Acknowledgments
This book could not have come to fruition without the invaluable support and input of numerous people. In the first place, I would like to thank my students who over the past six years have taken my course, Language in Immigrant America. This book was inspired by and took shape in response to the discussions we had in class and the ideas that these discussions generated. I would also like to thank the community partners in Durham, North Carolina, with whom my students work in the service component of this service-learning course and who make it possible for us to connect class discussions with real immigrant lives, as well as the Duke Service-Learning Program, in particular Kristin Wright, Bonnie McManus, and Joan Clifford. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the role of library archives in my research process, in particular the Rubenstein Special Collections Library at Duke University and the Jagiellonian Library of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Special thanks go out to Duke University librarians who assisted with bibliographies and special collections, in particular Linda Daniel, Greta Boers, and Elizabeth Dunn.
As this project moved from a proposal to a finished manuscript, my work on it benefited from extensive discussions with colleagues, mentors, and friends. Julie Tetel Andresen provided support and encouragement, as well as numerous practical tips for how to approach writing one’s first monograph. Edna Andrews offered helpful comments on the proposal as well as invaluable moral support throughout this project. Both Julie’s and Edna’s work was also instrumental in influencing my thinking about the nature of language and multilingualism as it relates to this book. I also want to thank my colleagues Thomas Ferraro, Priscilla Wald, and Luciana Fellin for their support and for conversations that contributed to my analysis of immigration and migrant lives.
The inspiration to write this book came partly from the meetings of the Migration, Languages and Cultures Working Group, supported by the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke, which I co-convened in 2011–2012 with my Duke colleagues Gareth Price, Luciana Fellin, and Hae-Young Kim. I would like to express my deepest thanks to my co-conveners, who helped organize the seminars and stimulate discussions that directly and indirectly influenced the ideas that inform this book, as well as to all the participants who came to our meetings and contributed to discussions. In addition, I am indebted to the guest speakers whose work had an impact on this book, both in their presentations at the working group meetings and in both formal and informal discussions afterwards; in particular, I would like to thank Anna De Fina and Adrienne Lo. In addition, big thanks go out to Erin Callahan, at the time a graduate student in Linguistics at Duke/NCSU, who was an integral part of the Working Group, whose research on the emerging Hispanic English in North Carolina inspired parts of this book, and whose intellectual input I benefited from in our discussions.
All shortcomings of this work remain, of course, my own.
A separate heartfelt thank you goes out to my colleague, intellectual partner, friend, and husband, Gareth Price. Our ongoing conversations and the inspiration of Gareth’s extensive expertise in political sociology, sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis have been invaluable as I developed the theoretical approaches underpinning this book.
I thank my wonderful friends, who have helped me keep a healthy mind and a sense of humor, and my daughter, Salomé, who took to making her own books while still in preschool and thus motivated me to finish mine.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, without whose decision in 1987 to leave their lives behind and take their chances in the United States I would not have become an immigrant American.
