Ana Celia Zentella

Zentella was born in the South Bronx, New York City to a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father. Growing up in the 1950s, she was exposed not only to multiple languages but also to multiple varieties of Spanish in the community.[8]

She attended Hunter College, CUNY in the Bronx as an undergraduate, obtaining a B.A. degree in Spanish.[3] She went on to complete a M.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures at Pennsylvania State University, and obtained a PhD in Educational Linguistics in 1981 at the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation was titled "Hablamos los dos. We speak both": Growing up bilingual in el barrio.[9]

Zentella was Professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies (now the Department of Africana/Puerto Rican/Latino Studies) at Hunter College, CUNY from 1990 to 2001. She was Chair for the Language and Social Justice Committee of the American Anthropology Association from the 2010 to 2012.[10][6] At the time of her retirement, she was Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, San Diego.

Zentella's research adopts a political perspective on linguistic anthropology that "places language in its social context and acknowledges that there is no language without power. In other words, issues of power are deeply embedded in all aspects of language."[11] Much of her research focuses on U.S. varieties of Spanish, English, and Spanglish, practices of language socialization in Latinx families, and the societal impact of “English-only" laws. She notes that when English and Spanish speakers interact, it can be difficult to decide which language to speak. Sometimes when non-Spanish speakers use the few Spanish words in their vocabularies to communicate, they come across as genuine and considerate, while at other times their use of phrases such as “no problemo” and “comprendee” comes off as offensive or mocking of Spanish speakers.[12]

She has explored how specific linguistic features may shift in their distribution when different groups of speakers converge. As an example, she and her colleagues have explored the overt use of pronouns as a marker of the linguistic identities of different groups of Spanish-speakers residing in New York City.[13] In another study, she recorded the language practices of high school and college students who live in Tijuana, Mexico, but travel to San Diego, California on a daily basis to attend school. Through interviews with these students, known as transfronterizos, she documented the conflicts they experience around language use and identity, and stigma associated with their use of Spanglish.[14]

• Otheguy, R., & Zentella, A. C. (2012). Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford University Press.
• Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Blackwell Publishers.
• Zentella, A. C. (Ed.). (2005). Building on strength: Language and literacy in Latino families and communities. Teachers College Press.
• Zentella, A. C. (Ed.) (2009). Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of language loss and revitalization. University Readers.

• UCSD Faculty Homepage