Biography
I'm from an Arizona mining family. My father worked in the copper mines as a truck driver and a tire repairman. His family worked New Mexican mines around the turn of the 20th century. Before that they were worked in mines around Parral, Chihuahua. My mother is a homemaker whose family lived in the Valle de Allende, Chihuahua as far back as 1704. By the turn of the 20th century, her parents were in Arizona, where she and her siblings were born. However, all her family was forced to leave everything to go to Mexico as part of the Great Repatriation of the early 1930s. I have three siblings. One is an attorney working for the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development near Washington. Another is a parole officer living in Tucson. The third is a geneticist who lives in Albuquerque. My parents still live in my hometown of Miami, Arizona.I am married to Thelma Meléndez. She is a Montebello CA native, also with deep roots in Chihuahua. [ Thelma y yo somos parientes! ] Thelma earned a B.A. cum laude in sociology from UCLA. She took a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy & Learning from the University of Southern California. Her 20+ year career in public education began as a bilingual classroom teacher. Thelma recently was Deputy Superintendent of Instruction at the Pomona Unified School District (34,000 students). She is now a Program Manager in the Stupski Foundation, which is dedicated to reducing the educational achievement gap in public schools. She is a 2006 Fellow of the Broad Superintendents Academy. We make our home in Eagle Rock (Los Angeles).

Education
[Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, 1991.]
[Dissertation: Phonetic simplification processes in the English of the Barrio: a cross-generational sociolinguistic study of the Chicanos of Los Angeles.]
[M.A., Linguistics, University of Arizona, 1981.]
[B.A., Anthropology, University of Arizona, 1977.]

Spanish
On the Spanish side, with Professor Claudia Parodi (UCLA) I have conducted research on the change in the Spanish of Salvadorans who have lived in Los Angeles for several years. I have published several articles about the nature of Mexican Spanish, particularly in Jalisco and Michoacán. All these studies inquire into the social and educational implications of language variation among ethnic communities.



Language in the Classroom
An active area of research is the success of language minority students in the U.S. public school system. By language minority, I refer to all children who enter the school not speaking Standard English. This includes immigrants, racialized students, and working-class White students.A capstone of this research strand is my anthology, Tongue-Tied: the Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education. Tongue-Tied is designed to give voice to millions of people who, on a daily basis, are denied the opportunity to speak in their own words. Tongue-Tied aims to open the hearts of its readers to these children- by way of literature- and through accessible scientific essays. First-person accounts by Amy Tan, Sherman Alexie, bell hooks, Richard Rodriguez, and less familiar authors open windows onto the lives of linguistic minority students.