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The American Dream Is Not Dreamt in English Only: Latin@s and Linguistic Intolerance in the USA

Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—Dr. Ana Celia Zentella (Ph.D., U. of Pennsylvania), Professor Emerita (Hunter College- CUNY and the University of California, San Diego/Ethnic Studies), is an anthro-political linguist internationally recognized for her research on U.S. Latino languages, language socialization, "Spanglish", and "English-only" laws. Her community ethnography, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in NY(Blackwell, 1997), won awards from the British Ass’n. of Applied Linguistics and the American Ass’n. of Latina and Latino Anthropologists.  She has also edited three volumes, Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities  (2005), Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization (2009), and Multilingual Philadelphia: Portraits of Language and Social Change (2010). Her latest book, co-authored with Ricardo Otheguy, is a comprehensive sociolinguistic study, Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity (Oxford UP, 2012).

As the proud New York born daughter of a Mexican father and Puerto Rican mother, she was honored when Manhattan's Borough President, Ruth Messinger, declared October 30, 1996  “Doctor Ana Celia Zentella Day", for “her leading role in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights.”

Professor Zentella chaired the Language and Social Justice Committee of the American Anthropology Association from 2010-12.


This lecture is sponsored by the Five College Lecture Fund and co-sponsored by Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Anthropology,  Spanish and Portuguese Program of the Dept. of Languages, and Literatures and Culture at UMass Amherst; the Department of Spanish at Amherst College, the Department of Sociology and American Studies at Hampshire College, the Department of Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American Studies at Mount Holyoke College, and Latin American and Latino/a Studies and Department of Sociology at Smith College.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - 4:00pm
Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union
Free and open to the public

Dr. Ana Celia Zentella
Professor Emerita in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego