Lecture Series
With seed funding, the Jocelyn Solis Fund has been established to support a yearly lecture series designed to continue discussions of themes related to Dr. Solis’ research. The lecture series will continue Dr. Solis’ focus on undertsanding identity development of young people living in socio-politically oppressive circumstances, like being denied “papeles” and expanding theoretical inquiry into relationships between globalization and threats to human development. In particular, the plight of Mexicans in the U.S. - their rich and powerful neighbor - will be a starting point for the Jocelyn Solis Lecture Series, as this issue relates to plight of indigenious peoples worldwide who are becoming increasingly oppressed amid the forces of globalization.
Please save the date: May 10, 2007 for the 2007 Lecture in the Jocelyn Solis Lecture Series
Professor Ana Celia Zentella will present a lecture entitled, Language socialization in Latino families and communities: An anthro-political perspective. Focusing on issues related to the following abstract, Dr. Zentella’s talk will be informative and provocative for discussion with the audience:
The new Latino diversity in the USA challenges traditional approaches to the
study of socialization to language and through language. An anthro-political
perspective sees through the language smokescreen that obscures ideological,
structural, and political elements that construct some ways of speaking or
raising children as inferior, ensuring the reproduction of inequality.
Brief Bio of Presenter: Ana Celia Zentella
Ana Celia Zentella, born and raised in the South Bronx and a product of NY City’s public schools, including Hunter College, is a Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. One of the foremost researchers in what she has named anthro-political linguistics, Zentella is a central figure in the study of U.S. Latino varieties of Spanish and English, Spanglish, and language socialization in Latino families. She is also a respected critic of the linguistic profiling facilitated by English-only laws and anti- bilingual education legislation. Her community ethnography, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York 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. Zentella has also recently edited, Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities. Her current research includes a study of Puerto Rican assimilation to Mexican Spanish in California, an NSF sponsored study of pronouns in Spanish dialects in New York City, and an anthro-political linguistic analysis of the transfronterizo talk of border-crossing students in Tijuana-San Diego.
The inaugural lecture in 2005 featured Barbara Rogoff of the University of California, Santa Cruz and her research on intellectual development among women in Central America. In addition, faculty and students at the Graduate Center offered comments connecting the keynote presentation to various aspects of Dr. Solis’ research.
With the Jocelyn Solis Lecture Series established, we will invite keynote lecturers who would be Jocelyn’s contemporaries, such as Particia Badequeria of U.C Berkeley, and eventually the colleagues with whom Dr. Solis worked at the Graduate Center, such as Eduardo Vianna, and those influenced by her work but who never had the opportunity to know her.
Invitations to the lectures will be distributed to the Graduate Center Community, relevant Continuing Education mailing lists, and, of course, the institutions and colleagues with Jocelyn Solis worked, such as Brooklyn College, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Association Tepeyac - as well as other community organizations and university programs with related missions.
