How Spanish Became a Foreign Language: The Othering of the Majority in the Rio Grande Valley

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Abstract

The U.S. is a Spanish-speaking country, second only to Mexico in total number of speakers. Spanish has been spoken in the southern border states—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California—since the late 1600s (Montejano, 1987). Spanish proliferates in the families and neighborhoods of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley (RGV) (Cavazos, 2014). Native Spanish speakers (NSSs) are the majority in many RGV schools. Yet English remains the language of power (Lippi-Green, 2011), and schools play the central role in stigmatizing Spanish knowledge.

Every major school district in RGV operates two programs that teach Spanish: Bilingual Education (BE) and Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL). What happens when educators designate a child’s voice, culture, and neighborhood as “foreign”? Here, I argue that 1) our rhetoric falsely constructs Spanish as foreign, and that 2) this deception hinders the already low educational attainment of NSSs.

Othering is a fundamental process of colonization, as the colonized find their culture devalued, assuring the power of the colonizer (Fanon, 1967; Said, 1979). The U.S. military conquered the RGV in 1846-48, enabling white colonizers to impose an anglocentric regime on Spanish-speaking Tejanos (Arreola, 2002; White, 2015).

Nowhere is this regime more visible than inside schools. It is common for BE teachers to dismiss local varieties of Spanish (Macedo & Bartolomé, 2014), and in RGV, BE teachers may ignore Spanish altogether (Hinton, 2015). Teachers describe students’ “non-standard” knowledge of Spanish phonology and vocabulary as an obstacle (González, 2005). In Texas, BE and SFL textbooks alike promote varieties from foreign countries (e.g., Gahala et al., 2004). Conversational prompts discuss people in Spain, Mexico, or South America, positioning Spanish as outside the U.S.; when materials show Spanish in a positive light, it remains exoticized (Ducar, 2006).
Proficiency in Spanish or another additional language is a college admissions requirement, no longer optional (Friedman, 2015). Yet Spanish is still called an elective in Texas, easily postponed. Once the NSS’s “foreign” language has been removed (Valenzuela, 1999), she is allowed to return to the forgotten language, years later. By that time, Spanish may be viable only for course content, as English dominates conversationally (Hinton, 2015).

Can educators admit that Spanish is not foreign and thus belongs in the U.S.? Spanish holds official status in Puerto Rico, and semi-official status in New Mexico and Texas. Though structural discrimination continues, legal rights of NSSs are virtually identical to those of native English speakers—except inside schools. What if RGV districts provided dual-language for all (Collier & Thomas, 2004)? What if districts embraced Spanish versions of Texas’ standardized tests—or Texas versions of Spanish? What if transitional BE teachers actually taught Spanish (Palmer, 2011)? What if universities prepared U.S.-born teachers for the same level of excellence as Mexico-born normalistas (Flores et al., 2008)?

Anglo colonization of Texas enshrined the premise of English as the native language, and Spanish as the foreign language. Even when BE and SFL educators successfully teach Spanish, they contribute to the othering of NSSs by accepting the false categorization of Spanish as foreign.

Author

• Kip Austin Hinton, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley