Between having a white supremacist father and a mother who refused to check the “White” box choosing “human” instead, Jane Hill"> did what she could to rebel against her father.

“If your father is a white supremacist, the first thing you’ll do is date a dark-skinned Puerto Rican,” Hill laughs. “So I did. This guy would walk through the front door and my father would walk out the back.”

However, it was the philosophy of Hill’s mother who helped balance things out.

“She was very much a liberal of her time,” Hill said. “She wasn’t active in civil rights but she very much objected the white supremacist position.”

Hill, a University of Arizona Anthropology professor, grew up in Los Angeles in the Westwood area, often surrounded by famous faces. The neighborhood could be described as fancy but Hill didn’t think of it that way.

Down the street, Rhonda Fleming had a home and so did the owner of the Western Costume Company. Her younger brother once dated Tina Sinatra.

“A house there now would set you back about 3 million,” Hill said. “It wasn’t like that then. L.A. had not become what it is now.”

Hill credits University of California at Los Angeles' University Elementary School for giving her a universal approach as part of her foundation.

“Oh my God, they were liberal,” Hill jokes. “They were very one worldy kind of folks. They taught us that everybody was the same.”

Hill majored in Anthropology at Reed College and then transferred to UCLA"> to complete her undergraduate degree. Hill had every intention on being an archaeologist. She had taking archeology classes in preparation for graduate school but had only one thing working against her.

“I was really, really interested in archeology but they wouldn’t take me in the field school because they didn’t take women,” Hill said.

A senior at the time, Hill planned on entering the anthropology program at the University of Pennsylvania with her one-time boyfriend. He was Jewish and her father was horrified, Hill said.

“He was going to be an archaeologist, but we broke up,” Hill said. “I certainly didn’t want to go the same grad school as that son of a bitch.”

Now without a career choice, Hill took her mother's advice and applied to a new linguistics program that opened at UCLA. “A few of my mother’s colleagues were involved in it and I didn’t have anything better to do,” Hill said. “That was like 'going-back-home-to-mama' type of thing because she was teaching at UCLA the whole time I was there.”

After entering the program, Hill turned her research focus on Native Americans and did her dissertation on the Native American language Cupeno.

“I did take a few linguistic classes with William Shipley and William Jacobsen,” Hill said. “These are the people I had been exposed to so that’s why I got interested.”

After graduating with a master's degree in Linguistics and a PhD in Anthropology at UCLA, Hill moved to Michigan with her husband and two children.

Ken Hill, Jane’s husband, had received a faculty position at the University of Michigan so Hill applied to Wayne State University for a job. The application didn’t appear too difficult as the baby boomers were retiring at that time, Hill said.

One of the few female faculty members in anthropology, Hill’s presence was considered to be unusual at that time.

“There was only one woman in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan,” Hill said. “There were no women in linguistics. At Wayne State, there were other female faculty and they were there because they had been other people’s wives.”

Wayne State’s significant African American population helped propel Hill’s interest in race relations. With a population that was 40 percent African American, Wayne State boasted some of the biggest numbers outside of historically black colleges and universities.

In the classroom, Hill received angry comments from African American students who demanded Black History to be taught in her lectures. It was a time of activism for African American students who became more vocal during the Civil Rights movement.

Without having an Africanist background, Hill was perplexed.

“A lot of bright and mean African American students (said), 'Why didn’t you teach anything about Africa?'" Hill said. “Well I didn’t know anything about Africa. I got challenged all the time.”

This experience helped Hill reflect on why people wanted to know things for important political reasons. 'Why people were so hungry for that knowledge that had been denied to them?' she asked herself.

Around that same time, there was a move in anthropology from veiwing Native Americans as exotic survivors towards seeing them as colonial and post colonial victims.

In Mexico, Hill worked with the “Mexicanos”, who spoke Nahuatl, and were concerned with their place in Mexican history. They used the term affectionately to emphasize their position of “where it all started.”

“They are very involved with the idea that they are central to Mexican history,” Hill said. “Because their centrality has been denied to them for so long, they should be recognized. These people were hungry for all documents in their language.”

When Hill accepted a position in the department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, she offered a class called the political economy of language in the Southwest.

She also started working with the Palo Band of the Mission Indians, who also spoke Cupano. They were forced to move out of their original homeland and into a “flea-bitten reservation near Fallbrook, the most racist town in Southern California," Hill said.

“The first thing they did after building the casinos was open up an alternative high school, so their kids wouldn’t have to take so much shit,” Hill said. “The kids were dropping out like crazy and they were smart.”

Active in philanthropic efforts, Hill is currently working on a phrase book of their language. She also writes speeches for them from time to time. This work helped spur on new research interests for Hill.

Hill states that she couldn’t be oblivious to the fact that multilingualism in the U.S. Southwest was upside down from the way it is in Europe. If you read the textbooks on language contacts in Europe, it was the elites that were normally multilingual, Hill said.

The Native Americans that Hill encountered usually spoke three languages or more, Hill said. Here in the United States, it was mainly the poor people who spoke more than one language and Mexicans were largely bi-lingual to some extent.

“So I got interested in the way appropriation not only works to make white people look good but I noticed that it contained all these unspoken stereotyping,” Hill said.

“If you say, 'Oh I will take care of it mañana,'” Hill said. “My argument is that when you ask somebody why they say mañana, they will say, 'Oh I’ve lived in Arizona for a long time and have picked up some Spanish.”

Hill claims that the person then takes on a “cool” persona and is saying, “I’m not stuck up or uptight like a regular white person.”

“But the other thing that this is saying is, 'Right now, I’m gonna be a little lazy like a Mexican,'” Hill said. “If you say, 'lets get together and have a few cervezas,' I’m gonna be goofy and relaxed about alcohol like a Mexican. So you reproduce that drunken Mexican stereotype.”

Hill coined this sensation “Mock Spanish” and claims that it permeates today’s media because people just don’t get it – or they don’t want to.

“There’s this idea that white is a good culture and that they deserve what they have because they have worked hard to get it,” Hill said. “They're modern, sober, sexually careful, clean. Opposite of that belief is the idea that the reason why people of color don’t have jobs or wealth. There’s something about their culture.”