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Benjamin Bailey's Language, race and negotiation of identity is the first extensive sociolinguistic study of a Dominican-American communicative community, and is thus a timely and welcome addition to the literature on Spanish/English bilingual situations in the United States. Bailey conducted field work among second-generation working-class Dominican-American high school students in Providence, Rhode Island, from August 1996 to July 1997. (The school at the time of field work was 60% Hispanic, 20% Dominican, and the rest largely Puerto Rican and Guatemalan.) His investigation focuses on the ways in which linguistic deployments by these young people enact ethnic and racial identity. His data are drawn from videotaped activities of six high school students in school and in one nonschool setting, interviews about language use and ethnic/racial issues with high school and college students, and general participant observation in school, home, and community contexts (p. 36).
Bailey locates his consultants in a specific nexus of class, regional, historical, demographic, and institutional relations. He then shows how, within their specific locations, they enact a range of identities through the codes they speak - specific varieties of English and Spanish. Their use of Dominican Spanish functions as an ethnic/racial enactment of a "Spanish" identity distinct from U.S. white or black racial identity. In doing so, they explicitly resist U.S. binary classification, despite the fact that, to non-Dominican-Americans, Dominicans tend to be typified as "black" on the basis of what is perceived as their African-derived phenotype. This resistance is central to their identity. At the same time, they use (in various patterns) African American Vernacular English (AAVE) elements that mark nonwhite peer solidarity motivated by shared positions of economic and racial disadvantage and, at the same time, by a popular culture of hipness powerfully identified as African American. It is the combination of these positions that distinguishes the sociolinguistic identity of the second generation from that of their parents.
The book is organized into seven chapters and a conclusion. The first introduces the central sociolinguistic and racial points. The second lays out the field site and research procedures. The third reviews the linguistic repertoires of second-generation speakers vis-à-vis the community's immigration history. The fourth examines the ways that social and ethnic/racial inequality manifest themselves in linguistic identity enactment. The fifth contrasts...