Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class

Urciuoli’s award-winning book explores how language and the social construction of race, class, and ethnicity shape the lives of working-class Puerto Ricans living in New York City. Her reflexive ethnographic study is a combination of two absorbing features: her analyses of language and power relations based on key principles in semiotic and linguistic anthropology, paired with the authentic voices of individuals who share their lived experiences of speaking Spanish and English. The subjects’ conversations, interview responses, and anecdotes are saturated with ideas about what “correct” English means to them. Through these extended transcripts readers gain insight about language’s role in cultural dynamics that tangle minority populations in challenges, such as limiting where individuals and families live and work. Urciuoli’s provocative research and fieldwork give readers a rich understanding of language as the domain in which racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies are experienced.