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Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican Americans. Benjamin H. Bailey. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2002. ix + 294 pp.
In this volume, Bailey demonstrates the importance of language in the construction of racial identity, even in face of a racial ideology based on physical appearance. He shows that for second-generation Dominican Americans, most of whom have significant African ancestry, speaking Spanish challenges and to some extent removes them from, the binary racial ideology of the United States. Bailey argues succinctly: "they speak Spanish, so they are Spanish" (p. V). This dependency of identity on language performance leads Bailey to assert that, on both local and global levels, identity categories are not static but negotiable. Bailey's other major claim in his analysis is that Dominicans do not simply switch from one to another of several separate linguistic systems, but rather that their language is a single hybrid system which "defies purist and monolithic social and linguistic categories" (p. 10).
There are several aspects of this book that make it an exemplary study of language and identity, especially the richness of the field site, the combination of micro and macro viewpoints, and the quality of the analysis from both perspectives. The field site is a multiethnic high school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the majority of students are of Hispanic background. Almost all Dominicans, Bailey explains, have some African ancestry, and when they migrate to the United States they are often assumed to be African American. In the racial/ethnic ideologies of the United States, where Hispanic and African American are mutually exclusive, Dominicans are initially seen to be African American but can challenge that ascription by using Spanish. The field site thus highlights the role of language in identity construction. It is clear from Bailey's data that speaking Spanish is the...