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I Am My Language: Discourses of Women and Children in the Borderlands. Norma González. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Xxii + 220 pp., notes, references, index.

John Attinasi

California State University, Long Beach

Norma González has established herself as a brilliant educational anthropologist investigating the connections between cultural resources and academic development. She and her colleagues have worked with both commitment and benefit to the Latino communities of southern Arizona in the Mexican border area. The funds of knowledge literature is now classic in educational ethnography and applied anthropology (González et al.: 1995; Moll & González: 1994). The premise in that work is that cultural knowledge and personal contact will help teachers design a more engaging teaching that will result in more successful learning. The beauty of the ongoing work is that graduate students who are also teachers personify the value of an anthropological stance in education. The research, spanning more than ten years, seems to be communal as well as community-responsive, with several voices and sub-disciplines involved—the sciences, literacy special education, counseling and family development. I am my language extends that work well beyond education into the emotion, economy and ideology of several families.

González and her colleagues seem to base their well-known work in the social anthropology of Victor Vélez-Ibañez (1988) and the educational anthropology of Hugh Mehan (1979). In fact, Vélez-Ibañez wrote the book jacket text, and noted that González has explored “the manner in which language is created within the ecology of the borderlands….the very process of the creation of meaning, emotions and relationships within the maze of institutions, polity and economy of the Southwest.” These two comments reveal both the weaknesses and strengths of the book; the ecology of language in the borderlands is sketchy, but the multidimensional relational portraits are intriguing.

González originally set out to continue investigating community-school linkages by investigating the identities children construct when they use language in certain ways. From a linguistic point of view, this approach would mean discovering connections between personality and ideology, and connecting that to social networks and structures of code-switching, discourse types and situational ways of expressing emotions. This does not happen in the first four chapters, which develop the rationale of the study, and not in the three central chapters that explore the hybrid identities of several key families, nor in the final two chapters that deal with cultural, ideological and international issues. But these disappointments are small in comparison to what these chapters do contribute, and might have been lessened with revision and a less linguistic, more ideological focus in the title and subtitles.

The study was begun as an exploration of child language use (xvi), but developed to more complex levels as the impact of emotion, women’s networks, and González’ personal narrative as an investigator from within the community became more significant than the original purpose of the research. The salient issues of multiple identities and international ideology in the lives of adults influence child language indirectly and only tangentially. Here is where the strengths of the book outstrip its weaknesses. The theoretical inconclusiveness and lack of linguistic engagement in the study pale in comparison with the textured explorations of families and ideology. Put another way, this reviewer was initially concerned that González had failed in her goal to explore how discourse structures are patterned, that she had ambivalently stated, then abandoned (p. 18), and then returned to the paradigm of the anthropology of emotion (Chapter 4). Gonzalez’ conversation on dialogism was theoretically interesting, but disappointingly disconnected from the data analysis. The anthropologist’s narrative also seemed irritating: first person writing, mixing personal facts with collected data, and casual phrasing (“When facts won’t stay put,” is the title of Chapter 3).

The ambitious scope of the research, however, and the resulting insight into the familiar struggles of several key groups of Latino children, adolescents and mothers, and to lesser extent, fathers and extended family members, make this book useful and enjoyable. González is a virtuoso of language herself, able to sit across the kitchen table and hear personal stories, and through analysis, connect the discussion of daily struggles to the “discursive construction of subjectivity within a field of power which is the borderlands” (p. 75).

Language is the vehicle of ideologies in this research, but the linguistics is incidental. Most translations are adequate to capture the idea or emotion of the speaker, and ideology, not formal structure, is the focus. There is little linguistic difference in the choice of language other than the occasional culturally rich phrase (una mujer acomedida, is a women who can adjust and be useful, p. 113). Key incidents and memories are expressed in either Spanish or English. The content, not the structure of the language used, provides keys to the analysis, and in her analysis of border identity Norma González offers important insights and modifications to recently accepted views on immigration, national identity, other social theories and the process of theorizing itself.

The book is not a definitive statement by Norma González, but rather a valuable progress report on crucial issues of identity, minority ideology and social development that derive from her signature style of research (the community funds of knowledge). The educational implications of this study are better stated in her co-authored works, yet in this book González attempts to synthesize a singular and personal statement with a broader view of the future of cultural hybridity (p.195), a contemporary term that echoes the traditional concept of mestizaje. Latinos offer a challenge to the entire society of the U.S., extended to the global society visible in borderlands and most cities. That challenge is to incorporate imposed norms into indigenous values, modern trends into traditional patterns and the toughness of the marketplace into the tenderness of the home. Norma González has opened many conversations in I am my language, and not having any of them finished is perhaps wise.

References:

González, N., et al. (1995). Funds of knowledge for teaching in urban households. Urban Education. 29 (4), pp. 443-70.

Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press.

Moll, L. & González, N. (1994). Lessons from research with language minority children. Journal of Reading Behavior. 26 (4), pp. 439-56.

Velez-Ibañez, V. (1988). Networks of exchange among Mexicans in the U.S. and Mexico: Local level mediating responses to national and international transformations. Urban anthropology and the study of cultural systems in world economic development 17 (1), pp. 27-51.