About the Author
Professor Santa Ana is on the faculty of the César Chávez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA . He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania . He has held positions at El Colegio de México , the University of New Mexico , La Sorbonne Nouvelle in France, among other institutions. He is a sociolinguist, and studies the interface of language and social structure, particularly the language setting of language minority peoples.
Otto Santa Ana was born in a mining town in Arizona. He is married to Thelma Meléndez, who holds a Ph.D. in Education from USC and is Deputy Superintendent for Instruction, Pomona Unified School District .
For his doctorate, Dr. Santa Ana researched the development of Chicano English among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. This required ethnographic work in four barrios in Los Angeles (Boyle Heights, South San Gabriel, Huntington Park, and north and south Montebello). Over 150 interviews of Chicanos were conducted across five generations, from immigrants to the great-grandchildren of immigrants.
This work is part of a larger project to characterize the history of the languages and dialects of Chicanos involving research in rural and urban Jalisco, Mexico, as well as in Los Angeles. He is presently conducting research on the change that is taking place in the Spanish of Salvadorans who live in Los Angeles. He has also published several articles about the nature of Mexican Spanish.
All these studies inquire into the social and educational implications of language variation among ethnic communities. One product of this work is Tongue-Tied: The lives of multilingual children in public education , which is being prepared for publication in the (hopefully) near future.
Another area of research is the mass media representations of Chicanos/Latinos. This analysis was developed to investigate political discourse in the period of Proposition 187, Proposition 209, and Proposition 227. For example, he and his research group have identified the metaphoric representation used by Los Angeles Times to frame public discourse about immigration in California. Brown Tide Rising is the product of this work.