Please note that authors' royalties from book sales are donated. Here at UNM, I have created the
Latinx Linguists' Fund, which aims to address
Ana Celia Zentella's call to action to increase representation of Latinos in the field of Linguistics; she writes: "When members of racial/ethnic and language minorities clarify and draw upon the difficulties they face in an increasingly English-only nation in their analyses, they enhance our ability to address questions regarding language acquisition, proficiency levels and loss, as well as language reclamation, language education, and language policy. But the disturbing figures regarding educational achievement in our communities reveal a major hurdle that must be overcome before the ranks of LatinU linguists can increase: although 86% of Hispanic students were born in the US, and the vast majority are fluent in English, their high school graduation rates are low (76.3 % in 2013-14) (US Department of Education, 2015), only 13% have a bachelor degree, and only 4% have completed a graduate or professional degree (Díaz-Campos, 2016). Sub-groups of distinct national origins differ radically when the percent of earned college degrees is compared: “less than 10 percent of Mexican, Honduran, and Salvadoran populations hold a bachelor’s degree (Puerto Ricans = circa 12%), while 32 percent of Venezuelans and about 20 percent of Argentineans and Colombians have similar levels of degree attainment” (Zerquera and Flores, 2016, p.2). I take these data to be a call to action. One part of the solution involves the recruitment and training of future linguists who can teach and work with educators and professionals in the legal, health, and social service fields to ensure that LatinUs succeed in school and on the job, and live healthy lives. And encouraging LatinUs to become excited about the study of language can help ensure their academic success."
-Zentella, Ana Celia. (2018). “LatinUs and Linguistics: Complaints, Conflicts, Contradictions—the Anthro-political Linguistics Solution” In Naomi L. Shin & Daniel Erker (Eds.), Questioning theoretical primitives in linguistic inquiry (Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy). John Benjamins.