The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of
Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves,
i.e. as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,”
are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial
terms “Black” or “African American,”
applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish
language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial
categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their
Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally
occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article
shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable
from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and
inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist
ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In
using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization,
the Dominican second generation is contributing to the
transformation of existing social categories and the constitution
of new ones in the US.