Group Identity

In line with postmodern accounts of identity that emphasize its plurality and hybridity, Wallace (2008) claims that minority youth can express multiple identities through narratives with respect to not only majority cultural practices but their home experiences. Accordingly, Wallace (2008) argues that schools should support students’ identity assertion by avoiding cultural intrusiveness and stereotypes. However, such avoidance is often not guaranteed. In addition, minority youth may even confront stereotypes from communities and governments. As a response to these issues addressed in her ethnographic work on Latina youth gangs, Mendoza-Denton (2008) explicitly calls for attention to various aspects of the gang members’ subcultures, instead of readily overdramatizing their criminal tendencies. Following
In other words, distributed memory can play a vital role in reflecting how minority youth identities emerge and evolve through cross-cultural interaction and negotiation. Mendoza-Denton (2008) specifies a series of discourse practices to demonstrate how linguistic forms contribute to creating distributed memory and establishing group identity. For example, the word game hablar en su may distinguish less fluent Spanish speakers from the group of fluent speakers, as its linguistic complexity increases. Apart from group identity expression, Mendoza-Denton (2008) suggests that individual identity can also be reflected in distributed memory, because everyone has a different recollection of past events. Thus, distributed memory can aid in “connecting individual identity to group identity and stabilizing it over time” (Mendoza-Denton, 2008, p. 180), thereby deepening our understanding of a group’s cultures and cultural