Ana Celia Zentella is Professor Emerita (University of California/San Diego and Hunter College/ CUNY). She is an anthro-political linguist recognized for her research on U.S. LatinU languages, language socialization, "Spanglish," and "English-only" laws. In addition to her award winning community ethnography, Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York (1997), she co-authored Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity (2012) with Ricardo Otheguy, and edited three volumes, Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities (2005), Multilingual San Diego (2009), and Multilingual Philadelphia (2010). Recent articles include a study of language and identity on the Tijuana–San Diego border by Mexican-origin college students and at a border high school, and Puerto Rican assimilation to Mexican Spanish in San Diego.

In her talk, Prof. Zentella will discuss recent debates about language, truth, facts, news, and the rise of linguistic intolerance and hate crimes. As she indicates, “An anthro-political linguistic perspective helps us understand the recent attacks on speakers of other languages by the general public, employers, teachers, judges, senators, and by the President and his advisors, by explaining how racial ideologies of superiority/inferiority and purity/contamination have been remapped from biology onto language, with damaging repercussions for the education, employment, and safety of people of color who speak varied languages.”

This event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be served following the lecture. For more information please contact Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes at lawrlafo@umich.edu.

This event is organized by the Latina/o Studies Program and cosponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, Romance Languages and Literatures, and by the RLL Diversity Committee.