Locating and Contesting Raciolinguistic Ideologies: From Language "Problems" to "Possibilities" in Latina/o Communities

• In Event: 68.023 - Do You Hear What I Hear? Raciolinguistic Ideologies Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

The language practices of U.S. Latinas/os are frequently viewed as educational impediments, particularly in light of this population’s rapid demographic rise in recent decades. Such vantage points involve raciolinguistic ideologies that presume upon the English language as a readymade pathway toward educational success and societal inclusion (Flores and Rosa, 2015). Yet this is not the case for millions of U.S. Latinas/os, as well members of other minoritized populations, who identify as “native” English speakers and still face profound experiences of educational inequality. In many predominantly Latina/o communities, language use is viewed as a handicap and scapegoated as the cause of educational underachievement, despite the fact that, from normative linguistic perspectives, Latinas’/os’ multilingual linguistic repertoires could be understood as more expansive than those of the monolingual teachers, administrators, and policy makers who seek to fix them. Thus, ideas about language naturalize prevailing ideas about education achievement as well as broader forms of societal inclusion across a range of mainstream institutional settings. Effort toward denaturalizing these ideas and must shift from validating the practices of marginalized populations to tracking to the systematic ways in which their communities are systematically excluded and perceived as deficient.

This paper points to the exciting possibilities that emerge when we shift from viewing marginalized communities as static objects of academic analysis to dynamic sites of collaborative knowledge production. It analyzes a project bringing together a professor and undergraduate students with a teacher and students in a predominantly Latina/o high school. Combining Youth Participatory Action Research (Cammarota and Fine, 2008), Community-Based Participatory Research (Atalay, 2012), and a commitment to “sociolinguistic justice” (Bucholtz et al., 2014), the university professor and high school teacher worked collaboratively as co-instructors and the university students and high school students worked collaboratively as co-learners to track and respond to raciolinguistic ideologies in their school and surrounding community. The goal of the project was to learn ethnographic research skills to document and analyze the marginalization of particular language practices in a predominantly Latina/o community where linguistic diversity is often viewed as a handicap from mainstream perspectives.

The paper argues that such collaborations with linguistically marginalized youth exemplify culturally sustaining pedagogies, whose practitioners ask, “What if, indeed, the goal of teaching and learning with youth of color was not ultimately to see how closely students could perform White middle-class norms, but to explore, honor, extend, and, at times, problematize their heritage and community practices?” (Paris and Alim, 2014, p. 86). By approaching a linguistically marginalized community as a campus, the students and teachers were able to work together to present an alternative view of linguistic diversity that highlight not only the vast challenges that this school and its surrounding community face, but also the resilience and ingenuity of its students and residents.

Author

• Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University