Flores and Rosa's proposition of a raciolinguistic approach provides an important political, historical, relational, and sensorial framework for understanding how people become raced and how social action becomes interpretable through a racialized lens. I build on this analysis to underscore the need for scholarship of race and language to consider a multidimensional analysis that is dynamic, historical, and cognizant of the complex power relations involved in linking and unlinking race and language. As I understand, their argument is a call to be wary of approaches that treat race and its relationship to language as decontextualized ahistorical categories across space and time.

Attention to the sensorial interface that impacts how race is interactionally experienced also means paying attention to the historical circumstances and relations of power that produce race as a perceivable category of social differentiation, be it through aspects of speech and language, physical appearance, genealogical ancestry, and/or whichever characteristics become historically associated with racial categories in a given place and time. This requires a simultaneous acknowledgment and analysis of race as a colonial construct, as an anchor of relations, and a basis for certain forms of identity. In this commentary, I briefly discuss racial categories as complex, multifaceted colonial orders. I then discuss a multi-vector framework that, in acknowledging the multidimensionality of racial instantiation, allows for a grounded analysis of how race and its relationship to linguistic phenomena may be constructed, experienced, reproduced, and challenged.

Thinking of coloniality as the productive of the modern social orders that produce race as an important vector of and proxy for sociocultural experiences across different historical and geopolitical situations allows us to analytically see how these categories also produce interstices and voids where the limitations and excesses of assumed categories are insufficient and do not neatly map onto lived experiences and conceptualizations of identity and language. To understand the multifaceted and lasting ways that European colonial projects have structured systems of knowledge, hierarchies, and culture to reproduce Eurocentric colonial power, we need to ask: What gets erased, left out, or overdetermined in the broad categories of language and race used to demographically trace patterns?

The discussion of race in this context can be understood in relationship to the distinctive forms of organizing differences within coloniality. The concept of coloniality (Quijano, 2000) points to the epistemological conditions that are shaped along the political–economic conditions of colonial relations. Reyes (2020) applied this concept to ideas about mixed race and mixed language, to understand them not as attributes of persons and speech, but instead as an attribute of the listening subject position, as defined by Inoue (2006). Reyes offered important insight about how notions of hybridity presume the purity of the categories that form the so-called hybrid: It is the construction of the pure subject that makes possible the hybrid as a category as well as a potential problem. In this light, we can see how Flores and Rosa's essay invites us to think of how the analytical frameworks we choose may end up reproducing the very social categories and processes that our interrogations seek to dismantle. This approach seeks to treat demographic categories and name language varieties not as givens but as processes that require careful attention and disentanglement.

Mignolo's (2007) conceptualization of delinking seems particularly relevant to extending Reyes’ insights to Flores and Rosa's argument. With the impetus to “change the terms of the conversation,” one strategy within Mignolo's decolonial proposition is to “de-naturalize concepts and conceptual fields that totalize a reality” (459). This approach emphasizes the exteriorities produced along rhetorics of modernity and locates possibility in a “Geo-politics of knowledge (e.g., emerging from different historical locations of the world that endured the effects and consequences of Western imperial and capitalist expansion) …” (462): A denaturalization of the categories produced by a modern/colonialist logic to unravel its cloak of universality and naturalness. Mignolo's (and Quijano's) proposition entails a research praxis that originates in exploring the categories and ways of thinking emerging across different locations of geopolitical knowledge.

To delink race as colonial order from the naturalized features that have become associated with racial categories, Mignolo argued that analysts must engage in—drawing on Anzaldua's (1987) concept of “border thinking”—forms of thinking that go beyond given categories to interrogate, interrupt, and move beyond them analytically (497–8). In relation to Flores and Rosa's call to simultaneously consider how race and language have been rendered as separable while also being co-naturalized into joint linguistic and racial hierarchies, the attention to the role of language in these processes becomes not so much about mapping relationships or having one serve as a proxy for another, but about making sense of the ways that race and language locate subjects, rights, and possibilities; and about how different perceptions and ideologies of race erase nuance from discussions of multiple ancestries, unexpected linguistic affects, and other notions of heritage and identity that might anchor and interrupt complicated racial identifications and perceptions. Here, notions of scale are important to make sense of the colonial entanglements that impact how values and rights get determined for different racial categories as well as the attributes associated with them at personal, interactional, and structural levels.

My work (Feliciano-Santos, 2019, 2021) has sought to understand how ethnoracial categories and orders have been produced and experienced in Puerto Rico to elucidate the tangled, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways that communicative ambiguities, different experiences on the ground, and family stories might interrupt totalizing national and colonial identity narratives. From this perspective, I analyze diverse and contested language practices emerging from the range of knowledge frameworks for, and understandings of, history, identity, and language, as well as the political mobilization and activism that arise from these understandings. Through this analytical lens, I approach how the discursive limits and modes of interpreting ethnoracial identity and alterity become produced through the analysis of the role of colonial projects in building contemporary racial and linguistic orders. In considering how colonial racial(izing) logics distribute privilege, marginalization, and erasure through alternating forms of co-optation, celebration, and trivialization, while highlighting the co-emergence of language forms and ethnoracial categories, we see how people navigate and respond to the structural and discursive forms of power that attempt to narrate and delimit them.

In relation to Flores and Rosa's argument, I highlight four vectors of analysis (among many potential others) in thinking about the multifaceted relationships among identity, race, and language—concepts fraught with the complex relationships that different people have to race, as both identity and social category, within a broader system of hierarchical racial orders. These vectors help to analytically disentangle race as subjectively experienced, as structural category, and as a form of relation. I underscore these vectors as they are sites of debate with respect to how people define race and its role in their lives, offering different anchors for understanding the relationship among race, language, and identity.

The first vector proposes a historical analysis that shows how debates, ambiguities, and ambivalences about race are the result of colonial processes producing social orders, and how they have rendered race interpretable through modes of seeing and knowing rooted in sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory geohistorically distinctive epistemological grounds (Saldaña-Portillo, 2016). The processes that produce, silence, and discipline the epistemological and semiotic fields that generate and organize the sensorial, material, historical, and hierarchical relations of racial interpretability are a key site for understanding contemporary debates regarding the relationship among language, race, ancestry, identity, and political subjectivity. For example, within the US context, how does the hypervisibility, invisibility, or audibility of racial categories relate to the complicated ways in which racial orders have attempted to contain different groups in the service of imperial political and economic projects rendering some people as labor, others as obstacles to land appropriation, and yet others as the embodied borders of the nation?

The second vector considers the relationship that specific persons may have to social categories of race. In this respect, Jackson's (2005) concept of “racial sincerity” is relevant. He suggested using racial sincerity, which is analytically distinguished from notions of racial authenticity, and to consider “how people think and feel their identities into palpable existence, especially as such identities operate within a social context that includes so many causal forces beyond their immediate control” (11). This perspective shows the complicated relationships that individuals have to their known and unknown ancestries, their assigned and their claimed racial categories, and the multiple ways of thinking race and racial orders across the geohistorical trajectories and political borders. This aspect of how people relate to race reminds us that the relationships among race, self-identity, and language are neither stagnant nor always easily assessed through acts of external perception.

The third vector deliberates the relationship of perceiving others to the perceivable and knowable aspects of racially assessing and assigning others to racial categories. This vector, for example, highlights how colonial racial orders and hierarchies are structurally reproduced regardless of whether social actors experience an interaction in terms of race, as in the experience and production of racial prejudice. Work such as Everyday Language of White Racism by Hill (2008) and others (Chun, 2016; Pardo, 2013) shows how different theories about the origins of racism shed light into the mechanisms and scale at which racism is assumed to operate—be it individual, interpersonal, or structural. Highlighted in this approach, as well, is the insight of how both institutional and interactional perceptions of race impact social actors who are racialized within specific categories along with the ways this leads to the reproduction of racial categories and effects, regardless of a person's racialized self-identification.

The fourth vector contemplates the interplay of the previous two relationships by also considering the historical formation of groupings and traditions around racialized experiences. How do such geohistorical groupings, if formed, define inclusion based on shared histories and experiences? How do these relate to self and other perceptions of racial categories, racial inhabitance, and related racial orders? Here is where we might see debates around race in terms of categories and belonging—perhaps closer to the debates about “authenticity” that Jackson's concept of sincerity contrasts with. Rather than an interior relationship to racial categories and claims, we see relational assessments of racial identity and identification that often work within what Bucholtz and Hall (2005) proposed as a framework of identity and interaction. This process is always fraught with the potential for disjuncture (Meek, 2011) and differences in how actors ground racial categories and interpellations.

A consideration of the different processes and vectors involved in experiencing and reading the body as a site of racial materialization and contested categorization within broader colonial racial orders allows us to dynamically locate the processes involved in co-articulating racial categories and racialized bodies, linguistic varieties, and instantiated voices (Smalls, 2020), as well as how people relate (or not) to different forms of racial subjectivity and identity within these contexts. In this regard, careful analysis of speech alongside other relevant interactional, temporal, and geopolitical contexts is necessary to make sense of debates that attempt to anchor race and racial belonging across criteria ranging from perceptible to physical characteristics, to physical and vocal stylizations, to conceptualizations of genealogical ancestry, to ideas about traditions, practices, and heritage. Such an analysis offers us insight into the ways that movement within and across geopolitical borders might differently highlight or obfuscate prior ways social actors have been positioned within racial and linguistic orders. It also allows us to discern the different and complex ways people orient to racial, ethnic, and linguistic categories and boundaries. Lastly, it makes perceptible how linked racial and linguistic orders may shift over time and space in service of different political economic projects.

Analyzing these racial anchors helps us engage with the polysemous, ambiguous, indeterminate, sometimes incommensurable, and often contested forms of meaning and interpretation of race, racial possibility, and their dynamic relationships to language varieties as people move across spatiotemporal scales and geohistorical political borders—whether forced or of their own volition, invited or not, or across different positions of power. It enables us to consider contestations and their stakes from the perspective of the racial logics that differently distribute rights, access, and value for different human beings, as accorded to them by the politico-economic and sociocultural processes that have historically emerged in different locations. Ultimately, the aim is to disentangle the relationships that people may have to ancestral, lived, and ascribed racial categories and historical communities (whether overlapping or not with racialized categorizations), to pay attention to what aspects of embodiment, culture, language, and social practice become associated with race and racial orders, and to understand race not as an internal and static category but as a dynamic emerging in complex ways and in grounded situations with distinctive racial logics.

弗洛雷斯和罗莎提出的种族语言学方法为理解人们如何变得种族化以及社会行为如何通过种族化的视角进行解释提供了一个重要的政治、历史、关系和感官框架。我在此分析的基础上强调种族和语言学术需要考虑进行动态的、历史的多维分析，并认识到种族和语言之间的联系和分离所涉及的复杂权力关系。据我了解，他们的论点是呼吁警惕那些将种族及其与语言的关系视为跨越空间和时间的脱离语境的非历史类别的方法。

关注影响种族交互体验方式的感官界面也意味着关注历史环境和权力关系，这些历史环境和权力关系将种族产生为可感知的社会分化类别，无论是通过言语和语言、外表、家谱血统等方面，和/或在特定地点和时间历史上与种族类别相关的任何特征。这需要同时承认和分析种族作为一种殖民建构、作为关系的锚以及某些形式的身份的基础。在这篇评论中，我简要讨论了种族类别作为复杂的、多方面的殖民秩序。然后，我讨论一个多向量框架，在承认种族实例化的多维性的同时，允许对种族及其与语言现象的关系如何被构建、体验、再现和挑战进行扎根分析。

将殖民性视为现代社会秩序的产物，将种族作为不同历史和地缘政治情境中社会文化经验的重要载体和代表，使我们能够分析地看到这些类别如何在假设的限制和过度之处产生间隙和空隙。类别是不够的，并且不能清楚地映射到生活经验以及身份和语言的概念化。为了理解欧洲殖民项目以多方面和持久的方式构建了知识、等级制度和文化体系，以重现以欧洲为中心的殖民权力，我们需要问：在所使用的语言和种族的广泛类别中，哪些内容被删除、遗漏或过度决定以人口统计方式追踪模式？

在这种背景下对种族的讨论可以通过与殖民内组织差异的独特形式的关系来理解。殖民性的概念（Quijano，2000）指出了随着殖民关系的政治经济条件而形成的认识论条件。Reyes（2020）将这一概念应用于关于混合种族和混合语言的想法，不要将它们理解为人和言语的属性，而是理解为聆听主体位置的属性，如 Inoue（2006）所定义的。雷耶斯提供了关于混合性概念如何假定形成所谓混合体的类别的纯粹性的重要见解：正是纯粹主体的构建使混合体成为一个类别，同时也成为一个潜在的问题。从这个角度来看，我们可以看到弗洛雷斯和罗莎的文章如何邀请我们思考我们选择的分析框架最终可能会重现我们的审讯试图瓦解的社会类别和过程。这种方法旨在将人口类别和名称语言变体视为需要仔细关注和理清的过程，而不是既定的。

Mignolo（2007）的脱钩概念似乎与将雷耶斯的见解扩展到弗洛雷斯和罗莎的论点特别相关。在“改变对话术语”的推动下，米尼奥洛的去殖民主张中的一项策略是“去自然化总体化现实的概念和概念领域”（459）。这种方法强调了现代性修辞产生的外部性，并在“知识的地缘政治”中找到了可能性（例如，从世界上不同的历史地点出现，承受了西方帝国和资本主义扩张的影响和后果）……”（462） ：现代/殖民主义逻辑所产生的类别的非自然化，以揭开其普遍性和自然性的外衣。米尼奥洛（和基哈诺）的主张需要一种研究实践，该实践源于探索不同地点的地缘政治知识中出现的类别和思维方式。

为了将作为殖民秩序的种族与与种族类别相关的自然化特征脱钩，米尼奥洛认为，分析家必须采用——借鉴安萨尔杜亚（Anzaldua，1987）的“边界思维”概念——超越给定类别来质疑的思维形式，打断它们，并通过分析超越它们（497-8）。弗洛雷斯和罗莎呼吁同时考虑种族和语言如何被呈现为可分离的，同时又被共同归化为共同的语言和种族等级制度，对语言在这些过程中的作用的关注不再是关于映射关系或让一个人充当另一个人的代理人，但要理解种族和语言定位主体、权利和可能性的方式；以及不同的种族观念和意识形态如何消除对多重血统、意想不到的语言影响以及其他可能锚定和中断复杂的种族认同和观念的遗产和身份概念的讨论中的细微差别。在这里，规模的概念对于理解殖民纠葛非常重要，这些纠葛影响着如何确定不同种族类别的价值观和权利，以及在个人、互动和结构层面上与它们相关的属性。

我的工作（Feliciano-Santos，2019、2021）试图了解波多黎各的民族类别和秩序是如何产生和经历的，以阐明沟通模糊性、实地不同经历和家庭故事可能会打断民族和殖民地身份的总体叙述。从这个角度来看，我分析了历史、身份和语言的知识框架和理解中出现的多样化和有争议的语言实践，以及这些理解所产生的政治动员和行动主义。通过这种分析视角，我通过分析殖民项目在建立当代种族和语言秩序中的作用，探讨了解释民族身份和相异性的话语限制和模式是如何产生的。在考虑殖民种族（化）逻辑如何通过拉拢、庆祝和平凡化的交替形式来分配特权、边缘化和抹除，同时强调语言形式和民族类别的共同出现时，我们看到人们如何驾驭和应对试图叙述和界定它们的结构性和话语形式的权力。

关于弗洛雷斯和罗莎的论点，我强调了四个分析向量（以及许多潜在的其他向量），以思考身份、种族和语言之间的多方面关系——这些概念充满了不同人与种族之间的复杂关系，因为两者都具有身份和社会类别，在更广泛的种族等级秩序体系中。这些向量有助于将种族作为主观体验、结构类别和关系形式进行分析。我强调这些向量，因为它们是人们如何定义种族及其在生活中的作用的争论场所，为理解种族、语言和身份之间的关系提供了不同的锚点。

第一个向量提出了一种历史分析，表明关于种族的辩论、模糊性和矛盾心理如何是产生社会秩序的殖民过程的结果，以及它们如何通过植根于有时重叠、有时矛盾的地史独特性的观看和认识模式来解释种族。认识论基础（Saldaña-Portillo，2016）。产生、沉默和规训认识论和符号学领域的过程，这些领域产生和组织种族可解释性的感觉、物质、历史和等级关系，是理解当代有关语言、种族、血统、身份之间关系的辩论的关键场所。和政治主观性。例如，在美国的背景下，种族类别的高度可见性、隐形性或可听性与种族秩序试图遏制不同群体以服务于帝国政治和经济项目的复杂方式有何关系，使某些人成为劳动力，有些是土地征用的障碍，还有一些是国家的具体边界？

第二个向量考虑特定人与种族社会类别之间的关系。在这方面，杰克逊（2005）的“种族真诚”概念是相关的。他建议使用种族真诚性（在分析上与种族真实性概念有区别），并考虑“人们如何思考和感受自己的身份明显存在，特别是当这种身份在一个社会背景下运作时，其中包括许多超出他们直接控制的因果力量” ”（11）。这种观点显示了个人与其已知和未知的祖先、他们指定的和声称的种族类别之间的复杂关系，以及跨越地理历史轨迹和政治边界的多种思考种族和种族秩序的方式。人们与种族的关系的这一方面提醒我们，种族、自我认同和语言之间的关系既不是停滞不前的，也不是总是容易通过外部感知行为来评估。

第三个向量探讨了感知他人与种族评估和将他人分配到种族类别的可感知和可知方面之间的关系。例如，这个向量强调了殖民种族秩序和等级制度如何在结构上再现，无论社会行为者是否经历种族方面的互动，如种族偏见的经历和产生。Hill（2008）和其他人（Chun，2016；Pardo，2013 ）等人的《白人种族主义的日常语言》等著作展示了关于种族主义起源的不同理论如何阐明种族主义被假定运作的机制和规模——无论是个人的、人际关系的或结构性的。这种方法还强调了对种族的制度和互动认知如何影响特定类别内种族化的社会行为者的洞察力，以及这如何导致种族类别和影响的再现，无论一个人的种族化自我如何-鉴别。

第四个向量通过考虑围绕种族化经历的群体和传统的历史形成来思考前两种关系的相互作用。如果形成这样的地史群体，如何定义基于共同历史和经验的包容性？这些与自我和其他人对种族类别、种族居住和相关种族秩序的看法有何关系？在这里，我们可能会看到围绕种族在类别和归属方面的辩论——也许更接近于杰克逊的真诚概念所对比的关于“真实性”的辩论。我们看到的不是与种族类别和主张的内在关系，而是对种族身份和认同的关系评估，这些评估通常在布霍尔茨和霍尔（Bucholtz and Hall，2005）提出的身份和互动框架内发挥作用。这个过程总是充满了分裂的可能性（Meek，2011）以及参与者如何基于种族类别和质询的差异。

考虑到在更广泛的殖民种族秩序中体验和解读身体作为种族物质化和有争议的分类所涉及的不同过程和向量，使我们能够动态地定位涉及共同阐明种族类别和种族化身体、语言多样性、和实例化的声音（Smalls，2020），以及人们如何在这些背景下与不同形式的种族主体性和身份相关（或不相关）。在这方面，有必要对言论以及其他相关的互动、时间和地缘政治背景进行仔细分析，以理解试图通过从可感知到身体特征、身体和声音风格化到概念化等标准来锚定种族和种族归属的辩论。家谱血统，关于传统、实践和遗产的想法。这样的分析让我们深入了解地缘政治边界内部和跨越地缘政治边界的运动可能会以不同的方式突出或混淆社会参与者在种族和语言秩序中的先前定位方式。它还使我们能够辨别人们对种族、民族和语言类别和界限的不同且复杂的方式。最后，它使人们清楚地认识到，相互联系的种族和语言秩序如何随着时间和空间的变化而变化，以服务于不同的政治经济项目。

分析这些种族锚有助于我们理解多义的、模棱两可的、不确定的、有时不可通约的、经常有争议的意义形式和对种族、种族可能性的解释，以及当人们跨越时空尺度和地史政治边界时它们与语言多样性的动态关系——无论是被迫的还是自愿的，无论是否受到邀请，或者跨越不同的权力职位。它使我们能够从种族逻辑的角度来考虑争论及其利害关系，这种逻辑为不同的人分配不同的权利、机会和价值，正如历史上在不同地点出现的政治经济和社会文化进程所赋予的那样。最终，目的是理清人们与祖先、生活和归属的种族类别和历史社区（无论是否与种族化类别重叠）之间的关系，以关注体现、文化、语言和社会的哪些方面实践与种族和种族秩序联系在一起，并且不要将种族理解为一个内部和静态的类别，而是将其理解为一种以复杂的方式和在具有独特种族逻辑的扎根情境中出现的动态。