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

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 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.