"On the Backs of Latino Youth": Dual-Language Immersion as White Property

• In Event: Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of the presentation is to share a school-based empirical study that addresses concerns (Diaz Soto & Kharem, 2006; Flores, 2015; Palmer, 2010; Valdés, 1997) regarding how dual language immersion (DLI) programs fulfill—invoking the conference theme—the dreams and promises of public education. The study asked: How does one district’s DLI program conceptualize its work challenging racial inequities and toward justice, and what material consequences does this framing have on Latinx youth?

Theoretical Framework
To design the study and analyze the data, I applied a critical race theory in education (CRT) theoretical framework (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and its analytical lens of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993).

Methods
This 15-month critical ethnography takes place in a Spanish-English DLI strand program in a high school and its feeder middle school. Situated in an urban Midwestern city with a recent growth in its Latinxs population, the program’s student composition is half Latinx and the other half mostly White with a few Black students.
For data analysis, I used a recursive three-phased approach of data analysis (LeCompte & Schensul, 2012). First, I concurrently collected and analyzed data using grounded theory initial coding (Charmaz, 2014). Next, for establishing themes across techniques, I searched for codes from reoccurring patterns and discrepancies. Lastly, I used Harris’ (1993) four functions of property as an analytic framework.

Data Sources
The study’s participants include teachers/staff, parents/guardians, youth, and community members. The sources of data are: semi-structured interviews, classrooms participant observations of teachers, DLI community meetings, and a state statute.

Results
The data illuminate a complex picture of how one DLI program conceptualizes its work challenging racial inequities and toward justice, and the resulting material consequences on Latinx youth. The DLI program valued providing students—especially Latinxs—with the opportunity to develop academic biliteracy so long as it was also accessible and advantageous to White students.

Teachers’ practice—in both addressing language needs and sociopolitical issues—was regularly based on the needs and limits of its White participants. The program’s appreciation of biliteracy was not accompanied with challenges to hegemonic racial ideologies, thus, dominant knowledges and language practices that privilege the program’s White students were maintained. For example, there were no attempts to disrupt beliefs in meritocracy or to suggest non-dominant explanations for the program’s White students’ success relative to Latinx youth. I contend that a conceptualization of educational equity based mainly on biliteracy achievement bleaches bilingual education’s radically liberatory promise of epistemological emancipation and antiracism.

Scholarly Significance
While most language education scholarship examining white supremacy is set in contexts with restrictive language contexts and/or in places with a historical Latinx presence, this exploratory ethnography highlights the promises and challenges unfolded when a district facing increased Latinx enrollment attempts to provide an equitable education for Latinx youth. Bringing a CRT perspective to examining DLI helps uncover how biliteracy schooling is offered to youth of Color at the expense of whitewashing bilingual education, a necessary realization toward then reimagining what bilingual education as a political project must do.

Author

• Laura Carolina Chavez-Moreno, University of Wisconsin - Madison