differences but also to adapt our own language in an effort to index predictable sociocultural characteristics, we can make almost immediate inferences about a speaker’s identity categorization, and we can shift our own language practices in order to index these characteristics. In sociolinguistics, this has been referred to as intra-speaker variation or style-shifting. Each individual is a social actor able to perform a range of linguistic functions to assert and contest ethnoracial categorizations as developed and assigned through a variety of social functions. Suppose we assume that speakers are aware of differential linguistic features and the social evaluations that they index. In that case, we can imagine that speakers are not only capable of shifting their language to invoke these social identifications but that many of these shifts happen above the level of consciousness. I define these conscious decisions as stancetaking behaviors. Drawing on my definition of stance in section 2.2.1, I again understand stance as the way individuals signal relationships through linguistic choices toward interactants (Johnstone, 2007,

2009; Du Bois, 2007). Thus, a speaker takes a stance toward an ethno-racial categorization based on the mobilization of linguistic features that have been indexically tied to that group. For this project’s purposes, I define stance as the shifting usage of 126 dialects to indicate a positive or negative attitude toward indexed social characteristics or towards posited raciolinguistic ideologies.

In addition to exploring the speakers’ and interlocutors’ stance-taking behaviors toward or against advanced raciolinguistic ideologies and socially-assigned identity groups, we must interrogate how specific language features become racialized. The question is: What makes a person sound like a race?20 I approach this question through an engagement with the linguistic concept of enregisterment as defined in section 1.2.2. and taken up throughout this dissertation. Again, Rosa and Flores (2017) discuss “racial emblematization” as inherent to enregisterment, calling researchers to investigate the racializations of practices that are generally investigated as disembodied linguistic processes, such as code-switching.21 I argue that raciolinguistic enregisterment is shown through the innovative practices of Black youth in the development of Black language features that define their community of practice.

3.4 EXAMINING BLACK LEXICALIZATION PROCESSES IN DOMINICAN DIGITAL PRODUCTIONS

3.4.1 Procedure

Rather than focus on the ways that Black identities are positioned in relation to the hegemonic dominant of U.S. society (i.e., anglo-Americans), I focus on negotiations

20This is the question that forms the basis for Jonathan Rosa’s (2018) book project, “Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad.” In asking this question, scholars are able to nuance racial meaning, expanding on notions of physical race to incorporate language as a racialized system. 21I define code-switching as the alternation between one or more language varieties either within a sentence or within a larger set of discourse. 127 of identity within intra-racial digital cultural productions. More specifically, I examine five areas of lexicalicalization, processes of vocabulary creation that mark Dominican

Spanish production as belonging to Black cultural practices. These processes were used to develop the coding schema for ‘Black Lexical Practices’ based on Smitherman’s

(1998) review of Black lexicon described above in section 3.2.3. In speaking about

“talking Black,” Smitherman notes that Black lexical practices result from innovations required to survive the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade in ways that would validate

Black humanity. From these actions, I summarized the behaviors under five distinct codes, representative of “talking Black.” Codes included (i) semantic inversions; (ii) innovative abbreviations; (iii) double-voicing; (iv) phonological evolutions; and (v) naming practices. These processes were chosen due to their development within critical

Black frames, which allowed for a discourse analysis of Dominican Spanish as a Black language practice.

Data was selected from a corpus of digital artifacts assembled over seven months using targeted hashtags and active engagement in Black digital spaces. As an active user of social media, I chose many of the artifacts in the course of my regular social media participation on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. However, as a researcher, I also decided to follow and engage several memes pages, such as platanopower.rd,

Dominican memes, and funny_dominicanmemes. Each meme, post, or video was marked for every process that is engaged. In several cases, a single meme would be coded for multiple lexical processes. The coding scheme can be seen in table 3.1.

128 Code Definition Example

Semantic process of taking a word and changing its Bad = good inversions meaning to the opposite of its literal meaning

Phonological a process by which the africanized (or Baby → Babe → Bae; a popular Evolutions innovative) pronunciation of a term results example is the shift in meaning for the in the lexicalization of that word in its N-word with a hard ‘r’ vs the n-word new form with an ‘a’ ending

Innovative when shortened versions of words or Wypipo - white people; Yt = white abbreviations acronyms take the place of full vocabulary (acronyms) in spoken and digital productions

Double-voicing a process whereby common words are Kitchen = the hair that grows at the given unique Black meanings nape of your neck; Plug = a personal connection or a person that is able to secure goods, entry, or services for low to no cost; Paper = money

Naming Practices the integration of innovative nicknames Tre = the third; and the practice of resisting colonial Tyrone + Kiesha = Tykiesha naming through unique combinations of the father and mother’s name

Table 3.1: Coding Schema

3.4.2 Data

Screenshots of posts that engaged topics of Blackness, Latinidad, and

Dominicanidad were taken over seven months of social media engagement. In addition to posts on the topic of identity, posts that represented Dominican linguistic innovations and that were produced for or by Dominicans and African Americans were selected and added to the corpora. These posts were archived in what I called a corpus of Dominican language artifacts. They included memes, tweets, and Instagram posts that were marked by platform and date of access. No links were saved for these artifacts as the nature of online collection means that links often disappear, accounts become private on and off,

129 and people are able to remove and/or change postings at any point. All data was transcribed and then coded using NViVo qualitative software (released in March 2020).

The overall corpus included 61 memes gathered from across the platforms (many of which appeared on multiple platforms), 17 Instagram posts, and ten tweets for a total of 89 artifacts. Again, these artifacts were chosen for their display of either raciolinguistic ideologies about Dominicanness and Blackness or for the inclusion of a lexical process described above. On the other hand, many of the individual memes displayed multiple

Black lexical processes. The distribution of Black lexical features present in the memes can be found in Table 3.2.

Lexical process Memes Tweets Instagram Posts

Semantic Inversion 5 - 0

Phonological Evolution 11 3 3

Innovative Abbreviation 4 - 1

Double-voicing 11 1 5

Innovative naming practices 3 1 4

Table 3.2: Distribution of Black lexical practices

Finally, I would like to make note of the significance of the use of memes as language data. While sociolinguistic studies have traditionally relied on large data samples in order to evidence the existence of a linguistic phenomenon (or form), memes provide high impact evidence of a wide scale phenomenon. Herein, I provide a definition of internet memes to situate them as a fruitful source of linguistic data. According to

130 Shifman (2013), “[t]he phrase ‘Internet meme’ is commonly applied to describe the propagation of content items such as jokes, rumors, videos, or websites from one person to others via the Internet. According to this popular notion, an Internet meme may spread in its original form, but it often also spawns user-created derivatives.” (p. 363). In order for a meme to be successful, it must be immediately recognizable and shared among a large group of people. As such, the mere appearance of a meme on a popular meme page or account is evidence of a cultural practice that has been extensively attested within a particular population. Further, the frequent remixing of memes allows for mapping one culture onto another when one recognizes themselves within the original contexts. As such, Black cultural frames may be adopted in order to reveal cultural or historical solidarities.

3.5 BLACK LANGUAGE AS A MODEL OF BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION

Dominican(-American)s often engage in what I have defined above as Black lexical practices. This section provides examples from the Dominican language artifact corpora that provided parallel expressions of the five previously defined lexical processes in African American English described in section 3.2.4. Each artifact represents participation in a Black CofP through the mobilization of Black lexicalization.

3.5.1 Dominican Semantic Inversions

As noted, semantic inversion is a process of taking a word and changing its meaning to the opposite of its literal meaning (e.g., bad = good, stupid = great, or phat = pretty and generally not fat by African American standards). Semantic inversions 131 appeared in several Dominican productions. Many of these inversions occurred in terms of address. For example, image 3.9, which reads, “Dominicans be like, loco dame un chin.” In this meme, “loco” does not refer to someone with mental health issues but rather someone who was considered a friend or confidant (Image 3.9).

Image 3.9: Loco dame un chin

Further, “loco” is used as a term of fraternity, where its meaning shifts from a negative connotation (of someone who is mentally unstable) to a positive connotation (of someone who is your friend and with whom you have a familiarity).

132 Another example of a popular semantic inversion is the use of the term diablo

(Image 3.10), which translates from hegemonic vernacular Spanish to “devil” and generally carries with it a negative connotation. Here we see the image of a child who looks to be enraptured with something he hears alongside the popular Dominican phrase,

“Diablo, que bachata,” which translates roughly to “Damn, what a great bachata song.”

Image 3.10: Diablo que bachata

Nonetheless, the frequent use of diablo as an exclamation usually about something revered in Dominican culture suggests a semantic. Diablo is thus inverted into an exclamation rather than a figure of evil as it occurs in hegemonic vernacular.

133 3.5.2 Dominican Phonological Evolutions

Phonological evolution also plays a large role in the creation of Black Dominican vocabulary. This is a process by which the Africanized (or innovative) pronunciation of a term results in the lexicalization of that word in its new form. This is different from the incorporation or existence of Africanisms as archaic forms that have survived or formed parts of Dominican language creolization (i.e., words such as ñame or chachimbo). In this case, Dominican pronunciation of words that exist in the hegemonic vernaculars of the

Spanish language are reconstituted for use in Black Dominican language practices. The following examples provide evidence of this process of lexicalization. Frequent use of the word “tiguere” is an example of a word that has successfully undergone a phonological process of epenthesis, adding a syllable [tigre>tiguere]. This phonological shift then results in a semantic resignification from “tiger,” the animal, to a common phrase used to describe young men who engage in reckless or illicit behavior, “tiguere” Image 3.11).

134

Image 3.11: Entonce tu ere tiguere/comete ete cañon

The term also holds within it perceptions of Dominican masculinity and engagement with

Black Dominican ways of being (De Moya, 2004; García Peña, 2016; Brown, 2019), a discussion which is beyond the scope of this chapter.

The following meme (Image 3.12), which reads “Y e’te tiguere,” is another example of this resignification through a phonological evolution. The meme is comical and functions as a lexical innovation for several reasons. The innovative pronunciation, introducing an additional syllable, shifts the meaning of the words to someone with street smarts or a number of more vulgar permutations of someone with street smarts, so the use of a cute kitten brings additional comedy to the meme. 135

Image 3.12: Y e’te tiguere

We can also imagine the meme to be poking fun at the performed masculinities of

Dominican men that have been proffered across cultural productions (Brown, 2019).22

Another example of lexicalizing phonological evolutions in Dominican Spanish is the frequent and widespread use of dique as a single word. Dique, which would have previously presented two distinct words di and que, in English “said that,” have now been

22Tigueraje has been noted to function across sexualities with those who display tigueraje often falling back on a macho identity to transgress his woes in relationships with either men or women (Brown, 2019). 136 transposed into one word, which basically translates to “supposedly,” giving the current meme with Michael Jackson holding up air quotes hilarious meaning (Image 3.13).23

Image 3.13: Michael Jackson dique

23 In actuality, the term dique has undergone several evolutions from dizque (decir+complementizer) with syllable final /s/ deletion, again as consistent with the section on phonological evolution. Additionally, the term could be indicative of a shift from dicen+que, which would represent evidential semantics (hearsay). 137 In all of these cases, the lexical items have shifted as a result of Dominican phonological patterns and have been taken up in popular culture as individual lexical items.

3.5.3 Innovative Dominican Abbreviations (Acronyms)

In Dominican digital artifacts, the process of innovative abbreviations and acronyms was evidenced by the popular and frequent use of the greeting “Qué es lo que

(es),” which has eventually been shortened to “klk.” This greeting is often marked as

Dominican slang, meaning “what’s up.” Importantly, in the production of “que lo que,” which elides the final es as part of the phonological process of syllable-final /s/ deletion and vowel mergers attested in Dominican Spanish (Bullock et al., 2014), we see the incorporation of English orthographic systems. The incorporation of the letter “k,” not usually found in hegemonic varieties of Spanish, provides evidence for the construction of a uniquely Dominican(-American) language practice (Image 3.14). This meme also references the Black lexical practice of double-voicing in the use of the term

“chapiadora,” which will be discussed in the following section.

138

Image 3.14: KLK Chapiadora

In the example below (Image 3.15), we see the greeting “KLK” paired with a taboo word, “mamaguevo,” which is abbreviated to “mmg” and translates roughly to the

English “cocksucker.” In this instance, innovative abbreviation practices transform what may be taken as vulgar in hegemonic vernacular Spanish into something more colloquial.

I assert that the frequent use of the marker “klk” represents a positive stance toward

Dominican language and belonging in a Black CofP.

139

Image 3.15: KLK MMG

The use alongside the phrase “KLK MMG” transforms a generally vulgar term into something comical.

3.5.4 Dominican Double-Voicing

Dominicans also engaged in the process of double voicing, which is the application of a uniquely Black meaning to a word that exists in the hegemonic variety.

In the following example (Image 3.16), which translates to: “President Obama announced today that anyone who maintained a chapiadora (gold digger) in the year 2015 can claim her as a dependent on their taxes.”

140

Image 3.16: El presidente Obama anuncio que los hombres que mantienen una chapiadora

The use of chapiadora to indicate a woman who is only interested in a relationship of financial gain is a semantic extension from the verb chapiar, which means to gold-plate or put metal over something. This term was prominent in the data and is understood by

Dominicans to have an extended meaning.

An additional term, which has been double-voiced in Dominican Spanish is the term guapo. This term has an original meaning of beautiful or good-looking, but has been transformed in Dominican Spanish to indicate when someone is angry or upset. The

Instagram post shows a baby with the caption, “Donald Trump está guapo,” which translates roughly to, “Donald Trump is pissed off” (Image 3.17).

141

Image 3.17: Donal Trump está guapo

The next example came up in a tweet by @LO5T5OUL in 2018 (Image 3.18).

The tweet reads: “My boss just came back from the Dominican Republic. I called him El

Guapo. Didn’t go as planned.”

Image 3.18: My boss guapo

142 In order to understand the joke, one must have access to the double-voicing that has taken place in the Dominican Republic, which shifts the meaning of guapo from handsome to someone who is very upset or angry. This particular example is representative of Black language practices, which obscure meaning from general and hegemonic populations.

Lastly, Dominican double-voicing is seen in this meme (3.19), which reads “Deja el coro” or “Leave behind your crew”, or even more appropriately translated to “Don’t be worrying about ya crew.”

3.19: Deja el coro

143 Coro, which means choir in hegemonic vernacular Spanish, now takes on a new meaning indicating a group of friends or a crew.

3.5.5 Dominican Naming Practices

If we recall, Black naming practices provide the space for Black subjectivities to reclaim parts of their humanity that were stripped during colonial processes of owning humans as property. Incapable of choosing their own names and marked by their owners while their last names or tribal affiliations were lost and replaced with Spanish family names, reinventing first names becomes a Black lexical process that parallels African

American naming practices described in section 3.2.4.5. This practice in Dominican culture often receives the same kind of reproaches that it does when African Americans engage in the practice (Image 3.20).

144

Image 3.20: Yudy and Amaurys equals Yudeiskilaurys Maria

Here we see the admonishment of the community’s practice, evidencing shared incorporation of raciolinguistic ideologies that equate Black creativity with cultural depravity.

Moreover, Dominicans’ double socialization within systems of colonial and later imperial powers created a unique contact situation with English language speakers. This contact often impacts the creation of novel names. The post in Image 3.21, which translates to, “My name is danger zone in English/ What? / Danyerson,” is a play on the

Spanish pronunciation of a mundane English word to create what sounds like a real

Dominican name.

145

Image 3.21: Danyerson

In this Instagram post, contact with English has activated a creative name resulting from the Dominicanized pronunciation. Further, it connotes the value of incorporation of U.S. language practices into Dominican cultural norms in the search for cultural capital in the process of self-determination.

3.6 DOMINICAN SPANISH AS BLACK LANGUAGE PRACTICE

In this chapter, I have focused on Black lexical processes as indicative of Black self-determination for African Americans and Dominican(-American)s. In placing

Dominican digital productions alongside African American lexical processes and digital practices, we can see a clear existence of a Black American Community of Practice shown through the Black lexical processes in Dominican digital production. What is

146 more, despite the often noted explicit pronouncements to the contrary, the frequent incorporation of African American cultural icons, such as Barack Obama, Lawrence

Fishburn, Michael Jackson, and Samuel L. Jackson showed above, alongside Dominican cultural and linguistic productions, provides evidence for shared racialized conceptions of

Blackness.

A feature of Dominican digital production that I had not previously accounted for in exploring lexicalization was the frequent crossing of U.S. origin Blacks voiced as

Dominicans through linguistic or cultural indexing. Images of Barack Obama appearing in Dominican digital productions were very popular (Image 3.22).

Image 3.22: Obama Yo le hago el favor

In fact, it seems that Barack Obama and Drake represent the ideal Dominican when put alongside Dominican cultural propositions (Image 3.23 and Image 3.24). 147

Image 3.23: Obama Dique

Image 3.24: Drake Dime aver

148 It should be noted that although Barack Obama and Drake may self-identify as

Black, based on U.S. conceptualization of hypodescent, the use of these mixed-raced cultural icons affirms notions of Dominican identity within the frames of mestizaje.

Nonetheless, these cross-cultural productions disrupt the idea that “mixedness” is uniquely Dominican, Caribbean, or Latin American. Further, and attending to the remixification of memes characteristic of internet culture, Dominicans often appropriated images of U.S. Black Americans in order to critique Dominican racial ideologies. Many digital productions specifically critiqued the notion of Dominicans as non-Black by combining the popular phrase, “I’m not Black,” with an image of an African American who is voiced as Dominican (Image 3.25).

Image 3.25: Este lambón wish

149 This meme (Image 3.25) is particularly interesting in its recursiveness. The use of a popular African American rapper voiced as a Dominican who is creating a boundary between Dominicanness and African American Blackness reveals the absurdity of racial categorization projects.

Memes also featured a variety of Black American public figures alongside mundane topics such as relationship status (Image 3.26).

Image 3.26: Esta es tu cara cuando no tienes novia

While an exploration of the motivations for these cross-ethnic combinations is beyond the scope of this chapter, future work should interrogate the construction of Dominican(-

Americanness) as authentically hybrid.

150 The examples presented above are just a few of the Dominican language practices that follow the Black language processes described. Dominican(-American)s, alongside

African Americans, form part of a unique community of practice that engages in Black lexical practices in order to mitigate the effects of being African descendants in America.

Though the chapter began with an explicit questioning of the ways that Dominican(-

American)s perform Blackness autonomously from African American identity, it is worth noting that the relationship between Dominican(-American)s and African Americans is intimately bound up in a transnational (and thus hemispheric) Blackness that incorporates both African American Blackness and Dominican Blackness into the reproductions of digital artifacts. Again, access to Dominican Spanish alongside U.S. Black language and culture creates a rupture in the dominant formulations of U.S. Blackness and Latinidad.

Further, I wish to problematize my assertions of Dominican Spanish as well as

African American English as Black language practices, understanding that both varieties are used by non-Black populations in both the Dominican Republic and the United States respectively. While many of these practices can be directly linked to sociohistorical processes involved with the evolution from transatlantic slave trade to modern society, many others have circulated in ways that make it difficult to disaggregate their origins along imagined racial lines. A full analysis of Black and non-Black usage of these linguistic practices is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, for the purposes of this project, the linking of these practices to Blackness allows for a political reimagining of Dominicanidad and U.S. identity from the margins, rather than from the hegemonic

151 whiteness that has structure both of these societies. Future work should take into consideration the mobilization of such practices across racial boundaries and how they are read in larger postcolonial imaginaries.

3.7 CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I draw on youth internet practices in the forms of memes and tweets to make a connection between Black lexical practices as defined in research on

African American English and the practices found in Dominican digital spaces. Parallel practices in Black American digital production and Dominican(-American) digital production provide evidence for the existence of a Black American Community of

Practice. In this case, the practice of Black language is exemplified in memes, tweets, and engagement with Dominican culture practices. In the future, I imagine the incorporation of various other “Black” languages to be investigated in the service of understanding the existence of this community of practice, rather than a static bounded linguistic category to be applied to a set of racialized individuals.

In addition to parallel lexicalization practices, Dominican youth digital practices evidence a strong engagement with the African American community. From the use of prominent African American figures to the adoption of African American phrases and grammatical patterns, such as “Dominicans be like…,” Dominican content producers and those who interact with the content exist within a transnational frame. Positioning Barack

Obama or Drake as potential Dominican subjects, especially when voiced as Dominicans through language and cultural discourse, evidences both an acknowledgment of shared 152 ancestry while centralizing Dominicanidad as their primary cultural mode of being. These cross-cultural productions support my claim that there exists a Black American

Community of Practice, and within it, cultural autonomy is able to be maintained through the remixing of content to fit the unique characteristics of each Black subject positionality. Ultimately, the Black American Community of Practice is achieved through a rupture of national and linguistic boundaries and logics that resituates the ways that we think about Blackness and Latinidad in the United States.

Recalling the mis-educations of African Americans regarding hemispheric

Blackness, in Chapter 4 I will present an ethnographic account of the negotiation of

Blackness for an ethnically heterogeneous group of students in a private high school in

Brooklyn, New York. In that chapter, I specifically think through the impacts of institutional structures and programming on the raciolinguistic discourses of race and belonging. In the final chapter, I then consider the implications of focusing on language practices that can allow for movements toward or away from pan-Black diasporic solidarity.

153 Chapter 4. “They Spanish; they ain’t Black”: Language and culture sharing in the (de)construction of Dominican Blackness

4.1 BLACK HISTORY, BLACK LANGUAGE, AND THE FORMATION OF SELF In the United States, Black History Month is annually recognized in February.

The month was born out of “National Negro Week,” which Dr. Carter G. Woodson and the minister Jesse E. Moorland created in 1926 to highlight the previously ignored achievements of African Americans. The first “National Negro Week” was scheduled for the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and

Abraham Lincoln. Mayors in different cities along with organizations on several college campuses quickly recognized “National Negro Week,” but it took until 1976 for

President Gerald Ford to officially recognize Black History Month. The original idea of

Black History Month was to redress the erasures and caricatures of Blacks that contributed to notions of Black inferiority in comparison to white exceptionalism (King and Brown, 2014). Nonetheless, as racial scripts have continued transforming in order to uphold white supremacy and its attendant U.S. racial hierarchies, there has been a marked absence in the visiblization of Black heterogeneity in the United States.

For me, Black History Month has always been a special time. My family never missed an opportunity to teach me about the glory of people of African descent. My father is African American, and my mother was born in Martinique, so I grew up in and around a Black diaspora consisting of African Americans, West Indians, and recent

African migrants. They were so invested in me learning about my culture that my first ever educational experience was at an African American Montessori school where

154 lessons were taught not only in English and French but also in Swahili (shout out to Shule

Mandela Academy).24 This Black diasporic coalition around which I was raised gave me a passion for linguistic diversity and for Black liberatory struggles. We celebrated

Christmas and Kwanzaa. I didn’t take ballet classes; I took West African Dance and performed in West Indian Day Caribbean parades since I was old enough to shake my hips. In my mind, my African American and West Indian roots made me the embodiment of the African diaspora, and I easily made connections with Black people from all over the world.

So, when I moved to Spain and was (re)ethnicized as a dominicana, it wasn’t hard to connect with my new community. With our shared love of plantains and drum beats, how could I not feel the connection? I noticed how Spaniards easily referred to us as mi negra or mi negro no matter what hue of off-white to chocolate complexion we displayed.25 Growing up in a diasporic enclave where heritage from any of the West

Indian islands automatically made you family, I began to question the ideological separation between the Caribbean islands colonized by the English, French, and Dutch and those colonized by the Spanish. Moreover, I began to question the mechanisms of socialization that allowed for the acquisition or contestation of these boundaries in the formation of self.

24The Shule Mandela Academy was started by a group of Black educators and activists dedicated to liberatory education for Black children. The school became a charter school in 1999, but ultimately closed due to declined enrollment coupled with rapid rental increases as Silicon Valley grew and expanded. 25 I wish to note the demeaning nature of including possessives on a racial identifier. For Black people who have survived being physically possessed by white people, the simple use of the possessive determiner “my” can trigger ancestral trauma. 155 In the Handbook of Language and Identity, Vally Lytra (2016) asks,

“[H]ow is ethnic identity imagined and performed but also imposed in discourse

and social activity? What is the role of the nation state and its institutions, such as

schools and the media, in the social reproduction of ethnic categorization? Whose

linguistic and identity practices are considered authentic and whose are not, and

who decides?” (p.131)

The current chapter seeks to explore these questions within the context of an after-school program and culminating event aimed at validating the shared identity and experience of

Blackness among the student population—the annual Black History Month Show. I extend Lytra’s questions by asking in what ways projects of pan-ethnicity become imagined within transnational racial frames. Two main research questions guide the chapter. First, I ask how languages—Dominican Spanish and Black English—and cultures—Dominican and Black American—are shared and contested during the ethno- raciolinguistic development of Dominican(-American)s in U.S. contexts. Specifically, I ask how Black American culture is more widely construed for those who speak the same language, such that those with heritage in Anglophone Caribbean islands and African nations become more easily integrated into African American identities. Further, resisting the tradition of analyzing language in isolation from embodied experiences, I affirm

Blackness as a physical reality. In this way, we are able to understand processes that create boundaries between Spanish and English speakers but not between Haitian Creole,

French, or Garifuna and English speakers.

156 These questions become particularly important when considering Black heterogeneity as a linguistic and socio-cultural reality (Blake, 2016). Secondly, I ask how schools allow for the construction and negotiation of ethnoracial identity through the implementation and direction of a school-sponsored activity. In exploring this activity, as part of the school culture, I am able to interrogate pedagogical and policy impacts on the construction of identity boundaries for heterogeneous Black subjects. Ultimately, I argue that the presence of Dominicans within the school context creates a situation in which we must consider transnational racial constructions that engage variable ideologies of race and racial hierarchies.

This chapter examines significant moments of linguistic profiling in the planning and execution of a Black History Month celebration in 2016 at a private high school in

Brooklyn, New York. In describing these moments, I theorize the ways that language informs ethnoracial developments among a group of students who represent differing

Black subjectivities. Further, I draw on these moments to understand how school decision-making and implementation (or lack) of programming are implicated in the fashioning of self and others for students. Using the annual Black History Month show as an anchor, I consider how racial scripts and the negotiation of space provide a basis for the creation of boundaries around identity categories for students who sit at the margins of several ethnoracial categories. I then examine the ways in which school policies and practices promote the active erasure of Blackness as a central element of Latinidad. And lastly, I reflect on the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogies and practices within school settings with highly heterogeneous populations, despite institutional 157 classificatory practices that would mark the student population as homogeneously Black or Hispanic. Such practices situate/frame these categories as mutually exclusive.

4.2 A CRITICAL RACE AND ANTHRO-POLITICAL LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY

4.2.1 Methods The study detailed in the current chapter presents a Critical Race Ethnography and

Anthro-political linguistic ethnography of a six-month period at Hispaniola High

School.26 Critical Race Ethnography is defined as the presentation of ethnographic data in ways that allow the reader to contend with the ideological nature of “racially informed relations of power” that are present in “seemingly objective social languages” (Duncan,

2002, p. 131). More importantly, Critical Race Ethnography focuses on stories from below, centering the voices and experiences of marginalized individuals and documenting stories to contextualize reconstituted formations of power (Duncan, 2005;

Woodson, 2019). In categorizing erasure as a form of violence and oppression, I employ

Critical Race Ethnography as a method of examining racial identity development for a group of Afro-diasporic students.

For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in how ethnoracial identity was socially co-constructed during an extra-curricular activity in an educational context.

Critical Race Ethnography is appropriate for this study because it permits the integration of multiple data sources to explore what can only be described as a dynamic and highly

26All proper names are pseudonyms. 158 complex process of peer-to-peer and student-to-teacher Ethno-racializations. Moreover,

Critical Race Ethnography allows for an integration of the localized historical contexts and power dynamics that structured understandings of ethnoracial belonging for the students involved in the Black History Month show that year.

Anthro-political linguistic ethnography can be defined as the presentation of ethnographic data that help illuminate “a stigmatized group’s attempts to construct a positive self within an economic and political context that relegates its members to static and disparaged ethnic, racial and class identities, and that identifies them with static and disparaged language codes and practices” (Zentella, 1997, p. 13). Scholars in anthropology have long been interested in the formation of racial constructs; however, it wasn’t until recently that the field began to challenge accepted norms of taxonomic and genetic models of racial categorization. While linguistic anthropology has been historically primarily concerned with describing “language in its social contexts in order to understand the ways in which language and culture impact social life” (Charity-

Hudley, 2016, p. 393), innovations in the field have begun to challenge the basic assumptions about how race is mapped onto language in the first place. In her call for anthro-political linguistics, Zentella (1997) challenges researchers to situate language ideologies and practices within a sociopolitical context to reveal the power structures that regulate the use and evaluation of language practices. In doing so, researchers can join and support communities that sit on the margins of hegemonic racial categorization projects to question the validity and social functions of these projects.

159 This chapter contributes to the anthropolitical linguistics of social identity and aids in the growing field of raciolinguistics, which I have engaged throughout this dissertation. More specifically, the study engages in languaging race, which Alim (2016) describes as the process of “theorizing race through the lens of language” (p. 7).

Importantly, the lessons we can learn from an educational perspective and from ethnographic examination grounded in critical race studies allow for an imagining of racial solidarities that move beyond categorical constructions of race as they currently exist. Again, I assert that in order to contend with linguistic processes of racialization, one must move beyond disciplinary bounds. As such, I take an interdisciplinary approach to the exploration of ethnoracial developments within a notable linguistic and socio- historical context. My guiding constructs combine theoretical innovations from history, education, sociology, and linguistic anthropology.

4.2.2. Ethnographic Sources Combining critical race ethnography with anthro-political linguistic ethnography allows for a multifaceted investigation of a particular phenomenon by permitting multiple data sources as evidence of how racial hierarchies function in the discourses and language practices within a particular institution. This study draws on a variety of data sources: (i) field notes, taken originally during a six-month period in the 2015 - 2016 school year as a way to catalog and improve future programming and to argue for the development of culturally responsive programming for the high population of Caribbean- origin students; (ii) six interviews with Dominican(-American) students conducted in

160 June of 2016 that addressed their ethnoracial identities and school experiences; (iii) four student reflection interviews with Hispaniola High graduates conducted in November of

2020; and (iv) four teacher and staff interviews conducted in November 2020 that comment on changes in the school culture over time. A description of the interview metadata can be found in Table 4.1. During the time of primary data collection, I was not involved as a researcher-observer but as a practitioner armed with a certain subject positionality, educational history, and a leadership role within the organization. Having been solely responsible for their admissions, recruitment, and processing since they were in the eighth grade I had worked with most of the students for over four years, since the majority of the students involved were in their third year of high school.

Pseudonym Relationship with Hispaniola High School Time of interview

Guillermo Junior, Dominican(-American) June 2016

Marcos Junior, Dominican(-American) June 2016

Ramona Junior, Dominican(-American) June 2016

Juan Senior, Dominican(-American) June 2016

Rico College Freshman, Dominican(-American) June 2016

Eddy College Freshman, Dominican(-American) June 2016

Erica College graduate, Haitian(-American) (Hispaniola class of 2016) November 2020

Stacy College graduate, Black, Haitian(-American) (Hispaniola class of November 2020 2015)

Julissa College graduate, Dominican(-American) (Hispaniola class of 2016) November 2020

Mercedes College graduate, Dominican(-American) (Hispaniola class of 2015) November 2020

Francisca Administration, Philipina(-American) (2015-2016) November 2020

161 Jean Teacher, African American (2014-2017) November 2020

Stephen Teacher, White American (2011-2019), Administration (2018- November 2020 present)

Siobhan Administration, Mixed Irish and Puerto Rican(-American) (2011- November 2020 2016)

Table 4.1: Interview Metadata While working with the students, I strengthened my relationships with them as well as with their families, often stepping in to advocate for students to their high school teachers and academic administration. At the time, I considered myself a researcher in practice, as I was constantly taking notes and collecting data to challenge and improve structural norms both at the school and network level. This project was part of a larger push to incorporate Black History electives, Spanish and Haitian Kreyol language programs, and experiential learning through travel abroad. Importantly, the work grew out of the need to challenge dominant assumptions that minoritized students, who are often labeled as behind their grade levels, need to be educated in the hegemonic language and literacy norms that will allow for successful engagement with college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT exams. Moreover, such assumptions included the notion that that an absence of education in the hegemonic language would prove detrimental to the life expectancy and material conditions of these students. Though I did not have access to

April Baker Bell’s landmark study of Black language in Detroit schools at the time, her

162 problematization of standard and white language practices as a means to “save the lives” of Black students would have proved fruitful in my attempts (Baker-Bell, 2020b).27

Fueled by my determination to remedy the current school curriculum that failed to reflect the students that were being served, I launched a campaign to include African diaspora history into program offerings. The first aspect of this campaign was to survey the ways that student identity was allowed space within the current programming and school culture. Nonetheless, as Zentella (2016b) noted, “a sociolinguistic ethnography of school networks must build upon an understanding of the larger community —its socioeconomic and political context” (p. 329). While I will comment on this context throughout the chapter, I begin with a small portrait of the socio-political context that shaped Hispaniola High School.

4.2.3 Socio-political context In the original context in which the Black History Month show had been conceived, at a converted elementary school building in the Bushwick region of

Brooklyn, Dominican students represented the majority of the school population. The principal was a bilingual Puerto Rican who identified as an Afro-Latina and prided herself on making substantive connections between the students’ school and home communities. Teachers and staff members attended practices in games throughout the

27April Baker Bell argues in her book, Linguistic Justice, that though Black students have been repeatedly told that learning White Mainstream English will allow them to code-switch to find success and thus survival within a system dedicated to white norms, it has no impact on their actual ability to survive racial violence. In interviewing her students in Detroit, Bell describes that “the students pointed out how Trayvon used White Mainstream English when he said ‘What are you following me for?’ and that did not protect him from being murdered” (2020, pg. 30-31). 163 community because the school had no gym or field to itself. Additionally, events relied heavily on family volunteering to provide food and other services. While much of student life occurred at the school, the lack of space meant that most students left directly once their classes or extracurriculars came to an end. Extra-curriculars were fairly limited and counted on teachers and Jesuit Corp Volunteers (JVC) who were employed as full-time volunteers over two-year periods. Despite the large presence of Dominican students, there were no explicit celebrations of Dominicanness. Nonetheless, the culture was ever- present. On Fridays, one student would bring pastelitos to school to sell to other students and teachers. Students participated in baseball over all other sports and professed dominance due to “Dominican plátano power.” At school dances we listened to as much reggaeton, merengue, and bachata as we did U.S. hip hop and R&B.

In what might have felt like an overnight shift, this context was nearly reversed in the fall of 2013 after the school moved to a new building in the Flatbush region of

Brooklyn. Around 50% of the 2013 graduating class of Hispaniola High School was of

Dominican descent. The remaining students were African American, Mexican, and

Ecuadorian, with very few students coming from West-Indian or Anglo or Francophone

Caribbean families. Since many of the Dominican families decided to find alternative schooling options for their children and the admissions at Hispaniola High was geared toward the new location, the Haitian, West Indian, and African(-American) population significantly grew as the Dominican population diminished. The location change would mean that in order to maintain a similar demographic profile, the school would not only

164 need to retain the Dominican populations in the rising classes, but it would also need to recruit students in similar demographics as it had done in prior years.

As a Catholic institution, Hispaniola High School had a mission of providing a college preparatory education and impacting the growth of a student’s faith, purpose, and service to their communities. As such, families who decided to send their students to

Hispaniola High School did so with the understanding that students would be engaged in academic training and also be subject to the moral and social codes of the institution specifically and the Catholic church more broadly. Nonetheless, there were many students whose families were not Catholic and who made their choice based on college acceptance rates, the work program, safety, and several local considerations rendered necessary by the complex high school choice system in New York City.28

While New York City is known for its ethnic diversity, neighborhood segregation is still advanced (Flores and Lobo, 2013). This segregation would come to affect the student population at Hispaniola High, even if families were not constrained by zoning or the public high school application process. At Hispaniola High School, the instruction was offered in English with the goal of bringing students up to college-ready

28New York City functions on a matching system, much like the system used in U.S. medical schools. That is, students are allowed to select up to 12 schools, ranked from first choice to last choice, and then the schools are able to choose from the applicants based on items such as location, grades, recommendations from teachers, and other portfolio items. The original system was intended to equalize disparities caused by zoning and segregation, but the current system includes several barriers that have resulted in similar rates of inequity (Abdulkadiroğlu et al., 2005). Students are often misguided in their choices and the highest ranked schools require additional testing. Much like the ACT and SAT, these tests now have a business built around them where students who can afford test prep courses are able to perform and access these schools at higher rates than those who do not have the financial means. 165 classification by graduation. Decisions were made in order to ensure that students acquired hegemonic vernacular English in reading, writing, and speech production. These decisions were reinforced through work-ready training that occurred throughout a student’s academic trajectory at the school. Therefore, despite students’ wide and varying linguistic abilities, Hispaniola High functioned as what Williamson and Clemons have termed an “English-Mostly” space (2019).

4.3 WHO GETS TO BE BLACK IN THE UNITED STATES? Throughout the chapter, I rely on the use of several named ethnoracial categories or concepts that require further definition. As previously noted in Chapter 2, ethnoracial refers to the linkages between ethnicity, as heritage from a particular nation-state, and race, as the corporeal manifestation of colonial categorization projects. Following the work of sociologist Nancy López and her colleagues (2018), I use the terms self- identified, ascribed, and street race to distinguish between the interactional levels of race that live at the level of individual, community, and society. I recognize race as a socially constructed phenomenon. Therefore, self-identified race refers to the racial category used by the individual to describe themselves. Ascribed race is the racial category that would be assigned based on the social construction of a particular society—i.e., national origin or linguistic abilities as indicative of racial category. Street race is the racial category that would be assigned based on embodied physical features at an instant on the street. I define nationality as belonging or citizenship to a politically bounded nation-state. Pan- racial refers to a racial category that extends beyond a nation-state, and pan-ethnicity

166 refers to the political and social unification of a number of sub-ethnic groups in an effort to gain material improvements within a particular socio-geographic landscape (Ricourt

2016). Pan-ethnic solidarities are often evidenced in community activism and in a centering of shared cultural norms such as language or religion. Both pan-racial and pan- ethnic identities are inherently heterogeneous. Nonetheless, it is important to note that hegemonic groups can promote both pan-racial and pan-ethnic identity categories in ways that are not taken up by members of the subgroups who have been identified within the categories. This hegemonic posturing of pan-racial and pan-ethnic groupings is often mobilized in an effort to justify harmful policies and practices that maintain current power structures. For instance, though the Chinese American Exclusion Act of 1882 had

Chinese in its name, the policies were often extended to other “Asian” immigrant groups such as those migrating from Korea or Vietnam (Hagan and Rodríguez, 2009).

In addition to overall ethnoracial concepts, I use categorical terms to speak about subject positionalities. I wish to note that the use of categorical terms in no way suggests the ratification of these terms as valid in the marking of human subjects. Each of these terms exists within a categorization project, most often steered and controlled by systems of white supremacy. Therefore, the inclusion of this section is more an exercise in describing the current terms being employed to speak about a group of humans who were interacting in a particular space and time as described in this chapter. I use the term Black subjectivities to refer to anyone who has visible or self-identified African ancestry. This term will also be shortened to Black throughout the chapter. It should be noted that I

167 privilege this term for embodied experiences of Blackness. In cases where other lived experiences may overshadow the experience of Blackness (Candelario, 2007; Ramos

Zayas, 2011; Lamb and Dundes, 2017), then I default to afro-descended. I also use the terms Afro-Dominican, Afro-Latinx, and Afro-Hispanic throughout the chapter. Afro-

Dominican refers to a group of people who proclaim African descent and at least one great grandparent, grandparent, parent, or whom themselves were born in the Dominican

Republic. I take my lead in the use of Afro-Latinx from the definition provided by

Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, who note Afro-Latinx identity as “those

Latin@s of visible or self-proclaimed African descent” (Jiménez Román and Flores,

2010, p. 4). Therefore, Afro-Latinx refers to any person of African descent born in a country now considered to be part of Latin America—i.e., a Brazilian or a Colombian could fall into this category. Afro-Hispanic is any person who has African descent and who has parentage or is themselves from a Spanish-speaking nation—this would include a person from Equatorial Guinea but not a Brazilian.

Following my use of Latinx and Hispanic in Chapter 2, I use Latinx to refer to populations historically displaced from formerly colonized regions in Central and South

America and the term Hispanic to refer to those who come from colonizing regions into a society—the United States—where they do not always fit neatly defined racial dynamics of hypodescent. The ethnoracial label West-Indian also appears throughout the chapter. In most cases, the word is used by students to describe people who originate or who have heritage from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch Caribbean islands. However, in

168 certain instances, the term was extended to include those who had connections to the

Spanish Caribbean, recalling the use of the term to encompass all of the territories within the Greater and the Lesser Antilles. Again, in my use of each of these terms, I would like to acknowledge the extreme limitations that each carries—the lack of accord between those who may inhabit these categorizations, the blurred and mutable boundaries, and the biopolitics associated with each. While I choose to use the terms as descriptors in the chapter, I in no way claim them to be authentic and all-encompassing terms. In cases where my subjects could define their own terms of identity, I privilege their self- identification. In addition, I acknowledge high school as a period when students are coming to make decisions about who they are and how they would like to relate with the world as it exists (Eckert, 1989; Nasir et al., 2009). As such, I note the times where students acknowledge their struggle with their own terms of identity.

Lastly, I employ a variety of terms to describe my own linguistic practices as well as those of the students with whom I worked in the school—recalling Smitherman’s

(2006) definition of Black Language as “a style of speaking English words with Black

Flava—with Africanized semantic, grammatical, pronunciation, and rhetorical patterns,”

(p.3). I expand the use of Black Language to include the experience of “U.S. slave descendants” as marked by Smitherman and those who survive the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade across the Americas. Drawing from Chapter 3, I argue that despite the minority status of Black language users in the U.S., there exist commonalities in language practices and enough ties to African language roots to justify Black

169 Language’s use as a hemispheric categorization rather than a national one. In addition, I use Black Language (BL) much in the way that Baker-Bell (2020b) uses it to bring attention to the inextricable linkage between the language practices and the embodied realities of being Black in the Americas. Like Baker-Bell, I enlist the term Black

Language as a political statement to align myself with Black liberatory politics and movements.

By linking Black and white racial classifications to language, I am challenging

you, the reader, to see how linguistic hierarchies and racial hierarchies are

interconnected. That is, people’s language experiences are not separate from their

racial experiences. Indeed, the way a Black child’s language is devalued in school

reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world. Similarly, the way a white

child’s language is privileged and deemed the norm in schools is directly

connected to the invisible ways that white culture is deemed normal, neutral, and

superior in the world. (Baker-Bell, 2020b, p. 2)

Because I have expanded the definition of Black Language to include languages other than English, I must distinguish between Black Language practices that occur in English and those that occur in Spanish. Therefore, I use Black English to refer to the Black language practices of U.S.-based Black populations. These populations may include second-generation West Indian and African language users who have assimilated and/or aligned themselves with Black U.S. populations and who speak no other heritage language or creole. On the other hand, I use Dominican Spanish to refer to the dialect of 170 Spanish spoken in the Dominican Republic and by those who have Dominican heritage in the United States. I note that Dominican Spanish is often rooted in what I term a Black

American Community of Practice as discussed in Chapter 3 and thus constitutes a Black language. I also speak about Haitian Creole and Garifuna as Black Language varieties used among my population.

Though the term White Mainstream English (Alim and Smitherman, 2012) has been used to note the ways that white language practice becomes invisible as the base, I don’t adopt it in this study because I wish to emphasize that hegemonic vernaculars are often ratified and promoted by racialized subjectivities who have already acquired and are loyal to white modes of being. As such, I use hegemonic vernacular English as well as hegemonic vernacular Spanish to refer to the generally white and upper-class mainstream languages in both the United States and Latin America. These terms are used to connote the power hierarchy and dominance of white language practices in mainstream society and institutions. In the following sections, I present brief ethnographic portraits of significant moments of linguistic profiling and ideological stance-taking before, during, and after the 2016 Black History Month Show, which are analyzed through the lens of racial scripts (Molina 2010), social acts, stances (Ochs, 1993), and ideological enregisterment (adapted from Rosa and Flores, 2017).

171 4.4 “IT’S BLACK HISTORY MONTH NOT SPANISH HISTORY MONTH, RIGHT?” When I began working in 2012 at Hispaniola High School, a pseudonym I gave the school owing to the high populations of students of both Haitian and Dominican origins, I was so excited to celebrate Black History Month. It had been a long time since I had worked in a school with a population of predominantly Black students. The school had only been open for four years when I arrived, and I was told that the Black History

Month celebration was the largest school event. On the last Friday of February, students would celebrate Black history through poetry, dance, song, and an African(-American)- inspired fashion show. After quickly bonding with the students, I enthusiastically volunteered to help with hair and makeup, last-minute rehearsals, and backstage pep talks. After two years of volunteering behind the scenes, one in the school’s former location and one in the new school building, I noticed two things. The first was that although I had been socialized into an ever-present celebration of “Blackness,” many of my students and the educators they were working with had effectively been robbed of any significant education regarding a hemispheric Black history. Though the students were celebrating their culture through art, “Black history” was decidedly lacking in the school curriculum and, by extension, was missing from the show.29 This feeling was expressed by some of the students whom I interviewed. Erica, who during her time at Hispaniola

29I will note that in my four years in the school, I was involved in numerous meetings in which the principal and other educational leadership appealed to the president for more culturally relevant pedagogy as defined by Ladson Billings (1995). Culturally relevant pedagogy in this instance would have provided students an education about the vastness of the African diaspora and its manifestations throughout the Americas. In 2016, the school allowed for one African American culture class as part of a college credit initiative with a local partner University. It was taught by one of two African American teachers in the faculty of about 25 teachers. 172 High School bore the badge of star student, reflected on the lack of education or “history” in the Black History Month Show (1).

1. Erica: The Black History Month show was basically an excuse to showcase our

culture, so we didn’t really have much Black history; it was more of like a

showcase of our culture at that time.

My second realization was that there was a clear divide in who was involved with the show’s production and execution in terms of faculty, staff, and students. In the new building, the event was visually diasporic, with students representing their parentage through the waving of flags from several African and West Indian nations. Nonetheless, students of African descent from Spanish-speaking countries were completely left out.

Many of these students didn’t even show up to the event. It was in that space, so heavily occupied by bodies clearly marked by their African descent, where I began to question the role of racial categorizations as they had been conceived in the United States.

Like many born in the United States, I had been inculcated in the notion of a racial binary that rested on “one-drop” rules (Omi and Winant, 2014). Even the history lessons that my parents had so painstakingly exposed me to throughout my life did not prevent my common sense understanding of race, in which “one drop” of African ancestry automatically pushed someone into the named category of “Black” (Dominguez,

1986). The ideology of the “one-drop” rule often feeds into ideas of racial authenticity, which I will return to in my discussion on participation in the Black History Month Show and identity policing among the students. In my own case, I was not immune from this

173 ideological policing of Blackness. Armed with my subjective understanding of who is authentically “Black,” I began to question the marked absence of about 40% of the school population. Moreover, I began to question this absence in the face of active participation by Black Latinx students of Central American—Garifuna—origins as well as first- generation Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean and African students.30 What was the boundary of difference between Black and Hispanic in a context where nearly everyone involved had at least a trace of sub-Saharan African heritage?

By my third year at the school, I was asked to take over the show’s planning and execution, and I vowed to remedy what I saw as the exclusion of certain Black subjectivities and the lack of “history” contained in the Black History Month show. First, all students would be learning something about diasporic Black History by attending the

Black History Month show – even if it was only to learn how Black History Month came to be in the first place. And secondly, we would celebrate all people of African descent.

Despite the ostensible simplicity of this request, it proved difficult nonetheless. Less than two weeks into planning the event, I was breaking up a screaming match between the

Dominican Bachata Group and the West Indian Dance Crew. An argument over rehearsal space quickly evolved into one of who more authentically deserved to be involved in the first place. After hearing shouting in the auditorium, I entered to see what was going on.

One teacher in the room tried to calm the girls down, but the debate was heated. Both

30Student backgrounds were reported as Black or Hispanic during that year according to the 2016 Hispaniola High School annual report. Though the report didn’t include information about student ethnic/national origins, I can attest to the existence of students (and families) from Ecuador, Mexico, Honduras, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic marked as Hispanic alongside students from St. Lucia, Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Haiti, Honduras, Senegal, and Guinea. 174 groups declared that they had the stage reserved for their rehearsal. While the Dominican

Bachata Group had a faculty chaperone there, the West Indian Dance Crew did not. After

I asked them where their faculty advisor was and informing them that they would not be able to have rehearsal without adult supervision, the leader of the West Indian Dance

Crew turned to her group members and said, “well you know Ms. Clemons Spanish anyways, so we shoulda known she was going to take their side. I don’t even know why they are here. It is BLACK history month, not SPANISH history month, right?”31 In one phrase, she had insulted my ability to do my job impartially and she had assigned me to an entirely different racial category than the one that I claim for myself. In doing so, she had effectively called for the exclusion of both me and the Dominican students from a celebration of Blackness, purely based on our linguistic practices, and during my favorite month of the year. A simple scheduling mishap had turned into an ideological battle where race and language had been conflated, and Afro-Latino did not even exist.

As previously noted in Chapter 3, section 3.3.3, human beings are biologically equipped to perceive lexical, phonological, and structural variations, and from those cues, they can make social inferences. In a match-guised test that was adapted to compare hegemonic vernacular English (e.g., White English), African American Vernacular

English, and Chicano English, over 80 percent of the participants were able to accurately identify the dialect being spoken based on hearing the word, “hello” (Baugh, 2003). Such studies provide empirical evidence for the ideological linking of language and race,

31 Emphasis is mine. 175 which has likely foregrounded the discriminatory practices and policies that define educational institutions in the United States (Darder and Torres, 1997; Baugh, 2000; Pita and Utakis, 2002; Shohamy, 2006).

John Baugh’s (2003) conception of “linguistic profiling” (described in Chapter 3, section 3.3.2) is the aural equivalent to racial profiling. I enlist this concept along with

Rosa and Flores’s (2017) “co-naturalizations of language and race as part of the colonial formation of modernity” and “raciolinguistic enregisterment,” in order to introduce the notion of ethno-raciolinguistic profiling, which I define as the profiling of language use and ability as inextricably tied with a particular ethno-racialization project, such as the project of Latinidad. The “co-naturalizations of race and language as part of the colonial formation of modernity” views the European project of colonialism as a site where not only phenotypical differences were used to construct power hierarchies between

European and non-Europeans, but also a site that engendered language ideologies that marked non-European languages as barbarian and unsophisticated. More recently, this process has been rearticulated into the promotion of ‘standard’ or ‘educated’ varieties of language as requisite for professional success (Valdés et al., 2003; Lippi-Green, 1994,

2012; Leeman, 2018). Further, American imperialism combined with fervent ‘English-

Only’ efforts has created a situation in which the once-dominant colonial language,

Spanish, has been relegated to an inferior status. In the United States, Spanish, much like the indigenous languages of colonized territories, becomes synonymous with a lack of evolution, but only for racialized speakers. Conceptualizing language ability and use as inextricably tied to racialized subjects results in institutional practices that ultimately 176 marginalize Spanish speakers, as is the case with their erasure and exclusion from certain activities such as the Black History Month show. In this way, any instance of Spanish becomes a cause for a boundary of separation between both Blackness and whiteness as they are conceived in the United States. Furthermore, individuals engage in a policing of language, enacting ethno-raciolinguistic profiling in their evaluation and marking of others as in-group or out-group members. In exploring the nature of interactional identity development among this group of students, I again acknowledge “raciolinguistic enregisterment”—the perception of language varieties and racial categories as mutually exclusive (defined in section 1.2.2). The idea that language varieties and racial categories are discrete entities that can be demarcated by particular characteristics, whether they be linguistic forms or biological features, is challenged through this process.

Additionally, expanding the concept of raciolinguistic enregisterment (Rosa and

Flores, 2017), I define ethno-raciolinguistic profiling as the practice of making discriminatory decisions based on perceptions of the language features (or languages) linked to historically marginalized racial groups. This includes decisions about what group a person potentially belongs to, despite self-identification or explicit pronouncements to the contrary. I argue that ethno-raciolinguistic profiling furthers the linkage between language production and racial identifications such that there is no instance of linguistic profiling without the engagement of ethno-raciolinguistic profiling.

Moreover, ethno-raciolinguistic profiling often results in what Potowski (2016) terms

“language-focused discrimination, repression, and violence” for groups deemed to present non-standard languages or language varieties. Accordingly, the current study 177 intends to scrutinize how Dominican language is racialized within school contexts to provide foundational information for educational interventions. This includes the ways that Dominican language practices are perceived by non-Spanish speaking bilinguals who have more traditionally been incorporated into notions of Black personhood.

To Natasha, the leader of the West Indian Dance Crew, the Dominican girls were not Black enough to participate in the Black History Month show at all. In her mind, the mere fact that they spoke Spanish completely erased any connection to their African descent. Furthermore, my Spanish knowledge rendered me incapable of making any kind of impartial decision. While the “one-drop” rule has been a fairly consistent racial logic throughout the United States, the complex migration and settlement patterns represented in New York City’s socio-cultural landscape may provide a counter space, where race is signaled more by cultural practices and language production than any phenotypic or biological characterization. The “one-drop” rule had been reconstituted. In his exploration of Dominican identity in Providence, RI, Bailey (2007) notes how post-1965 immigration has created a context where race conceptions from the country of origin have come to reshape the way second-generation immigrants conceive race.

Herein, I interrogate both raciolinguistic enregisterment and its ideological counterparts in order to theorize about how certain ideologies that link language, race, and identity are central to our understanding of category binding. I understand ideological enregisterment as processes whereby repeated rhetoric and discourse become ideologically concretized in the minds of a particular population with the aim of maintaining or reconstituting the social hierarchy as it stands. Consequently, Afro- 178 Hispanic students’ linkage to Spanish as a racialized aspect of their identity is part of a project of white supremacy. My Spanish language ability aligned me with Latinidad, and therefore I was perceived as an outsider. Armed with my professionalism and not wanting to make a bad situation worse, I was struck by a question: How could I teach a complete history of colonialism and its effects on the African diaspora in an instant, especially in a context where Black histories were decidedly missing? While Dominicans who speak

Spanish consume Latinx cultural products, and engage in Latinx cultural practices often exist within bodies that are ascribed as Black, Latinidad has been racialized in a way that stigmatizes, erases, and marks them as non-Black (Hernández, 2003; García Peña, 2016;

Oro, 2016; López, 2020). This ideological construction of Latinidad aids in the commonplace misconception that Dominicans engage in these practices as a way to purposefully distance themselves from their Blackness (Clemons, 2021).

In the moments after my initial shock of being stripped of my Blackness, I was fortunately able to compose myself to respond. “Well Tanya (a Haitian) speaks Kreyol and French and she is part of your dance crew. How come she gets to be black and we don’t?” Natasha’s face went from momentary confusion to full understanding. At that moment, I knew that I had succeeded in teaching at least one lesson: Speaking a different language (a colonial one at that) is not the sole determiner of racial identity. However, one issue remained. The students had no concept of the socio-historical contexts that had led us to the stage-conflict in the first place. Though I had not yet begun my research exploring the connection between educational spaces and notions of identity, my life as an educator had prepared me to challenge what was being presented to this set of students 179 in the name of U.S. and World History. Additionally, it strengthened my resolve to introduce a more culturally responsive pedagogy to students who had limited formal education about hemispheric Black history.

4.5 MULTILECTICAL RACILIZATIONS, EMBODIED BLACKNESS, AND THE NEGOTIATION OF SPACE Research has long suggested the relational nature of the development of identity more broadly and the development of racial categories more specifically. In her landmark book, Natalia Molina (2014) develops the concept of “racial scripts,” which suggests that race is made not only through narratives about a particular group but also through the correspondence of that group to other dominant and non-dominant groups within the socio-cultural landscape. Drawing from the work of sociologists of race, Omi and Winant

(1986), she argues that these scripts, which ultimately inform our use of particular categories, are shaped by power relations, time, space, material conditions, and political stakes. Further, Molina notes that the use of particular “scripts” or narratives impacts the way in which we “think, talk about, and act toward one racialized group based on our experiences with other groups whose race differs from our own” (Molina, 2010, p. 157).

Accordingly, racial scripts provide the ideological fodder for the negotiation of authenticity within the bounds of a particular category. Drawing from Molina’s theory of racial scripts, I propose that students who engage in negotiations of self do so through what I call multilectical racializations. While the idea that identity formation is a dialectical process is not a new one, I argue that the formation of identity categories and ethnic categorizations is not a dialectical process between two interlocutors but rather a

180 multilectical process of social (re)colonization meant to uphold and normalize already established hierarchies of power, which have been constituted in repeated scripts. Every interlocutor comes to an interaction with a set of (subconscious) ideologies drawn into racialization processes. As such, every act of speech is implicated in the confirmation or contestation of white supremacy as the current organizing structure of U.S. society. This often contradictory process of racialization is evidenced by the highly variable relationship that many Dominicans have with U.S. pan-ethnic terms and identifications.

During the conflict for space in the auditorium, I was struck by a contradiction.

For the students, the way that Dominicans used Spanish in school spaces was different from how Garifuna and Haitian Creole speakers (who were allowed authentic entry into

Black spaces) used their languages. In retrospect, I imagine that the difference may be because the latter often relegate their home languages to home contexts and have acquired and use Black English in their daily lives as a native tongue. Moreover, as

Blackness continues to be erased from notions of Latinidad, Garifuna and Haitian Creole are ideologically linked to Black embodiment and experiences in a way that Spanish is not. When I asked why Tanya was allowed to be a part of the show even though she was known to be a Haitian Creole speaker, one student retorted under her breath, “But

Haitians are Black!” In this ratification of Haitian Blackness as opposed to Dominican

Blackness, the students had drawn an ideological boundary. Thus, Spanish speakers face a multilectical racialization under which a boundary is created based on linguistic practices but also generational embodied experiences and colonial histories. Furthermore, these boundaries are asserted in an attempt to negotiate and claim space within an 181 institution that, besides the Black History Month show, gave limited opportunity for authentic Black being.

In an interview with my former assistant, Francisca, I asked her why she agreed to participate as a staff volunteer. Taking on her duties represented a significant increase in her time commitments to the school, yet she had agreed without hesitation. Though she did not share an ethnic or racial background with any of the students, she identified as an

Asian American and, in her own words, as a “brown Catholic who had begun to acquire

[her] own knowledges of the colonial histories of the country where her parents were born.” In her response, she commented that unlike the experiences in the pan-Asian club at her high school, she never witnessed a moment as an employee at Hispaniola High

School where students were able to engage with their cultures authentically. She continued by noting that for herself, the ability to join and participate in the Asian

American clubs at her high school had a significant bearing on her development and pride in her culture, and though she had found that she still lacked in fundamental knowledge about the colonial legacies of the Philippines, she did feel pride in her ethnicity as a result of participation in these clubs. Additionally, in gaining traction as a community organizer, she felt the Black History Month show might be the only time students were able to engage in political expressions of their communities.

2. Francisca: And I was really excited to do the Black History Month because it was

like the one somewhat political thing that we could share with the students or

coordinate with the students so that they could have a place to express themselves,

and so I really helped with like a lot of the tech stuff, and I remember putting 182 together, I still have them—the videos, like a video summary of the of ...because I

was also in the in-between stage of doing communication right for the school. So

I was putting together the summary for it; I helped, though, with the music kind of

like the yeah the coordination of like the music and the visuals on the stage.

In her assertion, what became clear is that the Black History Month show, though not prepared to be a source of historical or cultural development for the students, was, in fact, an opportunity to exist in the fullness of oneself. The Black History Month show was a space to exist in one’s Blackness was echoed by several of the students interviewed.

Stacy, who had transferred to the school as a junior because of the closure of her previous school, which was housed in the same building, noted exactly this:

3. Stacy: For me now that I think about it, I kind of forgot that it was the black

history show because I think every element in the show was just reflective of the

demographic of students, like [Hispaniola High] had more Caribbean, African,

and Hispanic people, so it was like either the...the… Latina Dance team or Step

team was like the most ambiguous group there, but I don’t remember anything

like Black history knowledge-wise type of thing. It was just like, like, ok, we have

a bunch of Africans, and we got African prints so we can do a fashion show, and

then there was the formal dressing, but I don’t think there was necessarily an

educational aspect.

What is interesting in the above acknowledgment was that the student recalled the

“Latina Dance crew,” though, by all accounts, the Latina Dance Crew only participated

183 during one year. Nonetheless, in the same show, her recollections of the moves toward education were absent. Despite the addition of three video presentations of significant moments in Black history and the inclusion of recitations of Black poetry, the show as a moment to showcase identity was centralized. This moment for students to exist in their full Blackness was contrasted to the educational spaces where they had to display professionalism and appropriateness as dictated by the school and work program’s mission and curriculum. To be clear, the standards of professionalism were structured by whiteness, where authorities measure students’ approximation to a particular mode of behavior deemed appropriate for the corporate offices in which they would be employed

(Flores and Rosa, 2015; García and Solorza, 2020).

At Hispaniola High School, there were policies that indicated the appropriate length of hair for male students, and the appropriate earring size and nail colors and lengths for female students. There were also codes about the kind of ‘soft skills’ the students would need to be successful in their job places. These soft skills were taught through a lens of “academic language” and “professionalism,” both of which have been shown to be codes for whiteness as a structural element that organizes institutions and society (Allesandri, 2018).

Additionally, an adherence to “academic” or standard language is used to deny resources for Black students (Woodson, [1933] 2006; Smitherman, 1995; Lippi-Green,

2012; Baker Bell, 2020a, 2020b), much in the way that Spanish is used to deny Black

Spanish speakers access to authenticity in their Blackness. The Spanish language has

184 been posited as the primary unifying measure of Latinidad in the pan-ethnic project of

Latin American solidarity in the United States (Flores, 1997; Mora, 2014; Negrón, 2014,

2018). Nonetheless, the insistence on Spanish language as a unifier suggests that that connection is made through a shared experience of colonization and that centering the language within emerging pan-ethnic solidarities is indicative of what Pablo López Oro recently noted as the “persistence of afterlives of Spanish colonial formation of Latinidad in the U.S.”32 In this way, Latinidad has and continues to function as a project of whiteness—moving those who claim Latinx identities toward whiteness on a stratified racial hierarchy much in the way that mestizaje functions in Latin America. This project of white supremacy allows for the erasure of Blackness within Latinidad and is perpetuated by racial and linguistic narratives of Latinidad. Therefore, the use of Spanish within a public sphere is ideologically enregistered with non-Black racial performances through a process of multilectical racialization. Moreover, if we imagine the authorities who are evaluating the language, identity practices, and performances of students to be not only school staff teachers and administrators but also student peers, then the policing of Blackness becomes twofold. While educators focused on appropriateness, students themselves focused on authenticity and used it to draw lines between in-group and out- group membership. Baker-Bell (2020b) hits on the origins of these student acts of language and identity policing as a result of internalized linguistic racism.

32 Personal Communication (February 2021) 185 The only thing worse than Black students’ experiencing anti-black linguistic

racism in classrooms is when they internalize it. When Black students’ language

practices are suppressed in classrooms, or they begin to absorb messages that

imply that BL is deficient, wrong, and unintelligent, this could cause them to

internalize anti-blackness and develop negative attitudes about their linguistic,

racial, cultural, and intellectual identities and about themselves. (Baker-Bell,

2020b, p. 3)

I would argue that these students may also become agents of marginalization through stances that proliferate and reconstitute the negative messages about Black language practices in general. Thus, this dual policing of Blackness becomes a mechanism by which Blackness is constructed in juxtaposition to both whiteness and Latinidad, racial frames which organize the behaviors of many students in their attempts at self- determination within the space.

As we have already established in Chapter 3, self-determination is an especially important process for Black diasporic beings in the United States. Furthermore, if we understand schools as a space of intellectual formation and a space that allows for the negotiation of self, then schools also become an especially important site of self- determination. Specifically, and for the purpose of this chapter, I situate schools as sites of interpellation,33 whereby students negotiate between dominant narratives they encounter in public discourse, at home, in classrooms, and among their peers. These

33In Marxist theory, interpellation is the process of internalizing ideologies (Althusser, 2006). In situating schools as sites of interpellation, I argue them as primary disseminators of social ideology. 186 negotiations, formed within racial scripts and discourses, are the basis for student self- determination and self-realization (Dixson, 2011; King and Brown, 2014; Parker and

Wilkins, 2018). As such, students are constantly engaged in self-determination processes, where they look to cultural and social models to make decisions about where they fit and what performances they must take up to display the bounds of their chosen identities. As such, schools shape students with every policy decision, with every pedagogical practice, and within discursive narratives of society about who represents success. It is this repetition that allows for the ideological construction of self. Again, these ideologies must be understood both in the institutional as well as the larger socio-cultural contexts in which the school was situated during my data collection. These conditions include not only the shifting demographics of the school but also the shifting demographics of the city and neighborhoods due to migration and gentrification over the previous 50 years.

The demographic shifts in Brooklyn can be described as a push and pull process of gentrification and white flight back and forth from the 1950s to today. While more established populations of older generation Polish and Irish inhabitants have mostly fled the area, having been replaced by African Americans and Puerto Ricans who migrated during periods of de-industrialization in the late 70s, the area has also been known as a receiver of varying migrant populations from around the world. More recently, processes of “super-gentrification” have been underway, forcing out generations of residents from their homes and neighborhoods (Lees, 2003; DeSena and Krase, 2015; Benediktsson et al., 2016). While areas in New York City such as Washington Heights and the Bronx are known for large populations of Dominican and Dominican(-American)s, little research 187 has been conducted on the population located in Brooklyn.34 Until the year 2000,

Dominicans did not even appear as an ethnic category on the Brooklyn community survey. Until then, many had to select “other” and write in their ethnicity under the

Hispanic categorization. Nonetheless, profiles of Dominicans in New York noted the presence of around 50,000 Dominicans in Brooklyn by 1990, and by 2015, when much of this study was conducted, Brooklyn was home to 103,450 Dominicans (Hernández and

Rivera-Batiz, 2003; American Community Survey, 2019, 2015).

The Dominican population began to grow alongside a second wave of Puerto

Rican and African American migrants to the region in the 1990s. Dominican settlements’ primary locations in Brooklyn occurred in the neighborhoods of Williamsburg,

Bushwick, Sunset Park, and Cypress Hills (Hernández and Rivera-Batiz, 2003). Bringing with them their cultural and religious practices, Dominicans constituted a large presence in the Catholic church, which had a declining diocesan presence in Brooklyn and Queens.

As Dominicans arrived, they often sent their children to Catholic schools and attended church services that were offered in Spanish. This infusion of life was welcomed in the church after a sharp decline resulting from the flight of many Irish, Polish, and Italian residents who had occupied the space since the 1950s (Warf, 1990; Lees, 2003). While the large influx of Dominican populations in Washington Heights allowed the community to gain and maintain control of the community and school boards since around the 1980s,

Dominicans in Brooklyn relied heavily on the Catholic school system to educate their

34Note the absent or cursory nature of the conversations regarding Dominicans in Brooklyn in primary Dominican texts about New York such as Ricourt, 2016 and Hernández and Torres-Saillant, 1998. 188 students.35 This connection with the Catholic church presented itself with a high level of confianza when Hispaniola High School opened in a former Catholic elementary school in the Bushwick region of Brooklyn.

As previously noted, Hispaniola High School had a distinctive history and structure. The school employs a work-study model aimed at providing educational access for low-income students. In the first five years of the school’s existence, every student accepted qualified for free/reduced lunch and—with the exception of one student who attended the school from 2010 to 2014—every student identified as Black or Hispanic.

Nonetheless, the move from Bushwick to Flatbush had an impact on the heterogeneity of

Black subjectivities within the high school population, which reflected in student understandings of community solidarities. Until 2013, when the school moved to the

Flatbush region of Brooklyn, the school was composed of about 60% students with

Dominican parentage, with the remaining 40% of students representing the Black diaspora (Hispaniola High School Annual Report, 2013). This demographic population, which was marked as Black and Hispanic in all official school reports, essentially reversed, with 60% representing the Black diaspora and 40% students of Dominican parentage. The Dominican population has continued to decline since 2013 as a result of the location change and limited infrastructure to travel within Brooklyn.36

35This knowledge was gained through community work and relationships. 36The train system in Brooklyn was built for easy access into Manhattan. This means that traveling from certain parts of Brooklyn to other parts becomes more difficult than traveling into another borough. Students often had to travel into Manhattan to get a connecting line that would bring them to school back in Brooklyn. 189 In (4), Stacy mentions Brooklyn as her geographic anchor, not a specific neighborhood, evidencing an ideological construction of Brooklyn as a West Indian and

Haitian space.

4. Stacy: I mean, I feel, like me, growing up in Brooklyn where there is a lot of West

Indians, I feel like most of my solidarity is with West Indian. Because I grew up

around them, so it’s like we understand each other, we understand each other’s

cultures, like the do’s and the don’ts for different like countries, and you know,

ethnicity. That’s where most of my solidarity comes from, or is.

Aris Clemons: Do you think that, like people from the Spanish Caribbean form

part of that.

Stacy: Um, might not for me like I never really, really got along with a lot of

people in the Spanish Caribbean until college like when I got to college I’ve got a

couple of Spanish friends, so like one of my friends is from Puerto Rico.

Thus, we see Dominican erasure as part of diasporic Blackness at the school level and at the level of the larger community. In my conversation with Erica, who played a prominent role in the Black History Month show’s organization and planning, she reflected on her time at Hispaniola High School and her relationship with the Dominican population. After describing herself as Black or Haitian American, she revealed that her grandparents were from Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

5. Erica: but like [with] a few exceptions of friends, I never really had like a lot of

Hispanic friends. Like Julissa, she’s like literally my closest friend that was like 190 the Dominican friend, and anybody else I talk to is because of her. Um, other than

that, it will be family members, and they’re like Black like physically looking ( as

she gestures to her darker brown complexion).

In her description, Erica marks off the Dominican friend as not physically Black, though without knowledge of her and in a different city or context, one would find it difficult to miss that many of her friend’s features have been linked to Africania. In another interview, Stacy further complicates ideas of diasporic Blackness by commenting on her

Black solidarities:

6. Stacy: I think part of it, sorry. I was gonna say part of like me feeling like my

solidarity is more to West Indians is because, like when I think West Indian, I

don’t think Hispanics, even though they are West Indian as well because of since

we grew up in since I grew up in Brooklyn, East Flatbush, Canarsie all that

they’re all like when you think West Indian is always Jamaica Trinidad, yes

Haitians like that’s what is directly there.

Notwithstanding her allowance for Dominicans into the ethnopolitical category of “West

Indian,” her idea of what counted as authentically Black was taken up in the term West

Indian. This Blackness was not extended to Dominicans, whom she marked as Hispanic unless they were like her family members who were of Dominican and Cuban descent but whose street race was clearly Black.

The school was part of a larger national network that catered to low-income students; however, each school’s ethnoracial makeup was dictated by the socio-historic

191 conditions of migration, segregation, and a myriad of other racial geographies. The school had a Catholic mission, though it was not connected to the Catholic diocese in the same way that all other Catholic High Schools were. Instead, this school only received nominal support. It maintained a Catholic mission and national affiliation of a network of

Catholic schools dedicated to functioning on a community model.37 As the school grew over the years, it required a new building that could accommodate the growing student and staff population. Working with the Catholic diocese, the school would move to the

East Flatbush region of Brooklyn. In moving to this region, there was an immediate loss of much of the Dominican population who feared having their children travel the hour or more commute that it would take to get to the school. Additionally, the school was located in a region with a high population of Haitian, West Indian, and African American students, which made a marked change in the student population from a majority Latinx to a majority Haitian and West Indian population.

Due to the college preparatory mission and specialized nature of the school admissions process, the school boasts a 100% college acceptance rate for its students; however, factoring in enrollment and completion within five years, this rate is more realistically around 80%. Though the school did not accept students with Individualized

Education Plans (IEPs), at the time of entry, about 65% of the student population was marked as “below grade level” in Math and ELA based on middle school state testing

37This in no way indicates the success of this dedication or portion of the mission, as the neoliberal model also signaled an “out of the hood” institutional stance, rather than a model for creating sustainable community solutions. 192 (Hispaniola High School Annual Report, 2016). Much of the culture of the school was guided by the Catholic church and shifting demographics in Catholic school populations.

In the years leading up to Hispaniola High School’s opening, several Catholic elementary and high schools were closing due to low enrollment and financial troubles. Though the

Catholic church still owned many of the buildings, keeping them staffed and running became increasingly difficult. Additionally, the nuns, priests, and teachers primarily remained white with Irish and Italian backgrounds, but the student populations they drew from became increasingly Caribbean and low-income than in the years with top enrollment. In the school building where we would be planning the Black History Month show, the all-girls Catholic High school had previously catered to over one thousand school children in a given year. Our school was at a max enrollment of 350 and only surviving because of the work-study model, which allowed students to fund their own education.

4.6 CLAIMING GEOGRAPHIC PLACE: LANGUAGE, SPACE, AND IDENTITY PERFORMANCE Though the Black History Month show was a mainstay at the school, the 2015-

2016 show would be one of the first times the students would be able to perform on a full theater stage in a large auditorium. Before that, the school had been housed in a former elementary school where all activities occurred in what we affectionately referred to as the gymcafetorium (gym, cafeteria, and auditorium activities all occurred in this space).

This year, the students were particularly excited about the possibility of having curated lighting, video projections, and full curtains between acts. (Image 4.1).

193

Image 4.1: Curtains opening for the Step Team’s performance The school was now housed in a building that was used for one of the historically largest all-girl Catholic high schools in the region that had closed down due to low enrollment only the year before. There were marks of the previous occupants all over; the school colors had yet to be changed, evidenced by the large crimson velvet curtains that would be used between acts; the crest showed the initials of the previous school; and there was a mural of the founding nun at the entrance. Since moving to the new site, the students were getting used to the space that they weren’t previously afforded at their last school.

This school was three floors, had a gym, and a full cafeteria with an attached kitchen.

There were several spaces for offices, and there were two locker rooms. There was a library, which could use serious updates but still presented an upgrade on the non-existent spaces at the previous site, and students also had access to a computer and science lab. In the move, the students shifted from a business attire dress code to a more restricted uniform dress code, though variation in color still allowed students to perform their 194 identities in different ways. As students began negotiating their new surroundings (either as freshmen or students who had to learn to navigate a new school building), they also began to mark and define the spaces in the school. We can easily recall the argument over stage time for the rehearsing dance teams.

In her ethnographic portrait of a border high school in southern California, Ana

Celia Zentella (2016b) uses the school’s geographic space to interpret student positionalities. In doing this, Zentella made claims about how these groups mobilized their own language ideologies to create networks. At Hispaniola High School, access to new spaces required a negotiation in the formation of new identities and alliances for the students. These negotiations were ever-present and marked by comments on cultural and linguistic dominance within a particular space. Furthermore, the Black History Month show provided evidence of how groups claimed space to perform identity. As the teams and individual performers formulated their showpieces, they began to make claims over classrooms and common areas in the school in order to run informal practices. Many times these claimed spaces directly corresponded with the areas where students spent much of their free time. The library became a popular practice spot for those who were often there in their last period due to an imposed study hall. The cafeteria, gym, and even the locker rooms served as practice spaces for the dance teams and students who usually participated in sports and afterschool activities. And science and computer labs hosted the poets and spoken word artists for their rehearsals. These spaces were often supervised by faculty who would have already been in the space prior to the practices, though several teams did have dedicated faculty mentors. In any case, these locations became part of a 195 constructed geography of safe space where students had moments to perform their identity free from the academic and social evaluation that shaped much of their school experience. When I asked the only Black teacher at the school if she thought the Black

History Month Show was for a particular group of students or for all of the students, she responded quickly:

7. Jean: Oh, a hundred percent before we started, it was only for black students,

there was [pause]there was nothing there for any other students, which is

obviously sad because they had a significant Latinx population.

In her use of “we,” she was referring to her participation in the planning of the show for the first time after I had taken over the direction of the show. She noted the explicit integration of Latinx students as part of the show and, in doing that, acknowledged her understanding of these students as part of the Black diaspora in the school population who had been excluded prior to the 2016 showcase.

The Director of Mission and Culture, Stephen, remembers the move to the new building as a moment that complicated notions of Blackness in ways that have required serious reflection around the celebration of student identities at the school. In answering if he felt there was a focus on the multiple Black identities that were represented in the school population, he responded:

8. Stephen: I don’t remember really there being like a strong Caribbean element

until we moved to Flatbush. Interesting. I would argue, like, I think that it

coincided kind of also when we like had more representation from like the Afro

196 Caribbean Community versus like when I think about Bushwick the predominant

like it was either Puerto Rican, Dominican like kind of like Caribbean Hispanic or

the predominant identities, I remember, it was more African Americans. And it

was when we moved to Flatbush that at least from kind of like a white person

outside perspective inside-outside perspective, that’s what it seemed like there

was a lot more focus on like more of an Afro Caribbean identity and that’s what I

say, because that’s also when like like the Bushwick days, there was a step team,

and that was it.

Because he had been present since the opening of the school and had a deep historical knowledge of the policies, populations, and evolution of the school, I asked him to describe the spaces in which he felt students were genuinely allowed to exist in their full

Blackness. With a deep sigh, he responded, “I say none in Bushwick, I mean I honestly cannot think of a single space.” He then went on to say that even though teachers were able to create strong bonds with students, the spaces where students got to be themselves and celebrate themselves were limited in both locations. I found it interesting that he didn’t think of the Black History Month show as one of those spaces, even though the interview was clearly marked as a discussion about the Black History Month show and its impact on student identities.

Zentella (2016b) notes the prevalence of “educators, social service personnel, health professionals, and other gatekeepers [who] are often unaware of the significant differences among [racialized] groups or of intragroup differences, a fact that hampers their work and hinders students’ access” (p. 327). When asked about times when students 197 were able to use their home languages, Stephen noted that sometimes he heard kids using

Spanish but not very often. For this administrator, the lack of perception of Black self- determination in the use of non-English languages in informal space is also noteworthy and calls attention to the hegemonically positioned modes of perception often present in academic spaces.

In the hallways or at lunch, for those who paid attention, Spanish greetings could be heard alongside Haitian Creole, Anglophone Creoles, and sometimes Wolof or other

West African languages. However, these languages rarely had entry in classroom spaces since the majority of the teaching staff remained white, monolingual, Catholic, and of

Irish or Italian descent, much like the previous population of Brooklynites who had participated in the white flight out of Brooklyn in the 1970s and 80s. And many of the teachers and staff boasted a connection with the students for having attended the same

Catholic elementary and middle schools. While the students may have engaged in multilingual banter, rarely could teachers or staff address their students in a language other than English, even if they did speak the language. Nonetheless, since my position at the school included recruitment and community engagement, I was often in situations where students bore witness to my use of Spanish with parents and other community members. This exposure gave students license to interact with me in both Spanish and

English, a mode that many students took advantage of throughout the school day as they popped in and out of my office, which always had an open door policy. These interactions were frequent, and as such many non-Spanish speaking students were aware

198 of my linguistic abilities. What I had not counted on was that there would be automatic assumptions about my ethno-racial identity based on these abilities and interactions.

Nonetheless, if we agree that Black American students are constantly told that they must eradicate their language in order to become successful in school and professional spaces (Smitherman, 1997; Kinloch, 2010; Lippi Green, 2012; Baker Bell,

2020a), it is no surprise that they have a desire to protect extracurricular spaces that have been designed and dedicated to not only preserving but also celebrating their language and cultural modes of being. This space, in which Black students are allowed to simply exist, becomes a space of comfort. Paris (2009) suggests that Black American students are open and willing to sharing their linguistic variety with immigrant populations who settle in close proximity (e.g., Mexicans and Polynesians in the California case); however, the lack of access to a second or third language means that they share their language and have no “ethnic safe haven” when their own linguistic codes are disparaged in school spaces (p. 442-443). Moreover, since code-switching between Black English and Hegemonic Vernacular English has been the pedagogical frame to which most of these students are introduced for school survival, then the existence of code-switching that occurs across many bilingual communities may be seen in a negative rather than positive light. Therefore, while Dominican students have access to Black English as well as Dominican Spanish, the use of Spanish in school spaces function to exclude them from authentic Blackness, as such practices do not align with the imagined safety and narrativized understanding of Black space (i.e., switching between Black English and

Hegemonic Vernacular English). 199 Recalling the additional work being done by students to find their place within the new school building, I would like to note that policies regarding where students could be and at what points during the school day were somewhat of a moving target. Students often tested the boundaries of this flexibility, hedging out spaces where they could exist outside the restrictive frameworks of the classroom and work environments for which they were almost always being trained.38 As such, it is no surprise that when given the opportunity to celebrate themselves that they would want to fervently protect that space.

In this case, the lack of hemispherically Black pedagogies and histories combined with the acquired raciolinguistic ideologies that had created thick boundaries between

Latinidad and Blackness were strong factors in the visceral response to a perceived intrusion on Black space and place.

4.7 “NO ME GUSTA CUANDO ME LLAMAN NEGRO;” COMMUNICATIVE RUPTURES AND THE LINGUISTIC POLICING OF BLACKNESS For Dominican(-American)s in the United States, racial categorizations have been negotiated through the lens of U.S. Blackness and modern projects of Latinidad, both racial projects that have relied on institutional and political backing (Collins, 2002;

Restrepo, 2004; Aparicio, 2017a, 2019). Moreover, the presence of Dominican-born and

38Student training regarding appropriateness and professionalism began as soon as they were admitted to the school. In order to begin school after being admitted, students had to undergo a three- to four- week training on the “soft skills” needed to perform well in a corporate work environment. The course was called Business Communication and focused almost entirely on how to navigate communicative ruptures between supervisors and themselves as student employees. The curriculum for this program was suggested at the national level, created by a team of people who were almost entirely white middle to upper class cis gendered folks. At Hispaniola High School, the three-week program was supplemented by additional coursework throughout the year in a one-credit professional development class that did not affect a student’s GPA but could decide their placement within the program if deemed unsuccessful. 200 Dominican-origin youths has changed and challenged the contemporary demographic and linguistic landscape of many U.S. classrooms, particularly in the east coast cities where

Dominicans have historically settled (Torres-Saillant and Hernández, 1998; Ricourt,

2016). Since Afro-Dominican youth have been noted to maintain the use of Spanish cross-generationally at higher rates, their presence in classrooms alongside students who have been traditionally categorized as Black American—including African and West-

Indian migrants and their children—requires that critical attention be paid to the institutional responsiveness to the academic and social development of these pupils

(Bartlett and García, 2011).

Again, Dominican identity is noted as multiple and mutable, differing considerably from the rigidity of racial categorization that exists in the United States.

Therefore, while popular discourses of the growing ‘Hispanic’ population have prompted calls for culturally responsive pedagogies (Valenzuela, 1999; Ladson-Billings, 2014), rarely have these appeals problematized the linguistic and racial heterogeneity of the group itself. In addition, Dominican students who are most often bilingual and multidialectal (Toribio, 2003; Bailey, 2006; Krogstad and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2015) are often held to institutionalized monolingual standards, which in turn informs the understanding of their identity within these spaces. And as we have seen in the above examples, these monolingual standards are upheld by many students as they seek to protect their acquired notions of Blackness and authenticity.

201 In her (1993) article on the construction of social identity, Elinor Ochs argues that

“speakers attempt to establish the social identities of themselves and others through verbally performing certain social acts and verbally displaying certain stances” (Ochs,

1993, p. 288 italics in original). Shifting from the Johnstonian notions of stance that were discussed in my previous chapters (sections 2.2.1 and 3.3.3), I extend Ochs’ argument by noting the institutional impacts that condition the mobilization of certain social acts and stances in response to what has been deemed and established as appropriate within the context. I use Ochs' definition of a “social act” as “any socially recognized, goal-directed behavior, such as making a request, contradicting another person, interrupting a person”

(cf. Ochs, 1990 in Ochs, 1993, p. 288), marking the bounds of the social location within the practices and culture of the school in which the act was performed. Additionally, I take up Ochs' concept of “stance” defined as “a display of socially recognized point of view or attitude,” (cf Biber & Finegan, 1989, Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989 in Ochs, 1993, p.

288) including affect, emotion, and posturing toward a particular linguistic or cultural behavior. I argue that by looking at social acts and stances taken up by students within the non-academic spaces of a school, we can come to understand the interplay and negotiation of identity categories for those who occupy the margins of identity categories imposed by the state or institution. Foregrounding linguistic and identity performances as social stances allows us to understand how students behave in the negotiation of Black authenticity as well as the policing of Blackness in participation in activities such as the

Black History Month show.

202 …particular acts and particular stances have local conventional links that bind

them together to form particular social identities...From this point of view, social

identity is not usually explicitly encoded by language but rather is a social

meaning that one usually infers on the basis of one’s sense of the act and stance

meanings encoded by linguistic constructions. Of course, although some acts and

stances are closely associated with particular social identities, other acts and

stances are resources for constructing a wide range of social identities. Hence,

some identities are more readily inferable from acts and stances (e.g., the identity

of teacher inferable from asking a test question in the U.S. or the identity of a

low-ranking person inferable from a stance of attentiveness and accommodation

in traditional Samoan communities) than others. (Ochs, 1993, p. 289-290)

Therefore, acts and stances are an important aspect of the collaborative nature of identity construction (Ochs, 1993; Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). Further, decisions about what speech acts and stances are acceptable are not made in a vacuum; they must be ratified by the individuals who exist within a particular interaction. If they are offered and not authorized, the interaction will be deemed a failure, either in communication or in-group solidarity. These kinds of failures often result in communicative conflicts or misunderstandings. While linguistic research has generally treated communicative conflict within the realm of self-correction or repair as a structural frame for comprehension of misunderstandings (Brown and Levinson, 1987), I suggest that these conflicts build in ways that result in relational ruptures that occur in the unsaid. In other words, communicative failure is often predisposed prior to any act of speech and is 203 conditioned by experiences related and unrelated to the communicative context. These acts provide a lens through which ideas about Blackness and belonging can be analyzed.

Moreover, in educational contexts where the decision-makers are often functioning from different cultural realities to those of their students, these ruptures can significantly impact pedagogical and policy decisions. Additionally, limited cross-cultural foundations and knowledge mean that communicative ruptures often elude any type of significant repair, ultimately adding to the structural nature of inequity.

Consider the emergency meeting my boss called after overhearing the dress rehearsals for the Black History Month show. It was already 6 pm in the evening, and I had come in early that day to finish my administrative duties before taking over the running of the show. The students had run through various dance performances, costume changes, and lighting decisions, and as I was packing my things to leave and ensuring that all the students had adequate transportation to get home safely, my boss ran in and said, “Ms. Clemons, I need to speak to you immediately before leaving.” These kinds of meetings were not unusual, as working in administration for an under-resourced school often came with problem-solving. As I walked into his office, I noticed he was red. “Aris,

I explicitly prohibited any programming around Black Lives Matter. The police are not bad and I don’t want the kids to learn to hate the police.” It took a moment to process what I was being told. Since several acts were practiced after the recitation of a poem that condemned police officers’ actions in the nearby housing projects where many of the students resided. Though the student hadn’t mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement, my boss had made the connection himself and insisted that the topic be 204 banned. Once I realized that he was speaking about the poem, I knew that there would be an ideological rupture. It didn’t matter what happened in the conversation from that point on. Neither of us would be satisfied with the result. In the end, I had to concede to not include specific instruction about the Black Lives Matter organization in the official programming. At the same time, I refused to allow him to censor the experiences of the students who had in fact been called to share their experience through expressions of living Black History. As one of the few Black administrators at the school, these conflicts were plentiful and ultimately resulted in my departure from my position. But, the real tragedy was that in not being able to communicate, the students were denied access to knowledge that may have positively impacted their development of the self during a critical period of their lives.

In addition to these overarching communicative failures, students enacted and were often subjected to a type of linguistic profiling that shaped their understandings of race and identity within particular interactions. When asked about negotiating identity with Black students in school contexts, I asked one Dominican student why Spanish was important and why he kept on using it even if everyone didn’t understand.

9. Rico: Ooh. Es Muy importante porque primero si no puedo hablar el español yo

no puedo hablar con mi mamá. Es lo más fuerte para mí. Pero también yo puedo

usar español en sitios que yo voy. Hablar yo puedo hablar con gente que habla

español en diferente sitios del mundo como en Nicaragua en México. Todos la

205 gente que habla el español yo puedo hablar con ellos. So, español es muy

importante pa’ mi. Mi español es quien soy.

Ooh. It is important because first if I couldn’t speak in Spanish, I wouldn’t be able

to speak with my mom. That is the most important part about it. But also, I can

use Spanish in the places I go. Talk, I can talk with people who speak Spanish in

different places in the world, like Nicaragua and Mexico. Everybody who speaks

Spanish, I can speak with them. So Spanish is very important to me. My Spanish

is who I am.

Rico’s response is illustrative of the kinds of pan-ethnic and potential cross-racial connections that Dominican students can find through the maintenance of their Spanish.

Nonetheless, in recognizing these comments within the context of a multi-ethnic Black space, where Spanish provides the possibility of distinction from other Black subjects, it recalls a trend of boundary-making attested in Dominican Spanish maintenance in New

York (Toribio, 2003). Thus, Spanish language knowledge and usage by Dominicans, who could and often are marked as Black subjects due to their physical appearance and connection to African diasporas, contribute to the boundary between Blackness and

Latinidad. Again, this apparent contradiction between an embodied experience of

Blackness and a raciolinguistic boundary between Blackness and Latinidad often results in a multilayered policing of Dominican language and identity. This multilayered policing is especially true in school contexts, where Dominicans have to contend with the hegemonic white mainstream modes of being as well as their multi-ethnic Black peer

206 relationships. Charity-Hudley and Mallison (2014) contend that “speakers who face microaggressions, prejudice, and discrimination also react with internalization, a process whereby members of a stigmatized group accept negative messages about their self- worth” (p. 65). This “internalized stigma” is often posited as “self hate” or a denial of one’s Blackness. However, I would argue that for Dominican students, there was no such denial, but rather a negotiation of the erasures felt by fitting themselves into the ideological constructions of Blackness as it currently stands in the U.S. and much of the

Caribbean.

Many of my Dominican students were able to be transparent about their connections to notions of diasporic Blackness as linked to African heritages. This acknowledgment appeared in my conversations with Dominican students and statements from other diasporic Black subjects who had engaged in conversations with Dominicans with whom they had developed strong relations through close community ties.

10. Erica: When we got to college, I had conversations with Julissa about this, like,

do you think you’re Black. And she was like, well yeah, but I am also Dominican,

so I have lots of cultural stuff that is not the same as African Americans. And like,

I get that because when I went to college, I honestly felt like an outsider in Philly

because like I wasn’t around all my Haitians, and I feel like I was always judged.

Sentiments similar to Erica’s were mirrored in my own interviews with Dominican students who were able to both acknowledge their Blackness and attend to the lack of formal or informal space to be able to appreciate their familial heritage without reproach.

207 11. Julissa: I mean clearly, I have Black ancestors. You can just look at me. But I feel

like I don’t have to say that. I feel like I just show what my family has taught me,

our language, our food, our dancing, and that should be enough.

Nonetheless, I situate this transparency about Black subjectivity gained during explorations of topics such as Africana studies or through conversations with friends who had engaged in deeper analyses of Black History, with the feelings of students I had interviewed during their time in high school. Take, for example, this Dominican student from Hispaniola High (Gerardo) who, even as a participant in the Black History Month show, expressed irritation with linkage to “Black” as an identity term but not with the linkage to African ancestry. When asked what race he considered himself, he responded:

12. Gerardo: Yo soy dominicano. It´s a funny story porque a mí no me gusta cuando

me llamen negro como que yo soy um moreno. Pero yo entiendo que es tengo um

like Black in my heritage. Raíces Africanos. Uh huh. But I don’t like when people

like call me Black.

I am Dominican. It’s a funny story because I don’t like when people call me

Black, like if I am a Black American. But I understand that I have um like Black

in my heritage. African roots. Uh-huh. But I don’t like when people like call me

Black.

When I asked him why he continued with an explanation indicating an understanding of race as intimately tied with nation-state and ethnicity as opposed to diasporic notions of race often posited in the use of pan-racial terminology: 208 13. Gerardo: Porque...Me ofende porque es cómo ay sí tú es Haitian o um like let’s

say like tú eres de África y alguien te diga “o tú eres africano no tú”...”yo soy de

Senegal...y yo soy de [makes a sound]”

Because...I get offended because it’s like if you are Haitian, or um like let’s say

like you are African and someone calls you, “oh you are African, no you “... “I’m

from Senegal...I am from [makes a sound]”

Understanding that he was distancing himself from a pan-racial identity, I challenged him on what I previously defined as the categorization fallacy in Chapter 2. This fallacy occurs when there is a conflation of ethnicity and race, such that either a racial term is used for a singular ethnic group or an ethnic term is used as a pan-racial determiner.

Much like the commenters in the YouTube forum discussed in Chapter 2, this young man centralized where he was “from”, which indicated a conflation of nationality and race, shifting “Black” from a pan-racial term to an ethnic term reserved for African Americans.

14. Aris: Ah bueno es que no...como no respetan la etnicidad, como la cultura...

¿Pero si tú puedes ser … como negro y también dominicano?

Oh well, it’s like they don’t respect your ethnicity, like the culture. But,

you can be like Black and also Dominican?

Gerardo: No.

No

Aris: Me entiendes. O mezclado, meztizo, mulato todo eso?

209 You understand me? Like mixed, or mixed, or mulatto, something like

that?

Gerardo: Yo te entiendo. Yo te entiendo pero um a mí no me gusta [pause]

que me como me dan muchas cosas que yo no associate with porque, uh it

makes me feel like they’re disrespecting where I’m from, and I don’t like

it.

I understand you. I understand you, but um, I don’t like when [pause] like

it makes me feel a way that I don’t associate with because uh it makes me

feel like they’re disrespecting where I’m from, and I don’t like it.

Both students had clear stances toward constructed ethnoracial categorizations, but

Julissa had an evolved understanding of her subject positionality due to contact with

Black diasporic education in African Studies courses at the college level. It is important to note that Julissa claimed her “Black ancestors” had an ambiguous street race. It is most likely that if asked, she would have been ascribed to the “Spanish” racial category that circulated among the students at Hispaniola High School. Her lighter skin and looser texture of curls gave her the ability to make intentional choices about which ethnoracial identity she would most align herself with.

On the other hand, Gerardo had an undebatable Black street race. Potentially, his lack of desire to be aligned with Black as an identifier came with the inability to escape the consequences of being Black in the United States, in his neighborhood, in his family, and in the classroom. The fact that Black male students are most often evaluated negatively in classroom spaces (Gilliam et al., 2016) may be what elicits stance-taking 210 behavior away from Black identity categorizations. This refusal is also evidenced in his choice to interview with me in mostly Spanish. For Gerardo, the use of Black as a pan- racial rather than an ethnic identifier caused a communicative rupture. This rupture ideologically enregisters Blackness with African American identities, language, and modes of being that cause Dominican students to hedge their Blackness with qualifiers of

“culture.”

4.8 POST-BLACK HISTORY MONTH INITIATIVES AND CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGIES In 2014, Gloria Ladson Billings sat down to have a conversation about the evolution of her theory on culturally relevant pedagogies. In the conversation, she says,

“[i]nstead of asking what was wrong with African American learners, I dared to ask what was right with these students and what happened in the classrooms of teachers who seemed to experience pedagogical success with them” (Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 74).

“Culturally relevant” and its successor “culturally sustaining” pedagogies both have their origins in the study of Black excellence and existence in classroom spaces. While many of these pedagogies have been adapted in contexts with non-Black populations, who have been marginalized by systems of education that privilege white middle-class ways of being, we must understand that extending knowledges of Blackness provides space to create responsive and sustaining pedagogies for students who sit at the margins of categorization. This being said, I argue that our understanding of Blackness needs to expand, such that ancestral behaviors that have traditionally been attributed to African

211 Americans in Black language research are deconstructed in the service of dismantling boundaries of racial hierarchy hemispherically.

One of the strengths of being part of the community in which you are serving is the ability to build relationships with the families of the students. When the stage-conflict was at its height, the girls “threatened” to call their moms for the unfair treatment I was enacting to enforce the new policies that had been laid out. As I took out my phone, searched the phonebook, and handed it to the student, the others began to laugh. “Girl, she got ya mom’s number in her phone.” At that point, the student decided not to call her mother, but the incident pointed to a pattern of behavior that would have been successful had she attempted it between virtually any other authority figure in the building. While regular contact occurred between school faculty and staff and the families, there was little room for the growth of interpersonal relationships between the school community and the larger community. However, as one of the very few Black employees and as the admissions director, I functioned as a community liaison and in-group member. Though I did not have every parent’s number in my phone, it was well known that I had frequent conversations with parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I was able to forge lasting relationships with many of the families who sent their children to the school, many of whom continue to reach out long after I have moved on from the institution and their children have graduated. This knowledge shaped the interactions and relationships that I was able to build with the students. Additionally, these relationships helped shape my understanding of the needs and desires of the students and their families and communities. 212 April Baker-Bell posits anti-racist Black Language Pedagogy as a way to

“provide Black students with opportunities to learn about and use Black language as they simultaneously learn to reject Anti-Black Linguistic Racism” (Kinloch, 2020, pg. x). In the case of Hispaniola High, these opportunities must be situated within a hemispheric frame. As such, and through the tireless efforts of myself and a few teachers and administrators who truly believed in the importance of teaching Black history, we were able to introduce a variety of initiatives aimed at increasing conversations about the

African diaspora. First, along with the Director of Campus Ministry and an eager group of students, I was able to pick an inaugural group of twelve rising seniors and two recent graduates who would travel to the Dominican Republic with a non-profit geared at building multi-sport courts in a small village with limited resources. The first year we traveled to a town named La Guama Arriba. There was limited electricity, the students had to learn to use an outhouse, and in the evenings, we bathed in a nearby river. But by the third day of the trip, after working alongside community members, eating meals with them, and dancing bachata at night, the students had created relationships and memories that would last a lifetime.

There were a few students in our team with Dominican heritage that had never traveled to the island. For these students, the trip represented more than just an opportunity to serve. It was an awakening to a culture that they had always enjoyed tangentially through relationships with their parents and extended family. Those students who had been to the island served as resident tour guides. And for those with heritage in other Caribbean nations, such as Jamaica, Barbados, and even Haiti, this trip served to 213 dispel some of the rumors that they had acquired about Dominicans back in New York

City. They were able to see similarities between their countries of origin and, more importantly, between their cultures. And when they returned to school, they were eager to share what they had learned. The inaugural group put together a series of workshops with the junior class in order to teach them about their experiences. Interest in the trip grew exponentially, to the point where we had to create an application process for the students to attend. The following year we traveled to the border of Haiti and the Dominican

Republic in a town in the province of Dajabón. Here students were given lessons on the historical relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic along with the current political situation between the two nations. As this group of students returned and began to dialogue with their classmates, many questioned why they had never been taught much of the history presented on the trip.

Second, through the leveraging of a college credit program with a local university, the Government and Economy teacher was able to initiate a Black Studies class organized around the reading of Black authors. Eventually, and after much pushback from leadership who deemed the study of African diaspora history to be paramount to creating victimhood, we were able to incorporate a Black Authors class in the curriculum.

This class would be taught at the senior level, and students were offered the ability to take it for college credit through a partnership with a local university that certified our teachers as off-site instructors. The class required a significant amount of reading, but assessments could be designed in any way that measured students’ comprehension of the

214 material. Nonetheless, when I interviewed the teacher (Jean) to ask about the support or guidance that she had in creating the class, she noted that she was on her own:

15. Jean: Yeah, so before the formation of the class, nobody, and I mean nobody,

looked at what I created. Nobody asked me what I created. At no point did I turn

in anything. It was supposed to be a college course technically, and because there

were only three of us who had master’s degrees to teach college level, I chose the

Black class.

This class was introduced after the demographic shift at Hispaniola High School was nearly complete, meaning that though the school marked the population as nearly 80%

Black, the heterogeneity of Black ethnicities had risen significantly (Hispaniola High

School Annual Report, 2016). Nonetheless, the Black authors class featured 100%

African American authors, topics, and pieces. When asked about this, Jean admitted that though she had moments where she tried to make explicit the hemispheric connections of

Blackness, she could only work from her own knowledge.

16. Jean: But anyway, so on the first day of class what I did, to try to get everybody

bought in was I literally took a map of the world, I told them to put a post-it

where they were from or where they knew their family to be from because,

obviously, like you said a lot of them are immigrants. And then I took that map of

the world off and put up a map of the transatlantic slave trade. And they saw that

all their post-its fell within the areas where there was the slave trade, and that was

it, they were good we didn’t necessarily [pause] then, but it continued to come up

215 like there was a time that we were talking about the black codes and how was this

whole idea that you could literally be stopped just for being black and you didn’t

have your papers. You know, they could take you until it says that you weren’t a

slave. And then I showed them a clip of Arizona where they’re like stopping

Mexican people and being like show me your papers, and if they don’t have them,

they can send you back to your country, you know. So we would do stuff like

that, but to be honest, like my knowledge of Blackness on the global scale was not

strong enough yet for me to have integrated it as much as I could and should have

you know what I mean like...

Thus, while the teacher attempted to draw students attention to potential similarities, the content was entirely drawn from African American literatures and histories, which often forced students to make their own connections between their parents’ home contexts and their experiences living in Black bodies in a country defined by the histories and narratives they were learning about in the class. Students read literature such as “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker and read poetry by Langston

Hughes. As they read, the students got a lesson on Black English as a valuable and artful language variety. Students asked if the creoles their parents spoke should be considered languages or dialects or just “broken” versions of English during the teaching of their

Black English lesson. A focus on their home language practices allowed for conversations about language and power, and racial hierarchies.

216 Ultimately students began to make connections between shared histories at many levels of their culture, which allowed them to develop relationships and partnerships they had never considered before. Since the implementation of the Black History Class, many of the staff members who advocated the program have moved on. Moreover, since the teacher responsible for creating the class left no record of the class syllabus or content, the class was not institutionalized at the school. When I asked about whether the program and class still existed, the Assistant Principal told me that with the previous teacher’s departure and her promotion from teacher to Assistant Principal, the entire college credit program was dissolved. This change meant that, though they recognized the benefit of the class, structural issues made it impossible to keep. Nonetheless, I argue that treating courses that center on Black identity and Black histories as auxiliary ultimately reproduces anti-Blackness and erases hemispheric Blackness in the school curriculum.

Nevertheless, several programs continued as a result of efforts motivated by participation in or the planning of the Black History Month show. I can confirm that the international service trip continues to be a strong presence in the school. Since the inaugural trip, the students have traveled to the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

Additionally, a partnership with the sister school in Dallas resulted in travel to Mexico and Guatemala, where many of the Dallas students claim heritage. In every instance, the students were tasked with making connections between what they had seen and their own lives back in the United States. While I believe there has always existed a surface level of pride for all of the students, these programs and dialogues have ushered in a sense of community not previously seen. Unfortunately, due to the structure of the program, 217 which is a partnership with the Peace Corps, trips have not occurred in Haiti, where many of the students have family and transnational relations. Again, these structural issues have become barriers to the construction of sustainable hemispheric Black pedagogies.

In addition to the service trip, the academic team argued for the creation of a peer leadership program. Though not expressly dedicated to teaching the students about their own histories and languages, the program was noted as space where students are allowed to be authentically themselves. There is no adult presence, so students can talk freely, and the groups are guided by students who have applied to be peer leaders and who exhibit leadership qualities, defined in the school policy handbook as “demonstrated ability to take the program seriously and a demonstrated growth over their time at the school.” In doing so, students become the leaders in the creation of safe spaces. While I commend this effort to provide students with room for interpersonal growth, students still lack formal instruction and linkages to histories that extend beyond traditional lessons of U.S. history, which have long been found based on white mainstream modes of being. It seems as though much of the education that Black students get about Blackness occurs at the college level. Some students acknowledge the shift:

17. Mercedes: I really wish I would have gotten more of this in high school. Coulda

saved me a lot of strife. (laughs) Naw, but it’s cool because I am constantly

learning about myself and others and like we are all in this together.

218 Lessons that privilege students’ own histories should not be considered elective. These lessons aid in the development of positive self-images while also allowing for solidarity across differences.

4.9 CONCLUSION Throughout this chapter, I explored the nature of language and identity for a group of heterogeneous Black subjectivities in a private high school in Brooklyn, New

York. Using the annual Black History Month as an anchor for understanding the ways that students negotiated language, culture, and space, I suggest that the lack of culturally relevant educations combined with linguistic profiling and ideological enregisterments of language and race resulted in the erasure of Dominican Blackness, and ultimately the exclusion of Dominicans from the limited spaces that were dedicated to the performance of one’s authentic self. Though the Dominican students had traditionally been excluded from Black History Month show planning and execution, this exclusion was not based on malice. As Jean, the African American Studies teacher commented, her lack of engagement is a result of the deficiencies in her own education. Having been raised in the

United States, the previous director of the show allowed for the erasure and removal of

Black Latinx students from the show due to miseducation about the hemispheric nature of

Blackness.

Conversations about history based on pan-Caribbean narratives resulted in small changes through student-centered initiatives. These initiatives have given students a formalized space to form interpersonal relationships with their peers and provide a space

219 beyond the classroom to exist as their full selves. Additionally, the use of extracurriculars such as the Black History Month show and the service trip to the Dominican Republic and parts of South America allow for moments of celebration and education of the heterogeneity of Blackness and Latinidad for the students involved. Nonetheless, formal spaces are still ruled by monolingual white mainstream and hegemonic ideologies about academic and professional success, and as such, there is much work to be done at

Hispaniola High School.

In returning to the school in 2018, I was happy to see heterogenous Black populations represented in the show. But the experience in itself has led me back to my original question. How can we build curriculums that reflect what is important to the nation-state in which the students are being educated (in this case, the United States of America) and those that reflect the diverse backgrounds of the students who occupy those spaces?

Further, how would a large-scale inclusion of culturally reflective curriculums affect the development of identity for these students and, moreover, their academic success within these spaces? Stories like this help to build bridges in-school programs that serve students of color, especially those with students who have not fit into traditional notions of race and identity in the United States? Lastly, and more aligned with my current research, I ask us to consider how focusing on language practices, in both performance and proficiency, can give us insight into the identity construction of students who occupy transnational spaces. More specifically, does a transnational understanding of Blackness impact teachers’ evaluations of student language production and proficiency?

220 This chapter, much like previous chapters, suggests that for Dominicans, access to both English and Spanish language varieties may allow for the representation and maintenance of an ethno-racial identity that falls outside of dominant U.S. formulations or Blackness and Latinidad. Thus, the question becomes, in what ways are educational institutions implicated in and responsive to these processes of making race and identity categories? Moreover, how do institutional practices and policies impact ethnoracial development for those who live on the margins of hegemonic categorization projects? In the case of the students at Hispaniola high school, I suggest a move towards what I call a

Hemispheric Black Language Pedagogy.

In the final chapter, I consider the lessons that can be learned from interrogating ideological enregisterments of language and race within pedagogies that privilege hemispheric knowledges.

221 Chapter 5: Conclusion and Implications

In what H. Samy Alim (2016) terms “languaging race,” my dissertation project employs linguistic data to theorize racialization processes as they exist at the level of individuals and institutions. In the previous chapters, I have presented three studies on the construction of Blackness for Dominican(-American) youth. Overarchingly, the goal of the dissertation is to explore how bounded ethnoracial categories are talked about, acquired, and contested among Dominican(-American)s and the other Black subjectivities with whom they have historically shared space. The overall discussion is framed within three research strands: (i) intra-racial conflicts and solidarities, (ii) Dominican Spanish as

Black language practice, and (iii) institutional impact on creating ethnoracial categories.

And each chapter draws on a unique set of data and experiences. Importantly, the studies move beyond investigations of Dominican language production and evaluation to incorporate the linguistic communities in which Dominicans participate, be they digital platforms or social institutions such as schools. Incorporating the voices and experiences of other Black subjectivities in our understanding of Dominicanidad returns to the interactional nature of identity development while providing an understanding of how solidarities and conflicts are mobilized within current racial hierarchies.

In this conclusion, I first present summaries and limitations of the studies presented in chapters two, three, and four, followed by suggestions for a way forward from each study. I conclude by providing my own insights into the implications of taking

222 on this work from an interdisciplinary framework and how we can apply linguistic methodologies to the exploration of race and ethnicity in school contexts.

5.1 NEW BLACKS SUMMARY

Chapter 2, “New Blacks: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the construction of the

African American/Dominican boundary of difference,” theorizes the ways we co- construct and define boundaries of difference in ethnoracial categorization projects.

Specifically, the chapter draws on a public intra-racial conflict between Dominicans and

African Americans over the utilization and function of the term “Black” as a racial or ethnic term. Employing concepts of stancetaking (introduced in section 2.2.1 and 3.3.3), raciolinguistic ideologies (introduced in section 2.3), and Black self-determination

(introduced in section 1.1.2), I consider the ways in which people discursively constructed or contested boundaries of ethnoracial difference between Dominicans and other Black subjectivities. For this chapter, I explored four focal raciolinguistic ideologies: (i) DNA ideology, (ii) Categorization fallacy, (iii) Co-naturalization of language and race, and (iv) Accent Ideology. Two research questions guided the chapter:

What linguistic ideologies are implicated in the construction of Blackness for

Dominicans and Dominican-Americans in the United States? Moreover, what mechanisms are used to create what I call the African American/Dominican boundary of difference?

To answer these questions, I performed a critical discourse analysis on ten

YouTube videos, which tackled the topic of Dominicanness and Blackness in some form. 223 Additionally, I performed a critical conversation analysis on five comment threads that responded to the video’s content. Four raciolinguistic ideologies were defined to examine how they contributed to notions of Blackness, Latinidad, and Dominicanidad. In addition to investigating the appearance of the focal raciolinguistic ideologies within these conversations, I was interested in whether those who were engaged were invoking the ideologies to promote them or as a way to contest them. As such, I also performed an attitude analysis, marking each ideology with a weighted score of 1 to 5 for affect, alignment, and investment (described in Table 2.3).

In this this chapter and throughout the dissertation project, I move beyond the discrete linguistic practices of marginalized speakers to investigate the social structures conditioning these performances through my concept of multilectical racializations, a framework for understanding the sociohistorical processes of ethnoracial category binding. While the idea that identity is a dialectical process is not a new one, I argue that the formation of identity categories and ethnic categorizations is not a dialectical process between interlocutors but rather a multilectical process of social (re)colonization meant to uphold and normalize established hierarchies of power. Every interlocutor comes to an interaction with a set of ideologies that are drawn into processes of racialization. As such, there is no act of speech that is not implicated in either the confirmation or contestation of white supremacy as the current organizing structure of U.S. society.

The findings from the chapter provided three major takeaways:

224 1. While social scientists generally agree on race as a social construct, the current

data evidenced a continued reliance on eugenic and scientific notions of race that

are based in DNA, genetics, and blood quantum ideologies. The pervasiveness of

these notions may be connected with increased marketing and participation in

pop-DNA testing through companies such as 23&me® and AncestryDNA®.

2. The ways that people operationalize the concepts of race and ethnicity

significantly impact the ability to build solidarities surrounding identity

categorizations. While the main point of contention in these online conversations

surrounded whether Dominicans claimed a “Black” identity, communicative

failure occurred when certain individuals used “Black” as an ethnic rather than a

racial identifier. When Black was used as an ethnic marker, it was almost entirely

attributed to African Americans, which allowed for the creation of a boundary

between the U.S. Black population and those with heritage or nativity in other

countries around the world. On the other hand, those who opposed this view used

the term Black as a pan-racial and diasporic identifier linked to African ancestry.

In this case, African heritage allowed for the political unification of a

heterogenous group of people who would be categorized as Black. I designated

this terminological disconnect a Categorization Fallacy (defined in section

2.3.2). In most cases, the conflict did not occur because of a denial of African

Ancestry, but rather because of the ambiguities associated with the racialization

of ethnic and national categories in the United States.

225 3. Ideologies that strengthen boundaries of difference between African Americans

and Dominicans rely on colonial frames of power. These ideologies reaffirm

eugenic projects, which rest on anti-Black and anti-Indigenous frames. While the

U.S. racial schema has traditionally presented in a white-Black binary, data in

this study suggested a shift to a Black- non-Black binary predicated on the ability

to mobilize anti-Black ideologies. Further, since race is being remapped onto

linguistic production over physical characteristics, language allows one to move

toward whiteness as the top of the racial hierarchy.

5.1.1 New Blacks limitations

Drawing data from online social media platforms allows for wide-scale surveying of ideas and language sampling. However, the use of this data is not without its complications. Though Chapter 2 focused on how race—Blackness in particular— is taken up, there is no legitimate way of surveying the ethnic, racial, gender, sexuality, or other social identifications of social media users. In his Twitter analysis of the linguistic presentation of null subjects in two varieties of Spanish, Adrián Rodríguez Riccelli

(2018) notes the drawbacks of using online language data by commenting, “[o]ne drawback to this methodology is the difficulty in accessing sociolinguistic and language background, as well as biographical information. Information posted on a user’s profile may be inaccurate or absent all together and is currently not easily extracted.

Nevertheless, the relative ease of access and exorbitant amounts of data makes for a tempting tool of use. So long as its limitations are acknowledged” (p. 311). In our case,

226 the extraction of large-scale ideological constructions can still be achieved, though we cannot immediately evaluate how other characteristics such as gender or sociocultural subjectivity impact the pronouncements.

Further, conversation analysis relies on the words being produced, leaving untapped the non-verbal communication in the production of ethnoracial ideologies on these platforms. Nonetheless, using the current methodology allows us to move beyond anecdotal or interview data regarding racial ideologies by providing access to large amounts of data with relative ease. In the future, this work could be combined with digital media studies to investigate the ways that subject positionality informs social media interaction in order to submit a framework for understanding the subjective nature of race construction on these platforms.

5.1.2 Future Directions in intra-racial relationship studies

Negotiating raciolinguistic ideologies creates space for a fruitful investigation of the inevitable presence of inter-ethnic conflicts and solidarities. Django Paris (2009) speaks about what happens when immigrants come to the United States and do not learn a “standard” or “educated” variety of English. Based on their neighborhoods, contact, etc., they may be acquiring African American English first. For some Dominican(-

American)s who may have difficulty distinguishing themselves physically from their

African American counterparts, language then becomes a way to carve out space within the U.S. hierarchy of power (Toribio, 2000, 2003). Language choice becomes a necessary tool to gain access to societal privileges; as such privileges are distributed based on racial 227 logics and hierarchies of power. So, what happens when your natural language is that of a group that you cannot be physically distinguished from? If language is being used to remap racial categories, we must begin tracking linguistic shifts as they are implicated in drawing racial boundaries.

In the upcoming phases of the research, I look to the ways that the use of distinct

African American language practices results in moments of solidarity-building versus moments of language and ethnoracial policing across ethnic boundaries. How can we engage notions of linguistic crossing, passing, and innovations with the current constructions of Blackness in the United States?

5.2 DOMINICANS BE LIKE SUMMARY

Chapter 3, “Dominicans be like: Ethno-raciolinguistic stance-taking and the construction of Dominicanidad in the U.S.,” explores the mutual exclusivity between

Blackness and Latinidad by putting Dominican language practices into conversation with

Black English practices, as described in previous literature. The aims of the chapter were to provide evidence for an expansion of Blackness as it is currently defined in the United

States, such that Black identity includes hemispheric knowledges and practices.

Examining my data through the lens of linguistic stance, raciolinguistic ideologies, and raciolinguistic enregisterment, I argue for the existence of a hemispheric Black American

Community of Practice, evidenced by Black lexical practices in both African American

English and Dominican Spanish. While previous research on the Africanized features of

Dominican language has explored the variety’s morphosyntactic and phonological 228 properties, much of the research followed traditional modes of language abstraction from community practices.

To achieve my goal, I created a novel methodological approach by combining the development of a linguistic artifact corpus with a sociolinguistic review of Black language practices as defined in previous African American English sociolinguistic literature. More specifically, I focused on Dominican youth’s digital practices across three social media platforms: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Three kinds of artifacts comprised the corpora: memes, tweets, and Instagram posts. From this corpus, I was able to perform an analysis of Dominican Spanish as a Black language practice by finding parallels with five Black language lexicalization processes: (i) semantic inversions; (ii) phonological evolutions; (iii) innovative abbreviations (acronyms); (iv) double-voicing;

(v) Black naming practices. Each of these processes was evidenced in a digital artifact collected over a seven-month period.

The data and analysis from Chapter 3 resulted in three significant findings. These findings speak to the linguistic features found in Dominican Spanish as related to African

American English and the cultural linkages between the groups as a result of shared experiences of colonization in the Americas.

1. Parallel lexicalization practices evidenced in Dominican digital production

provide support for a hemispherically Black American community of practice.

This community of practice expands current ideas about what it means to be

Black in this country. At the same time, it recalls the ability of previously 229 enslaved and racially oppressed groups to survive the legacies or racial

capitalism and reinvent themselves through language practices in a push toward

Black self-determination.

2. Dominican Blackness and African American Blackness are intimately linked in

their response to colonial frames of power. Assuming colonization, white

supremacy, and Black self-determination as our starting point, there is no way to

disentangle modes of Black being, such that production of Black Dominicanness

is necessarily a reproduction of Black Americanness. Further, Dominicans lead a

highly transnational life, significantly impacted by U.S. culture and products

even before arriving in the United States. As such, Dominicans are able to

produce uniquely hybrid cultural productions as authentic to their experiences as

transnational subjects.

3. Lastly, Dominican digital production is based on the remixification of memes that

are produced in Black communities. Therefore, the voicing and imagining of

Dominican culture being mapped onto popular African American figures

represents a unique Dominican(-American) identity. It also shows participation

in a Black American community of practices, such that notions of American

Blackness need to be expanded to account for these productions. I argue that in

order to understand Blackness, it is imperative to include Black hemispheric

cultural productions in our investigations.

230 5.2.1 Dominicans be like limitations

Much like Chapter 2, this chapter relied on social media data. Due to the rapid spread and remixing of the primary type of artifact collected, memes, tracking the origins of these productions is nearly impossible. Additionally, as quickly as a meme appears, it disappears, making it nearly impossible to track its development and how it has been remixed. For this chapter, I focus on memes that had been posted in more than one location or that connected to a series of memes using the same image with varying language mapped on top of the meme. Nonetheless, the use of memes as linguistic data makes it difficult to collect some information that is traditionally associated with sociolinguistic research. The ways that people enact themselves on the internet may be significantly different from their “in-real-life” personae, and further, there is no way to know who exactly is producing and distributing memes. However, one can assume that if the pages it appears on are associated with a particular ethno-racial identity, then the producers share that identity. In future studies, a more longitudinal collection of digital artifacts and the incorporation of digital tracking software that shows where certain posts originate may provide the ability to investigate the humans behind the digital productions. In this way, we can investigate how online production mirrors or conditions linguistic productions in real life.

5.2.2 Future directions: Linguistic models for diasporic solidarities

Chapter 3 adds to a body of literature that argues that Dominican Spanish, rather than being a deficient version of some hegemonic variety of Spanish, is a living language

231 with intimate ties to African ways of being, knowing, and speaking (Bullock and Toribio,

2009,2014a; Valdez, 2007,2009). Whether these African ways of being are evidenced through connection to Africanisms present in modern Dominican Spanish or, as in the case of Chapter 3, the actual processes of language innovation as connected to survival and Black self-determination, we can gain incredible insight from applying linguistic models to our understanding of cultural practices and vice versa. Further, investigations of intra-racial solidarities and communities of practice allows us to capture notions of diaspora that extend beyond official records of contact. Using linguistic frames, I encourage a range of questions that ultimately aim to reveal processes of ethno-racial socialization hemispherically in the Americas. In relation to the project of a Black hemispheric community of practices, I specifically ask: (i) How do we reconcile

Dominican linguistic productions as Black while recognizing that they are used by

Dominicans of every race? (ii) What do innovative mixtures of Black Dominican Spanish and African American English suggest about moves toward Black self-determination?

(iii) How can we re-imagine our current modes of investigation about race (and more importantly about Blackness) in this hemisphere? (iv) What discourses point us to an understanding of the formation and contestation of bounded ethno-racial and linguistic categories?

Negotiation of the bounds of ethnoracial identifications by those who may be hegemonically categorized as belonging to different racial groups can aid in the deconstruction of said categories. Attending to the language that is used in the

232 deconstruction allows for an investigation of whether these categories are just being reconstituted in ways that uphold the power hierarchies as they currently exist or, more hopefully, the dismantling of racial hierarchies. Further, negotiations are revealed in the ways that individuals chose to interact in certain spaces. I have shown above that the indexical connections between language practice and racial categorizations allow for an investigation of how individuals create racial communities of practice. For Dominicans, who are often thrust into pan-ethnic categorizations of Hispanic and Latino, language practices reveal a strong connection to Black ways of being. These productions create a rupture between the expected and the performed, contorting the space between ideology and performance. In this way, their linguistic behaviors deconstruct current hemispheric racial constructs. Future work should investigate whether the deconstruction of these categories results in a substantive dismantling of racial systems as they currently exist, or if said deconstruction merely results in a reconfiguration of white supremacy—that being the racial hierarchy system in the Americas, which rests on anti-Black capitalism.

5.3 THEY SPANISH, THEY AIN’T BLACK SUMMARY

In Chapter 4, “They Spanish, They ain’t Black: Language and culture sharing in the (de)construction of Dominican Blackness,” I use the planning and execution of a

Black History Month Show at a private high school in Brooklyn to explore the negotiation of identity for Dominican students who sit at the margins of Blackness and

Latinidad. This chapter’s goal is to visibilize Black heterogeneity and explore the effects of institutional homogenization of the pan-racial category of Black. Additionally, the

233 chapter thinks through the ways that pan-ethnicity is racialized through linguistic ideologies and practices. I ask in what ways language production aids in the classification of students who would be marked and identified as Black through U.S. racial schemas of hypodescent. Moreover, I ask in what ways schools avail spaces for Black students to exist in the full authenticity of their Blackness within formalized school programming.

In order to complete this project, I employed a critical race and anthro-political ethnography of a six-month period during the planning and execution of a Black History

Month show in the 2015-2016 school year. As a researcher in practice, the ethnographic methodologies allowed for the incorporation of auto-ethnographic data alongside ethnographic observations and interviews. In addition to field notes from that time, I relied on interviews about the ethnoracial identification of several Dominican students as well as follow-up interviews with students who had attended the school during the time period described and with teachers and staff members who were involved in the development and execution of extracurricular programming at the school.

Findings from the chapter resulted in my recommendation for the development of a hemispheric Black language pedagogy built within the frames of culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies. For the school in question, these pedagogies included the incorporation of a Black Studies course, trips abroad to Latin American destinations, and the incorporation of Spanish and Haitian Kreyol courses. I describe the reasoning for this pedagogical approach below in section 5.3.1. Three major findings resulted from the study in this chapter:

234 1. Students are negotiating their identities within the ideologies and scripts that they

have been provided not only in school contexts but also at home in the media and

in larger discourse communities. As such, the use of ethnoracial terminologies

and raciolinguistic ideologies stem from local socio-political contexts. In

Brooklyn, where Blackness is acutely heterogenous, the competition for

resources and cultural visibility can create a situation where there are stark

boundaries of belonging being drawn between communities who may be

categorized as part of the same pan-racial grouping. Thus, school

homogenizations of Blackness can have a negative impact on individual student

self-determination.

2. In competing for visiblization, students often engage in the same kind of linguistic

and racial policing that institutions do regarding language practices. Nonetheless,

while schools police language toward a hegemonic white mainstream language,

students police the authenticity of Blackness through racialized linguistic scripts.

Post-graduation interviews suggest that the lessons learned during specialized

history and Black studies classes have a significant impact on the ways that

students viewed themselves as part of a diasporic Black community that included

Afro-Latinxs. This impact would suggest that earlier lessons about hemispheric

Black histories could combat some of the policing and boundary creations that

happen within school spaces. Furthermore, immersion in coursework that reflects

the students’ histories and experiences mediates some of the trauma experienced

235 in school spaces regulated by lessons of academic professionalism and

appropriateness.

3. Communicative ruptures are common due to enregisterments of raciolinguistic

ideologies. Much in the way that conflicts occurred in the comment sections of

the YouTube videos I explored in Chapter 2, students relied on folk

understandings of race, ethnicity, and their connection to language production.

Students had no explicit lessons about Black history beyond the chapter

dedicated to it in their U.S. history classes. This lack of knowledge led students

to formulate their own mechanisms for the creation of ethnoracial boundaries as

they competed for cultural and linguistic visibilization within the school

programming offered.

5.3.1 Lessons learned and strategies for justice-oriented anti-colonial frames of education

One of the ways to intentionally widen the hemispheric understanding of Black identity can be achieved through an integration of a more content-based Spanish class, where authentic materials are drawn from Afro-Latinx producers. In Baker-Bell’s

(2020b) proposal of Anti-Racist Black language pedagogies, she calls on activities that allow students to develop critical awareness in order to interrogate how other linguistically and racially diverse communities experience racial and linguistic violence and are impacted and affected by anti-Black linguistic racism. I suggest that a linkage of

Spanish to Latinidad as a project of white supremacy is part and parcel of anti-Black linguistic racism through the erasure of Black Latinx subjects. Ultimately, I ask how our 236 existing classroom pedagogies can be expanded to include a hemispheric understanding of Blackness. In this way, schools can be responsive to a population that has been dually censured—in both institutional and peer relationships—and has suffered the effects of anti-Black racism both in origin and migrant contexts that are intimately tied to the experience of slavery. In the case of students who share Black language(s), I argue that this education would leave space for a rejection of boundary-making ideologies that have resulted in linguistic and racial trauma within educational spaces. Ultimately, we need to think about the ways we can set ourselves up to be learners of the language varieties and practices of our students. This means we must concertedly immerse ourselves in diasporic history and socialization.

5.4 IMPLICATIONS OR SIGNIFICANCE FOR DIFFERING FIELDS

5.4.1 Raciolinguistics

In the first chapter of The Raciolinguisic Reader, H. Samy Alim argued that his ability to “transrace” through language production should disrupt race as a categorical project (Alim, 2016). In other words, if race is so unstable that simply flying to another place or speaking another language disrupts the category to which one belongs, then maybe the whole concept of race is flawed. While I agree with the premise of this argument, I understand that race in itself is not necessarily the problem. Rather, the effects of anti-Blackness, indigenous erasure, and racial capital are what need to be contended with. Because it is anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and not the fact of race, that structures U.S. society, we must find ways to destabilize the current

237 understandings of both Blackness and all of the categories that stand in its opposition.

While scholars have worked for years to try to reveal the essence of Blackness—what constitutes Black subjectivity, social death, genetics, ancestral bonds?—I argue that studies in the ways that Blackness is reconstituted through language will aid in the dismantling of Blackness as “other.”

5.4.2 Sociolinguistics

In an effort to decolonize anthropological methods developed under hegemonically positioned ideologies, my project considers both the internal and external constructions of race and language ideologies. With this in mind, my work reinforces and advances current sociolinguistic investigations of Dominican language variation and

(im)migrant language maintenance as intimately tied to the development of second- and third-generation ethnic-racial identities in diasporic contexts.

While the field of sociolinguistics places primary importance on the use of social categories as a unit of analysis, the current work provides an example of how to move beyond the bounded ‘social category’ as defined in the national imaginary. In my study, race as a category is complicated so that it is treated beyond essentialist static definitions often found in sociolinguistic work. Through this complication, the study allows for a nuanced investigation of how groups and individuals understand themselves, their linguistic production, and the ways in which others view their linguistic production.

Treating race as a fluid category that can function on a continuum allows for a more socially nuanced understanding of how people perceive language production. 238 5.4.3 Educational linguistics

Critical race pedagogy is often defined as the practice of designing and implementing curriculums that are culturally relevant to the population being served

(Yosso, 2013, Ladson-Billings, 2014). While educators around the country have begun to adapt approaches under the umbrella of critical race pedagogy, many of the practices are developed based on essentialized notions of “Latinx culture” and “Latinx identity”.

Examples of this include providing Spanish classes for English Language Learners while only allowing for a racialized and standardized variety of Spanish to enter the space. The current study provides information about how a particular group, defined as “Hispanic” in U.S. racial logic, actually interprets themselves within educational spaces. At the same time, it allows teachers to examine the ways in which they interact with this group and evaluate whether it is aligned with calls for critical pedagogy.

Again, we must think about the ways that we as teachers can be learners of not only our students’ needs but the cultural and linguistic frames from which they are operating. This is not new. From Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies, educators have been repeating the same message: in order to educate children, one must incorporate knowledges about who the student is both inside and, more importantly, outside the classroom. Clashes between home and school cultures are not only detrimental to academic achievement but also to the social-emotional and psychological well-being of a generation.

239 5.4.4 Cultural and Ethnic Studies

In this dissertation, I analyze the racial constructions and consequences of those constructions for a population that straddles the lines of racial categorization projects.

Additionally, I provide data towards the shifting understanding of Latinidad in the United

States. In doing so, I allow for an expansion of the conceptualization of African diaspora as it currently exists for both Dominican and U.S. populations, creating links that can result in coalition-building aimed at the liberation of individuals who identify as both

Black and Latinx. By thinking beyond the bounded categories of Blackness and

Latinidad, the dissertation aids in the dismantling of an ideological mutual exclusivity between the categories. Ultimately, it allows for a visibilization of a population that has suffered the consequences of persistent erasure.

Moreover, the dissertation provides a basis for the incorporation of linguistic methodologies in the study of cultural productions such as digital communications, art, music, and performance. While performance studies have traditionally resided in the confines of cultural study, a focus on the linguistic form can prove beneficial in our interpretation of identity production and processes of racialization.

5.5 FUTURE WORK

Ultimately, my work will continue to contribute to knowledge about the ways that language production constitutes moments of Black self-determination. That is, instead of focusing on how we survive colonial systems of power, I seek to understand how we transform those systems by refusing to engage within the frames that have been laid out 240 for us. While there may be concerted campaigns to draw boundaries of difference between varying Black subjectivities, in practice, in community, and inaction, Blackness remains a fact. Blackness remains central in the relationships and processes of a wide community of people who share a unique legacy of survival. A common saying in the

African American community holds that for you to be standing here today, every one of your ancestors had to survive. We are not new to surviving. We continue to survive despite arbitrary and hierarchical raciolinguistic boundary creations, purposeful miseducations, and perpetual threats to Black ways of being.

This survival of Black language practices is what grounds my future work. I ask:

What systems are built to eradicate Black language practices? In what ways are anti-

Black ideologies institutionalized in these efforts? And how do Black subjectivities continue to push against these systems across a range of activities, institutions, and cross- ethnic solidarities? Further, I look to communities in order to understand the ways that activism, linguistic and otherwise, can disrupt the racial hierarchies that have dominated social institutions across the Americas since colonial times. I question the ways in which language allows for the commodification of Blackness, while continuing to relegate

Black speakers to the margins. Ultimately, I argue that linguistic research should be primary in our understanding of race and ethnicity, expanding the scope of what has traditionally constituted linguistic and ethnic studies research.

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256 Vita

Aris Moreno Clemons is a scholar of language and race, originally from the Bay Area in California. She received her BA in Spanish Studies from California State

University Fullerton in 2008 and her MA in Linguistics from Syracuse University in 2012. She has done extensive work in educational non-profits and started her career as a high school teacher and administrator before dedicating herself to her research. Her research focuses on the way language practices and perceptions are implicated in the creation, mobilization, and contestation of named ethno-racial categories. Focusing on Afro-Latinxs as an emergent ethno-racial grouping, her work looks to social media and institutional contexts, such as schooling, to frame her understanding of the intersections of language, race, and identity.

Email: [email protected]

This dissertation was typed by the author.

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