Grassroots Tensions in the Language Politics of Mexican Chicago

• In Event: Contra la Corriente: Cultivating Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Learning Spaces for Chicagoland Latinx Youth

Abstract

This paper examines divergent grassroots efforts within the white institutional spaces of Chicago Public Schools to address ideological, political, and community-based hopes for Mexican schooling. These include heritage language schools with ethnic studies curricular design and arts-integrated instruction, and also pro-assimilationist charter schools highlighting access to mainstream political powers. Concurrent to politicization of language education in the broader Mexican communities of Chicago, public education practitioners faced external and internal pressures to respond to the tandem agendas of forced assimilation: a federal government responding to deficit legislation aimed directly at under-resourced students of color in large urban districts, and an emerging corporate effort to capitalize on children in poverty and redirect public funding to private entities.

Chicago’s large and diverse Mexican communities have been both the target of these actions/agendas and a source of resistance against them. This paper examines the roles of community participation in the building of these ideologically-opposed approaches to discriminatory and racist educational policy. Education policy has long provided ground for contestations of truth and efficacy, with language education policy often in its cross-hairs. Theorization of programs, models, and practices representing varied philosophical frameworks reflect the battle for truth in pluralistic societies and are often mutually exclusive. In the history of utilizing schools as tools of colonization (Spring, 2016), and the implicit need for addressing pluralities of language (Spolsky, 2009), communities and policymakers have strategically applied different notions of truth to educational sites. Critically analyzing the ideologies that foster this debate distills transformative language education policy as reparative for immigrant communities as well as for notions of multilingualism far beyond the communities and schools.

Exploring the patterns of policies that facilitate the contemporary manifestation of colonial values in urban schools – as continued sites of linguistic and cultural conflict – can serve to deconstruct assimilative school-based experiences and reconstruct culturally-pluralistic framings of community agency (Flores, 2013). Examining the ideological rationalizations across communities reveals two competing broad pro-Mexicanidad philosophies: participatory assimilationist approaches, and decolonial reparative approaches. Participatory assimilationist approaches integrate Delpit’s (1988) notions of codes of power with English-only models of serving immigrant families in which practitioners serve as bridges to white institutional spaces in schools and societies. Decolonial reparative models embrace language and cultural history curricular design along with critical framings of colonial logics that manifest as school success (Spring, 2016). Practitioners in decolonial reparative models facilitate and support learning spaces in which teachers act as “anti-racist cultural workers actively challenge, or trouble, white benevolence” (Bebout, 2011, p. 15). This paper examines the Mexican community impact of both models and the tensions and debate between them as culturally-specific, but also as micro versions of contests playing out nationally and internationally. In the policy world of urban language education models, the sites of this activism are schools that embrace multilingualism by addressing the history of linguistic genocide that preceded them.

Authors

• Alfredo Nambo
  Presenting Author

• Victoria F. Trinder, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author