CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Benjamin H. Bailey (Communication, UMass-Amherst), April 5, 2002.

"Developmental and Historical Time in Language and Negotiation of Identities: Some Findings among Dominican Americans"

Our ability to electronically record and subsequently analyze individual interactions helps us to link highly specific details of individuals' talk to larger social meanings. In focusing on the details of such "frozen," interactional data, however, it is easy to lose track of the temporal limits and specificity of one's data. In this talk, I suggest both the richness and limitations of particular data on language and identity of Dominican American teen-agers by contextualizing the data both in terms of a) the developmental time of individual lives, and b) historical changes in communities and social relations. By comparing the issues of identity faced by Dominican American teen-agers with those faced by Dominican American adults, I seek a) to capture a sense of social and developmental historicism that is frequently lacking in synchronic analyses of language and identity and b) to emphasize the role of local communities in mediating between individuals and larger-scale processes such as international migration.

Linguistic negotiation of identity is particularly interesting among second-generation Dominicans because many are perceived to be African American based on phenotype, but their Spanish speaking is at odds with popular stereotypes of African American identities. The issues of identity that teen-agers and adults face, and the contexts in which they negotiate them are significantly different. While second-generation teen-agers in public schools experience many ambiguous ascriptions of identity, as adults they commonly take on Spanish-speaking roles through marriage/parenthood, work, and religion and maintain a higher profile Spanish-speaking identity, in part due to a rapidly burgeoning Latino community.