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9. Identity and Heritage Learners: Moving beyond Essentializations
- Georgetown University Press
- Chapter
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C H A P T E R 9 Identity and Heritage Learners MOVING BEYOND ESSENTIALIZATIONS Kim Potowski, University of Illinois at Chicago C ITIBANK AIRED A SERIES of television commercials in 2003 to promote awareness of the risks of identity theft. Each commercial features a fictional victim of identity theft engaged in an activity common to their daily lives—a forty-something female Asian dentist attending to a patient, a thirtyish African American man working out at the gym, a pair of white, sixtysomething women sitting on a couch having coffee. However, these individuals speak with the voices of the identity thieves, who talk about the luxuries they bought with the victims’ money. The incongruity of the things the perpetrators purchased—the woman dentist bought self-tanning cream and hair plugs to become a ‘‘babe magnet’’ at an upcoming singles’ retreat; the bald man working out at the gym got hair extensions and lip injections to launch a Hollywood singing career; and the elderly women bragged about how loud their new motorcycles were—are almost as funny as the voices with which they speak. A husky male voice comes forth from the petite, Asian dentist; a young Valley Girl voice emanates from the burly African American man; southern male voices typically identified as ‘‘hillbilly’’ are drawled by the elderly, coffee-sipping ladies. Citibank effectively utilized the crucial role played by language in the enactment of identity to make their point: We rely on language as a key variable in identifying each other’s gender, age, socioeconomic status, and other factors. The Citibank examples, however, involve varieties of the same language; identity enactments become even more complex when more than one language is available to speakers. Language, indeed, plays a crucial role in the construction of identity, which as a construct has seen a large body of research in the social sciences accumulate 179 180 KIM POTOWSKI during the past thirty years. The first approaches that arose in sociology in the late nineteenth century held that individuals’ identities were largely determined by their membership in groups determined by social class, religion, educational background, and peer networks. However, this formulation has been criticized as ‘‘essentializing’’ individuals–that is, reducing them to a set of basic social or cultural characteristics—and as assuming that they all have those characteristics in common. Although it seems obvious that, for example, not all Christians are alike, or all Jews, or all college graduates or all plumbers, essentializing views of identity are still common and are formulated in such a way that individuals’ commonalities are sought and are assumed to be stronger than their differences. Theorists now search for ‘‘more nuanced, multileveled and ultimately complicated framings’’ of identity (Block 2007, 13), which constitutes a poststructuralist attempt to move beyond a search for universals. This introductory section seeks to lay out some of the basic tenets of modern approaches to the study of identity, drawing largely from Block (2007) and Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004). This includes definitions of terms such as ‘‘performativity,’’ ‘‘ambivalence,’’ ‘‘hybridity ,’’ and ‘‘communities of practice.’’ After laying out these concepts, the chapter turns to work on heritage speaker identities generally, and then specifically focuses on bilingual Latinos in the United States.1 Some of the questions I explore include: What identities have been ascribed to these groups, both from within their own communities as well as by the hegemonic mainstream, and how do these groups respond to such positionings? In what ways are these identities relevant for these individuals both as speakers of and as students of Spanish? The chapter concludes with a consideration of the concrete ways in which heritage speaker classrooms might profitably incorporate knowledge about the identities of US Spanish speakers and directions for future research. Table 9.1 displays seven common contemporary dimensions of an individual’s identity as summarized by Block (2007). Although ‘‘language identity’’ is listed as its own category in this table, language in fact does a lot of work in constructing the other facets of identity, as demonstrated in the Citibank commercials cited above. In addition to invoking one or more of these categories, modern conceptualizations of identity often utilize several key terms. One is ‘‘performativity ,’’ which means that identity is constantly performed. In particular, Butler’s (1990) work on gender identity emphasizes that individuals continually stylize their appearance, language, and body movements as they ‘‘do’’ being women or men. That is, though all individuals are born with a biological sex, gender is...