As a group whose members are Hispanic, American, and largely of African descent, Dominican Americans must negotiate distinctive issues of identity in the United States. Language is central to these negotiations, both as a symbol of identity and as a medium through which to construct and display local social meanings. Dominican Americans use linguistic forms from multiple varieties of two codes, Spanish and English, to situationally activate various facets of their multiple identities. This multi-variety linguistic and interactional construction of identities undermines implicit assumptions of uniformity and essentialism in United States linguistic and ethnic/racial categories, particularly in the construction of the category "African American."
Analysis of identity thus revolves around the questions of how, when, and why individuals count as members of particular groups. Analysis of language and naturally occurring discourse is a means to understanding how individuals, as social actors, highlight social boundaries and activate facets of identity.
In this chapter, I focus on the boundaries that are activated between in-group and out-group at two nested levels of specificity. First I show how Dominican Americans linguistically claim a "non-Black" Spanish/Dominican identity -made evident through Spanish use and represented by the ethnolinguistic label "Spanish" -that differentiates them from other African-descent Americans. Although Dominican Americans situationally align themselves with African Americans -as non-Whites -they also see themselves as distinct from African Americans, and they situationally highlight this distinction.
Then, I illustrate a way that Dominican immigrants situationally highlight boundaries among themselves. United States-raised Dominican teenagers see themselves as different from more recently immigrated Dominican teenagers (cf. Zentella 1990 among New York and island Puerto Ricans), and differences in language practices between United States-and Dominican-raised individuals can serve to highlight these differences. Language can function as an emblem of identity -as in the common Dominican usage of the term "Spanish" as an ascription of ethnic/racial identity -but it is also a tool used to instantiate multiple, shifting alignments and oppositions that are situationally activated or backgrounded vis-ร -vis other individuals or groups. Individuals use multiple Spanish and English resources to activate aspects of identities in ways that belie reified dichotomies, monolithic identities, and the one-to-one correspondences between linguistic code and social affiliation that have been emphasized in some research on language and ethnicity (e.g. Fishman 1989).