The Silent Teacher: The Unspoken Impact of Code-Switching on Second-Generation Latinos in the United States

Chloe Avilés

Instructor’s Introduction

For the semester-long research paper entitled, “The Silent Teacher: The Unspoken Impact of Code-Switching on Second-Generation Latinos in the United States,” Chloe Avilés skillfully applied her sociological imagination to conduct powerful research inspired by her personal experiences. In WR151: The Sociology of Code-Switching, students learn about ways people may be pressured to code-switch, including shifts in language, behavior, clothing, mannerisms, hair, and overall appearance to appease the socially dominant group. The foundation of the course is set when students read sociologist Elijah Anderson’s Black in White Space.  This text illustrates that institutional racism often forces people from marginalized racial and ethnic groups to change who they are. Throughout the course, we examine sociological research that demonstrates how White, Eurocentric standards infiltrate schools, the workplace, and even family life.

Chloe knew early in the semester that she wanted to understand the extent to which exposure to parental code-switching shapes the experiences and identities of second-generation Latino immigrants. She recognized a gap in the literature specifically on code-switching and second-generation Latino immigrants, and consequently developed thoughtful research questions to explore how this process can play out between parents and children. Chloe went above and beyond the requirements for this project by designing a mixed-methods study consisting of both surveys and an in-depth interview. 

Growing up as a second-generation Latina immigrant in an overwhelmingly White-majority town, Chloe became attuned to the nuances of navigating exclusionary spaces from an early age. Her experiences helped her craft a personally meaningful, but sociologically relevant case study. At a time when it could not be more relevant, her work gives readers valuable insight into the pressures faced by immigrant parents and their children as they navigate the racial hierarchy of the United States. 

Cara Bowman

From the Writer

In the past year, news outlets have brought increased attention to stories of institutional and interpersonal xenophobic attacks against Latino immigrants in the United States. But this is not a new issue; Latinos have been harassed, stereotyped, and subjected to hate crimes since they began immigrating to the United States. In fact, this long history of xenophobia helps explain why such treatment is often overlooked by those not directly affected, as its persistence makes it easy to normalize. 

Immigrants cannot afford to overlook racism and xenophobia, however, and have had to adopt code-switching to protect themselves. For immigrants, code-switching extends beyond language; it entails adopting behaviors to maintain the appearance of assimilation and perceived worthiness in white spaces. However, since these behaviors are expected by the dominant society, the intentionality behind them goes unnoticed, that is, by everyone except the children of immigrants. Growing up around these deliberate behavioral shifts, second-generation children are exposed to code-switching as a routine part of navigating the world. This paper examines what it means to witness these behaviors, focusing on how second-generation Latinos interpret and internalize parental code-switching. 

The Silent Teacher: The Unspoken Impact of Code-Switching on Second-Generation Latinos in the United States

Introduction

Being the daughter of a Bolivian immigrant in a town that was 76% white meant that difference followed me everywhere. In elementary school, I was one of six kids of color in my grade. To ease my insecurities, I did everything in my power to minimize my differences, and I learned quickly that blending in brought fewer racist comments. My whole life, I’d watched my dad do the same, changing his voice to lessen his accent, wearing a suit almost any time he left the house, turning off Spanish music in the car when he saw a cop, etc. All of these things, I now understand, are forms of code-switching. Code-switching is the adaptive act of changing speech, appearance, behavior, etc, to align/appear aligned with the dominant group. Watching my dad use code-switching behaviors inadvertently reinforced a belief that I was too different from those around me and that I, too, needed to code-switch. 

At the basis of Latino culture is a value called familismo. Familismo “refers to the importance of strong family loyalty, closeness, and getting along with and contributing to the wellbeing of the nuclear family, extended family, and kinship networks” (Ayón, Marsiglia, and Bermudez-Parsai 2011:9). Because familismo encourages frequent and emotionally close family interactions, second-generation Latinos are especially likely to observe their parents engaging in code-switching. Immigrant parents, under constant pressure to assimilate (absorb into the dominant culture of a white American society), often rely on code-switching as a practical and protective response to that pressure. Given the centrality of family in Latino culture, it is unlikely that second-generation Latinos are not affected by watching these behaviors. Yet, despite the relevance of these experiences, little research has explored the impacts of parental code-switching on second-generation Latino youth. To address this research gap, this study seeks to address the following questions:

1. How does an immigrant’s level of assimilation impact their children’s relationship with code-switching?
2. What does watching parents code-switch tell second-generation Latinos about where they fit into society?

Background Research and Literature Review

Motivation to Assimilate

The phrase “melting pot” is often used to describe the United States. This refers to a society where cultures “melt” together to create a new collective identity. Critics of the melting pot theory “suggest that this process harms diversity and leads to cultural loss” (Seven 2023:11). To embody the dominant “collective” American identity, immigrants are expected to leave large pieces of their cultures behind and adopt more American behaviors, cultural practices, and beliefs. In other words, immigrants are expected to assimilate. To reiterate, assimilation is the process of adopting the dominant culture’s customs, values, and behaviours (Seven 2023). 

Given the criticisms surrounding the cultural pressure for immigrants in the United States to assimilate, it is valid to question why immigrants continue to conform to the dominant culture of the United States. Historically, immigrants who have assimilated through behavioral and linguistic means have achieved higher levels of what is perceived as success in the United States. For example, researchers at Stanford found that immigrants who changed their names to less “foreign-sounding” names completed more years of school, earned more, and were more likely to be employed than their counterparts who had “foreign-sounding” names (Abramitzky 2017). Furthermore, education and proficiency in the English language have been proven to help immigrants succeed economically and socially in the United States (Di Martino 2023). 

For Latinos, linguistic assimilation, or verbal code-switching, is especially desirable. Amee P. Shah of Stockton University conducted a study that concluded that Hispanic accents are “associated with lower intelligence, pleasantness, socioeconomic status, and medium in friendliness” (Shah 2019:131:1). This phenomenon is called accent bias and causes some to believe individuals are unqualified or untrustworthy based on their accent. Accent bias is not limited to social interactions; it even carries over in professional settings. A survey of 2,000 immigrants in California indicated “70% of Latino and Asian immigrants thought that California immigrants experienced accent discrimination in the workplace” (Houlis 2023:10). To minimize accent-based discrimination, immigrants, especially Latino immigrants, often find themselves trying to dilute their accents and assimilate to the common way of speaking in the United States.

Immigrants make these behavioral and linguistic changes either to derive some sort of reward from American economic and social systems or to avoid/reduce discrimination, reflecting a larger pattern of assimilation and, more narrowly, exhibiting the function of code-switching as a strategic adaptation to navigate racial and cultural hierarchies. 

Proximity to Whiteness and Pressure to Perform

It is crucial to note that assimilation comes more naturally to some immigrants than others. The immigrants who tend to benefit from assimilation often belong to a college-educated subgroup and do not necessarily represent the majority. Indeed, this subgroup can be considered closer to whiteness than those with little to no education and limited knowledge of the English language. Proximity to whiteness consists of “access to certain forms of power, resources, as well as social, economic, and cultural capital that have been historically constructed to advantage white people in this country at the expense of people of color” (Barton 2021:2). 

In the United States, whiteness is the standard against which all people are judged. This sentiment is backed up by the foundation of white supremacy that the United States was built on (Chin 2024). White supremacy continues to be perpetuated through the phenomenon where assimilation to whiteness is rewarded as “actors that are better able, or more willing to achieve these racialized standards are seen as being more valuable and thus, more deserving of resources than actors who are not able or willing to achieve them” (Miller 2022:3). Things like educational and economic privilege establish some immigrants as the better “actors” in the performance of whiteness. This doesn’t come without consequences, however. Latinos who feel their national identity conflicts with their American identity may experience greater acculturative stress (Driscoll and Torres 2013). In other words, those who are considered better performers of whiteness often bear the brunt of societal pressure to continue to perform whiteness. 

Parent-Child Socialization and Fear Responses

In nature, animals use observational learning to capitalize on the experiences of other animals to change their behavior in a specific context (Carcea and Froemke 2020). This evolutionary strategy allows animals to adapt to the ever-changing environment around them. However, animals aren’t the only ones who use observational learning. Like animals, humans learn from the behaviors and experiences of other humans. If one person observes another person handling a perceived threat, the observer, having never encountered that event before, may feel afraid when faced with the same situation and produce a fear response (Dou et al. 2023). While these threats can be physical, they can also be social. 

Children are observant. Indeed, parents pass on values to their children in the early stages of their development through their behaviors, and these values can remain stable for almost three decades (Min, Silverstein, and Lendon 2012).  The same is true for fears. Various studies report that children are more fearful of stimuli that they had observed their parents reacting negatively toward. These stimuli don’t necessarily have to be physical threats, they can also be social. For example, children with a parent who suffers from PTSD, anxiety, or a phobia may be more likely to adopt said psychopathology (Bilodeau-Houle et al. 2022). 

Methods

I used a combination of primary and secondary quantitative and qualitative data to gather research. Before gathering in-depth research from existing literature, I wanted to see what original data I could collect. To do this, I created a survey and tried to distribute it to as many second-generation Latinos as possible. I did this by posting it on Instagram, sending it to loved ones, and getting a past professor to send it to her students. In the survey, I asked both open and closed questions, as I wanted to gather some statistics while understanding the respondents’ reasoning behind them. Respondents were asked about the kind of communities and households they came from and the kind of roles code-switching has played in their lives. The specific questions can be found by clicking on this link. Because of the limited number of responses, I wanted to avoid generalizations about the entire demographic of second-generation Latinos. In doing so, I treated the surveys as anecdotal evidence to back potential connections between existing pieces of research that are relevant to my study.

While the primary goal of my research is to explore the impact of watching parents code-switch on second-generation Latinos, I thought it would be valuable to investigate the perspective of an immigrant parent as well. Since parents often play a direct role in shaping their children’s social and cultural environment, their perspective helps contextualize how code-switching affects second-generation identity formation and belonging. To further investigate this perspective, I interviewed my father. My father is an immigrant from La Paz, Bolivia, and the father of four children, making him an ideal interviewee. The interview took place in the evening over FaceTime, and overall, it took 28 minutes. Though I have pre-established thoughts on his relationship with code-switching and assimilation, I intentionally asked open-ended questions so that his answers were truly reflective of his beliefs. To conduct a fairer, less biased interview, I did not weigh in on answers that I did not think aligned with his experiences. The questions were divided into three categories: the connection between community and assimilation, the assimilation process, and assimilation and fatherhood. I did not want to emphasize his role as a parent until the end because I did not want him to feel defensive. Essentially, the personal questions acted as an emotional warm-up. If he could see that he code-switches, he would be more likely to understand how it might impact his children. The specific questions can be found by clicking on this link. 

I used thematic analysis to interpret the free-response answers and the interview with my father. This consisted of looking through the answers and interview transcript and noting recurring themes. Once I narrowed the themes down to discrimination, adaptability, survival, and socialization, I further analyzed them by connecting them to the literature I collected during my initial research. It is crucial to note that only eleven people were involved across the survey and interview; therefore, my original research is limited to their experiences. This study could have benefited from a larger pool of survey respondents, but using thematic analysis, I still found patterns. Additionally, there may have been bias from the interview, as I interviewed my father and have personal opinions on his answers.

Findings and Analysis

Patterns of Assimilation in Latino Immigrants

Among the ten survey responses, eight participants reported growing up in predominantly Latino communities. Despite the small sample size, these responses reflect a broader pattern supported by Chavez, Crowder, and South in their study, “Geographic Mobility and Spatial Assimilation among U.S. Latino Immigrants.” They find that “Latinos are considerably less likely to live in, or move to, Anglo neighborhoods when they reside in metropolitan areas with large Latino populations” (2005:602). The tendency for Latino immigrants to settle in ethnic neighborhoods rather than predominantly white neighborhoods signals the human need for familiarity and challenges the idea that assimilation is natural. 

Economic status was another shared trait among the eight respondents who grew up in Latino communities. On average, these respondents rated their parents’ incomes 0.875 out of 5, with 0 indicating low income. In contrast, the two respondents who had grown up in white communities reported a significantly higher 4.5 out of 5 on average. These findings are in agreement with those that show that income, wealth, and education increase the likelihood of integration into white-majority spaces (Chavez, Crowder, and South 2005:580).

The divide in residential and economic patterns also reflects a notable divide in levels of assimilation. Respondents whose parents immigrated to Latino communities rated their parents’ level of assimilation at an average of 2.5 out of 5, versus those who grew up in white communities with an average of 3.5 out of 5. To reiterate, this is a case study with a limited sample size; however, these ratings help quantify the opinions of second-generation immigrants. They show the extent to which certain immigrant parents have integrated into white American society and what traits correlate with their subjective levels of assimilation. Those with “more assimilated” parents tended to have higher-paying jobs and exist in predominantly white spaces. In contrast, parents described as “less assimilated” were more likely to speak mostly Spanish at home and live among other Latinos. These differences offer a baseline for understanding how Latino immigrants experience assimilation materially, socially, and spatially. The performance of assimilation or the absence of performance is the product of these material and social contexts.

The Dynamic Between One’s Level of Assimilation and Code-Switching Behaviors

Based on the survey responses, it is apparent that the level of assimilation among Latino immigrants is closely linked to their code-switching behaviors, according to their children. Only three out of eight respondents with less assimilated parents reported noticing their parents code-switching when they were younger. Immigrants who are less assimilated do not engage in social spaces dominated by white Americans as frequently as those who have assimilated more, thus, their code-switching behaviors are less frequent. The two respondents who reported having more assimilated parents unanimously reported that they watched their parents code-switching when they were growing up, supporting the notion that code-switching behaviors are tied to relative levels of assimilation.

Assimilation is heavily associated with education. A 2019 report conducted by the Pew Research Center indicated that Black adults with a college degree were more likely than Black adults without a college degree to communicate feeling the need to change the way they expressed themselves when around those with different racial backgrounds (48% vs. 37%). These results suggest that access to white spaces via education and by proxy, economic status, increases the pressure to conform to white cultural norms. Though this research is specific to Black Americans rather than Latino immigrants, the dynamic between cultural capital and conformity applies to Latino immigrants. The closer a person of color is to “achieving” whiteness, the more likely they will feel compelled to perform whiteness. 

In his article “White Space,” Elijah Anderson (2015:13) describes the “dance” people of color engage in to separate themselves from racist stereotypes:

Strikingly, a black person’s deficit of credibility may be minimized or tentatively overcome by…what some blacks derisively refer to as a ‘dance,’ through which individual blacks are required to show that the ghetto stereotypes do not apply to them; in effect, they perform to be accepted.

Put simply, this “dance” or “performance of whiteness” is synonymous with code-switching, as the person of color changes aspects of themselves to prove a point and gain acceptance.  In the interview with my father, without naming it, my dad described the ways in which he has performed whiteness. In 1979, my father immigrated from Bolivia to the United States at eighteen out of necessity. Despite having minimal/no knowledge of the English language, universities in Bolivia were closed, and he was determined to get a college degree. As an immigrant with dark skin and a thick accent, my dad was met with racism daily. In his words, “At that time, there was a lot of alienation because there was a problem with Iran, and a lot of the foreign students were from Iran. People in general didn’t like foreign students.” This cultural bias against foreign students would follow my dad throughout college and even after graduation. Despite constant discouragement from higher-ups and his peers, my dad secured a job as a financial advisor in the same predominantly white town where he attended college. When describing his experience in finance, he said, “To get to the same place, I had to do twice the work that another [white] person would be doing in my same job.” He recognized that he was treated unfairly, but he’d lived in the United States long enough to know he could not change that. To lessen his mistreatment, he found solace in silence. When I asked about his method of using silence as a shield, he told me: “I can sense what their thoughts are. No matter what I say, I know I won’t change their mind. I just don’t say anything because I don’t want to get into an argument or want to antagonize people unnecessarily.” 

Society tends to view code-switching as strictly linguistic or physical, but in truth, it is commonly manifested through silence. For minorities, silence can be a means of protection from those in groups of dominance. Consistent with my father’s experience, a study focusing on Black women’s use of silence as a form of code-switching revealed that many Black women use self-silencing to preserve their mental and physical well-being (Scott et al. 2023). Though Black women face separate challenges from Latino immigrants, both share the experience of not belonging to the dominant group. For Latino immigrants specifically, silence in the presence of white people acts as a shield from threats such as deportation (Londoño-Rosado 2023). In my father’s case, he also feared he would lose opportunities to obtain new clients if he were to speak up against ignorance. 

My father also noted that he alters his behavior to be “more professional” at work. While this is the case for most, it is important to note what popular culture deems professional. Many institutions, such as higher education and workplaces, maintain cultural norms with historical roots that cater to the white American demographic (Sharma 2023). This association between whiteness and professionalism is so deeply embedded in American culture that my father resisted by suggesting that his idea of professionalism may be the result of pressure from white peers to assimilate. I witnessed my father code-switch when I joined him at his office. His accent mellows, and he tries to appear upbeat rather than embracing his resting “angry” face. This is also a testament to how code-switching becomes second nature to Latino immigrants who are frequently in white-dominated settings in the United States.

These patterns suggest that code-switching is not merely a matter of bilingual dexterity or cultural flexibility, as most research surrounding Latino immigrants suggests. Instead, it is often a reflection of one’s proximity to whiteness. My research shows that the more assimilated a Latino immigrant becomes, the more they are pressured to dilute parts of themselves to gain further access to social and economic opportunities.

Parental Assimilation as a Predictor of a Child’s Perceived Need to Code-Switch

As previously established, immigrants who have assimilated further are more likely to code-switch, thus, their child is more likely to take notice. The extent to which a Latino immigrant parent assimilates into white American society has significant implications for how their child comes to understand the necessity of code-switching. The psychological concept of observational fear learning refers to the internalization of fear-based behaviors through watching others, especially parents, navigate perceived threats. Bilodeau-Houle et al. (2023) note that this can contribute to a child’s development of fear-related psychopathologies. In the context of code-switching as a fear-based behavior, observational fear learning contributes to the internalized belief that code-switching is a necessary practice to maintain safety, respectability, and success in white spaces. 

From my survey, respondents who noticed their parents code-switch during childhood noted things such as believing that for all adults it was “normal to behave differently based on who you are with.” Another respondent reported that they’d grown to associate professionalism with a more American voice and set of expressions. While their children were young at the time, these parents were observed modifying their speech and behavior to blend into professional or white environments. While parents may view these shifts as practical and natural, to the child, they register as a performance necessary for safety and acceptance. This is best reflected in one respondent’s description of how watching their parents code-switch impacted them. The respondent wrote, “It made me aware of the dangers of the world, how we can be seen as dangerous just by our backgrounds.” This quote emphasizes how code-switching, rather than merely being a linguistic or cultural adjustment, becomes a psychological adaptation to racialized threats. Regardless of whether or not the second-generation child has experienced racism yet, they come to anticipate it through observing their parents. Oppositely, respondents who reported not noticing their parents’ code-switching also reported feeling unimpacted by code-switching in their youth.

On a broader scale, the patterns found in my survey highlight the difference in inherited social skills and defense mechanisms. Applying the logic of observational fear learning, children with higher assimilated parents are more likely to associate code-switching with safety and stability, as they’ve witnessed their parents use it to shield themselves from discomfort and conflict and become upwardly mobile. Over time, this observation turns into action. In this way, assimilation operates as an intergenerational transmission of fear and adaptation to racial hierarchy.

Conclusion

Latino immigrants have always been on edge, but especially this year, as policies, rhetoric, and everyday interactions further signal they do not fully belong. There are countless adults like me who learned to code-switch as children, and there are still children who are actively learning to code-switch by observing their parents. For Latinos in the United States specifically, code-switching is beginning to feel necessary. In this social climate, fear becomes a teacher. The greater implication is that code-switching is not just a habit but a survival tactic passed down from parent to child. As mass fear spreads across the Latino community in the United States, so do these behaviors. And when second-generation Latinos watch their parents shift how they speak, act, and present themselves out of fear and a wish to stay safe, they internalize not only the behavior but the anxiety behind it. 

Now more than ever, it is essential to understand code-switching as a learned response to systemic pressure and racialized fear. It reveals how deeply inequality operates in institutions, families, language, and the way young people come to see themselves. We need to start paying attention, not just to what code-switching sounds or looks like, but to what it says about who is allowed to feel safe being themselves.

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Appendix

Chloe Avilés is a sophomore at Boston University studying Data Science. Beyond her passion for data science and technology, she is fascinated by sociology and exploring the phenomena that have shaped her lived experiences as a Latina in the United States. She thanks Professor Cara Bowman for setting her up for success and for introducing her to works such as Elijah Anderson’s Black in White Space, which greatly inspired her research. She is also deeply grateful to her family for their support.