Civil Rights and Human Rights: The Contested Place of Spanish in American Education

• In Event: Heritage Language Education as a Civil Right: Policy and Practice in Indigenous, Latina/o, Asian American, and African American Communities

Abstract

Spanish is used in American educational settings in two principal types of instructional programs: bilingual education and secondary and postsecondary “foreign” language instruction. In this presentation, I reflect on the historical milestones of the civil rights basis of bilingual education and juxtapose the goals of such instruction with the goal of promoting linguistic human rights within the United States. I draw from the history of the teaching of Spanish as heritage language in established foreign classes to raise important questions about the role of educational institutions in developing and maintaining minority languages.

Author

• Guadalupe Valdés, Stanford University