"Tenemos que seguir nuestra cultura": Whiteness as Property at Hillside Elementary

• In Event: Gentrification and Dual-Language Bilingual Education: A Texas Two-Way Bilingual Education School Across Seven Years

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes
At Hillside Elementary, Mexican-American children from working-class homes were labeled and tracked in ways that limited their access to meaningful bilingual instruction and cast them as academically inferior. This paper will demonstrate that this process was visible to my Mexican-American students. As students wrote narratives of their experiences at Hillside and engaged in a data analysis unit on middle-school elective “choice sheets”, they shared their own critiques of these practices. This practitioner study shows that these students were aware of the status they were assigned in the Hillside Elementary community and had developed critiques of this process and ways to resist their marginalization in ways that mirror ket tenets of critical race theory, namely, that of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993).

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Whiteness as property is an analysis of the ways that whiteness evolved in American society from color to race, to status, and ultimately to property. In the U.S., property is legally valued and is ascribed rights which serve as the basis for certain expectations. Under this conception, whiteness operates within social relations in ways that are akin to property, both as something that gives one the right to make assertions and demands, and as something that must be fiercely protected (Harris, 1993).

This study also understands how perceptions of language are inextricable from racial ideologies (Alim, 2016). Raciolingustics argues that it is largely the perception of the listening subject, as opposed to bilingual children’s actual language practices, that should be the focus of understanding how language and speakers become perceived as deficient (Rosa & Flores, 2017).
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3. Methods and Data
This paper shares video data from a small group discussion during a mathematics lesson. The lesson was part of a larger unit planned, taught, and recorded as part of a seven year participatory design research project (Dominguez, 2021). When analyzing the data, I was struck with students' discussions of race and language and analyzed the data by “thinking with theory” a;ongside works of critical race theory and raciolinguistics (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013).

4. Findings
Mexican-American students were aware of how race and language shaped how they were perceived academically and socially by adults at school.. Students explicitly named the connections they saw between how they were perceived racially and through the named languages their parents did (and did not) speak. They knew they were positioned differently from white students, and devised ways to argue against and resist these labels.

5. Scholarly Significance
This paper shows that elementary-school age bilingual Latinxs can engage in critical analyses mirroring the logic and structure of critical race theorists, and highlights how these children’s experiences within the Hillside community were explicitly racialized in ways they were all too aware of. This paper serves as an example for scholars interested in the ways children themselves are impacted by TWBE programs failures to counter white supremacy.

Author

• Melissa Adams Corral, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley
  Presenting Author