Norma Mendoza-Denton

Her ethnographic and sociolinguistic analyses of Latina gang members in California are presented in her book Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice Among Latina Youth Gangs. Mendoza-Denton was a consultant for the Do You Speak American? television program. In 2020, she published a collection of essays, co-edited with linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh, examining the politics of language during the Trump presidency.

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/march-2020-member-spotlight-norma-mendoza-denton

Mendoza-Denton served as president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, from 2011-2013. She has also been active in the Linguistic Society of America, including serving on the Executive Committee from 2018 through 2020.

In 2011 she received a National Institute for Civil Discourse grant for her work analyzing the ways in which politicians handle disagreements with their constituents.

Mendoza-Denton earned a doctorate in linguistics from Stanford University in 1997 with the completion of her dissertation, Chicana/Mexicana Identity and Linguistic Variation: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Gang Affiliation in an Urban High School. She worked as an assistant professor at Ohio State University and at the University of Arizona before taking up a position at UCLA.

Norma Catalina Mendoza-Denton (born 1968) is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, including work in sociophonetics, language and identity, ethnography and visual anthropology.