Ana Celia Zentella
Professor Emeritus
Social Sciences Bldg. Room 224
Phone: 858.534.8128
Fax: 858.534.8194
E-mail: azentella@ucsd.edu
Education:
Ph.D., Educational Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
M.A., Pennsylvania State University, Romance Languages and Literatures
B.A., Hunter College (Bronx), Spanish
Ana Celia Zentella is a Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego
and one of the foremost researchers in what she has named “anthro-political linguistics”.
She is a central figure in the study of U.S. Latin@ varieties of Spanish and English,
Spanglish, and language socialization in Latin@ families, and a respected critic of the
linguistic profiling facilitated by English-only laws and anti- bilingual education
legislation. Her book, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York (Blackwell,
1997) won the Book Prize of the British Association of Applied Linguistics, and the Book
Award of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists of the American Anthropology
Association. Most recently, she has edited Building on Strength: Language and Literacy
in Latino Families and Communities (Columbia TC Press, 2005).
Her current research projects
include a study of Puerto Rican assimilation to Mexican Spanish in California and a study
in conjunction with researchers from COLEF [El Colegio de la Frontera] on the remapping of
language, identity, and the border by transfronterizo students who live in Tijuana and study
in San Diego.
Manhattan's Borough President Ruth Messinger declared October 30, 1997 "Doctor Ana Celia Zentella Day", for "her leading role in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights".
Publications:
Zentella, Ana Celia. "José can you see": Latin@ responses to racist discourse. Bilingual Aesthetics, Doris Sommer, ed., NY: Palgrave Press. 2003. [pdf version attached]
Zentella, Ana Celia. Recuerdos de una Nuyorican. Insula . julio-agosto, núm. 679-680, 2003.
Zentella, Ana Celia. Latin@ Languages and Identities. Latinos! An Agenda for the 21st Century. M.Suárez-Orozco and Mariela Páez, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002
Language Planning/Policy and US Colonialism: The Puerto Rican Thorn in English-Only's Side. Language Policy and Planning: Sociopolitical Perspectives, Kees de Bot and Thomas Huebner, eds., John Benjamins, 2001.
Puerto Ricans in the US: Confronting the linguistic repercussions of colonialism. New immigrants in the United States: Background for second language educators, Sandra Lee McKay and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (Eds). Cambridge University Press, 2000, 137-164.
Spanish in New York City. The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City, Ofelia Garcia and Joshua Fishman (Eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.
The 'chiquita-fication' of U.S. Latinos and their languages, or Why we need an anthro-political linguistics. SALSA III: the Proceedings of the Symposium about Language and Society at Austin. Austin, TX: Department of Linguistics. 1995.
The Hispanophobia of the official English Movement in the U.S. , International Journal of the Sociology of Language 127 (1997).