Eliminate the Negative: Urban Poverty, Latino Racialization, and the 1968 Bilingual Education Act's Contradictory Convergences

• In Event: Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education

Abstract

Objective
During the late 1960s federal policymakers across the political spectrum promoted the 1968 Bilingual Education Act (BEA), a bill that represented an acknowledgement of the federal government’s responsibility for the education of non-native English speaking students. The paper’s objective is to demonstrate how economic, rather than cultural, concerns regarding the racialization of 1960s urban poverty produced a contradictory convergence among policymakers and Latino activists promoting the BEA.

Theoretical Framework
Scholars typically employ two narratives to explain why the BEA gained bipartisan support. The first narrative presents bilingual education as a political victory by Latino activists whose demands became codified as policy (Donato, 1997). While rightfully highlighting grassroots activists too often marginalized in policy studies, these accounts often leave unanswered how and why organizers were so successful. The second narrative partially attends to this question by emphasizing “top-down” policymaker influence, such as Nixon’s support as electoral strategy to woo Latino voters (Davies, 2008). Yet both accounts emphasize local actors’ agency, thereby minimizing how larger forces also shaped the positions that policymakers and activists took.

Utilizing a critical race analysis that intersects theories of interest convergence (Bell, 1980), coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), and raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), this paper examines how larger socioeconomic forces formatively shaped policymaker and activist concerns. In doing so, the paper outlines a new analytic framework to understand how the BEA’s origins stem from a historic moment of economic and political instability that constrained local actors choices in oft-contradictory ways.

Methodology/Data Sources
This paper draws from a broader project analyzing the 1960s rise of education-based social reforms as the new cornerstone of the modern U.S. welfare state. Primary documents were collected from the U.S. Congressional Record and National Archives. Data was analyzed through an iterative process of writing and coding of primary and secondary sources.

Substantiated Conclusions
Drawing primarily from Congressional hearings, the paper demonstrates two points. First, policymaker and activist support for the BEA arose in response to changes in the 1960s political economy and racialized social order. Second, the framing of race and language itself shifted through the political debates surrounding the BEA in ways that far more fully met the interests of white political and corporate elites than the impoverished urban Latinos the program presumably served. Latino activists endorsed bilingual education within a broader agenda for economic uplift and self-determination. Conversely, policymakers supported the policy as a concession to redirect focus from other activist demands and a tool to legitimate cultural deficit discourses that reimagined job automation and outsourcing into raciolinguistic “handicaps.” Through bilingual education, policymakers coopted activist discourses and ultimately promoted the BEA as a new apparatus to both appease and racially discipline Latino subjects.

Scholarly Significance
The paper is significant for two reasons. First, the findings illustrate the contradictory assumptions intersecting poverty, race, language, and culture embedded in the BEA and suggests a possible strategy toward reimagining bilingual education. Second, reinterpreting the BEA’s origins illuminates how broader discourses and policies concerning urban schooling and communities draw from similar contradictions.

Author

• Kenzo K. Sung, Rowan University