This book talk will offer the findings and major arguments of Rosina Lozano’s recently published book.

From the back cover: An American Language reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of Spanish in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.

Rosina Lozano is a historian of Latino history with a research and teaching focus on Mexican American history, the American West, migration and immigration, and comparative studies in race and ethnicity.

Lozano's first book, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (published by The University of California Press in April 2018), is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States from the incorporation of the Mexican cession in 1848 through World War II, with some discussion of the following decades and present-day concerns. The nation has always been multilingual, and Spanish-language rights, in particular, have remained an important political issue into the present. The book is organized in two parts. The first five chapters argue that Spanish was a language of politics in the U.S. Southwest following the U.S. takeover. The second half of the book transitions to exploring the multifaceted use of Spanish in the twentieth century as it became a political language that instigated local and national political debates related to immigration and Americanization and aided the hemispheric interests of the nation. Read full bio here.

Photo credit: [ca. 1937], Herman Schultheis, Herman J. Schultheis Collection, Los Angeles Public Library