About the Author

Otto Santa Ana has the rare combination of credentials to bring cognitive metaphor theory and empirical discourse methods to bear on the topic of Latino representation in contemporary public discourse. Professor Santa Ana, an Arizona native, has devoted his academic career to language issues of minority communities, most often the Latino community. Professor Santa Ana is a founding member of the César Chávez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA . Previously he was Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico , and Lecteur in American History and American English at Université de Paris III (La Sorbonne Nouvelle), France.

Professor Santa Ana, a sociolinguist, studies the interface of language and social structure. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania , working under the pioneer of the study of empirical language phenomena, Professor William Labov . Santa Ana's dissertation was an intensely empirical investigation of the evolution of an ethnic dialect, Chicano English, for which fieldwork in Los Angeles was conducted with over 150 interviews of Chicanos across five generations, from immigrants to the great-grandchildren of immigrants. Since the dissertation was an evaluation of competing linguistic theories in the light of natural language data, it was solid preparation for Santa Ana's current project.

Santa Ana began the research leading to Brown Tide Rising during the Proposition 187 campaign. At the time he noted that the reports published in the politically-moderate Los Angeles Times tended to reinforce a limited set of images of immigrants, despite its editorial position against Proposition 187 and its efforts to maintain the commonly-accepted professional journalistic standards of "objectivity." At length Santa Ana came to understand that the Times in fact was mirroring a change in the public discourse about immigrants. This observation led to a full investigation of the construction of social representation (in the end by means of metaphor) not only of immigrants, but of the burgeoning Latino population and its political issues.

Dr. Santa Ana has written articles on ethnic dialect formation and its consequences for linguistic theory, on the precise character of the speech community concept in sociolinguistics, on the education of language minority children, and on the shared concerns of historians and linguists, among other topics. The writings of this young scholar have or are scheduled to appear in journals such as Language in society , Nueva revista de filología hispánica , Discourse & society , Aztlán , Language change & variation , Hispanic journal of the behavioral sciences , Frontera norte , among others.

Professor Santa Ana has received various honors. In 1997 he was a National Research Council, Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow. His tenure as a Ford Fellow was devoted to the completion of the Brown Tide Rising manuscript. He was awarded a University of Pennsylvania Fontaine Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Minority Graduate Fellowship Honorable Mention, and was honored as Linguistic Society of America Fellow.