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How the Garcia Cousins Lost Their Accents: Understanding the Language of Title VII Decisions Approving English-Only Rules as the Product of Facial Dualism, Latino Invisibility, and Legal Indeterminancy |
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| Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination in employment based on, among other things, national origin. The adoption by employers of policies requiring employees to speak only English in the workplace would appear to constitute national origin discrimination against bilingual Latinos, whose Spanish-speaking ability is central to their identity. Yet it is settled in the federal courts that implementing "English-only" rules does not even state a prima facie case of discrimination. In this Essay, the author seeks to understand why judges hold national origin challenges based on language discrimination in such low esteem. He argues that three themes drawn from the growing literature of LatCrit theory help explain these results: racial dualism, the tendency of courts to view civil rights discourse in terms of Blacks and Whites to the exclusion of Browns and other people of color; Latino invisibility, the tendency of legal institutions to make Hispanic litigants and their injuries disappear; and legal indeterminacy, the tendency of the jurisprudential tools of legal reasoning to be ambiguous and manipulable. The author concludes that understanding judges' use of language-- phraseology, choice of metaphor, and silence--offers insights into the values and prejudices that have assigned Latinos and other minorities to second-class legal status. By confronting these values and prejudices, courts and combatants may begin to change them and accord victims of national origin discrimination the respect they deserve. | |
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Copyright
© 1997 by California Law Review, Inc. |
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