UC Irvine

Why does the state of California, while a significant presence on today’s world stage, suffer practices which marginalize many of her Spanish-language citizens? I look to the inherently contradictory rhetorical conditions under which the state was founded in the mid-nineteenth century for some insight. Preceding statehood, the Republic of Mexico and the United States of America ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which mandated that all citizens of Mexico that maintain their homes in California “be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States.” Yet, at that time, per the “Laws of the United States Relative to Naturalization,” only those who were “a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States.” These contradictory decrees did not benignly coexist. As a historiographic text, this dissertation starts at a point in time in California before the use of Spanish, or being associated with Spanish speakers, was cast as unquestionably “minoritized.” More specifically, this dissertation samples moments over a span of decades inscribed by raciolinguistic dynamics, raciolinguistic ideologies and, eventually, the dominance of raciolinguistic inversion – a phrase that develops Miyako Inoue’s idea of indexical inversion in order to acknowledge the eventual exchange of praise for criticism of the same qualities – through examination of a range of 19th century legislative, judicial, and periodical records. In so doing, it aims to contribute to the scholarship of raciolinguistics by examining how, in the early development of California’s statehood, racialized linguistic hierarchies were inscribed. I focus primarily on documents containing the official records of the state, along with other historical artifacts, in order to delineate an understanding of the substantive and influential statements of the day. Since such raciolinguistic dynamics continue to shape the teaching of academic literacy today, I offer in the Conclusion chapter a series of pedagogical implications for contemporary educators in a range of contexts.