“We’re not fully us without our languages”: multilingual Latina educators and raciolinguistic ideological clarity

ABSTRACT

Ideological clarity has been defined as a process in which one struggles to identify dominant society’s explanations for existing societal socioeconomic hierarchies and then juxtapose them with one’s own. In this paper, ideological clarity is used to analyze the ability of multilingual Latina educators to identify, name, and disrupt dominant raciolinguistic narratives and their effects on the students they teach. We present the anécdotas – short, illustrative stories frequently used for teaching and learning – of five K-12 multilingual Latina educators to show how they have developed and employed raciolinguistic ideological clarity. Our findings demonstrate that, in identifying, naming, and disrupting dominant raciolinguistic narratives through both their words and their actions, they actively dismantle racial injustice and construct educational possibilities for language minoritized students of color.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• language
• raciolinguistics
• secondary schooling
• teacher education

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the educators who participated in this study for contributing their valuable time and anécdotas, and for the work they do daily in their classrooms and school sites. We would also like to thank Dr. Rebeca Mireles-Rios, Dr. Rita Kohli, and Dr. Mary Bucholtz for their invaluable support, insight, and feedback on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Dual language models require students to speak in only one language at a time for strict percentages of each day.

2. Dual language programs often police stigmatized forms of the non-English languages present in their programs, as well.

3. ‘We use the term language minoritized youth for several reasons. First, the use of minoritized vs. minority emphasizes the active, purposeful ways in which these speakers are portrayed as being separate from the linguistic majority or norm. Second, we use this term to encompass all youth of color, including those who use two or more “named languages” and those who would commonly be viewed as “monolingual”’ (Seltzer and de Los Ríos 2018, 74).

4. The word ‘multilingual’ is used in line with Seltzer and de los Ríos’ (2018) framing of Language Minoritized Youth. That is, it encompasses all educators of Color, ‘including those who use two or more “named languages” and those who would commonly be viewed as “monolingual”’ (p. 74).

5. Otheguy et al. (2015) remind us of ‘the well known but often forgotten idea that named languages are social, not linguistic, objects’ (p. 281). In other words, named languages are as much of a social construction as the languages that dominant narratives deem ‘only dialects’ or ‘bad English’ (e.g. Indigenous languages, such as Zapotec, Nahuatl, or Mixteco, Black Language, Spanglish, Hawaiian pidgin and more).

6. Pérez-Huber et al. (2008) define racism as, ‘the assigning of values to real or imagined differences, in order to justify white supremacy, to the benefit of whites and at the expense of People of Color, and thereby to defend the right of whites to dominance’ (p. 41).

7. Though, in 1998, much of Proposition 187 was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the long fight toward its passage made clear the strong anti-immigrant sentiment present in much of California.