Access and Advocacy for Emergent Multilingual Children Labeled as Disabled: One Latinx Mother’s Counter-Story

• In Event: Imagining Futurities in Bi/Multilingual Education Through Counter-Stories From Racialized and Minoritized Parents

Abstract

While parental involvement is considered to play a defining role in children’s academic achievement (Garcia & Kliefgen, 2018), the voices of racially and linguistically minoritized mothers have often been excluded from the discourse about families in bi/multilingual schools (Cioè-Peña, 2021). This marginalization is multiplied for those mothers who also raise emergent bi/multilingual children labeled as dis/abled (Cioè-Peña, 2017), as they must navigate educational systems which operate at the intersections of racism, ableism, and other dominatory logics (Annamma et al., 2013) to advocate for their children. Extending from a yearlong ethnographic study with children and families in an Arizona trilingual immersion charter school, this paper draws from interviews and ethnographic observations to highlight how Ana, a Latinx, Spanish-English bilingual mother, pushed back on these racialized and ableist discourses to advocate for the academic and socioemotional well-being of her emergent multilingual daughter who is labeled as dis/abled.

Guided by Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), Ana’s advocacy for her daughter can be understood as a counterstory, exposing the impacts and realities of structural oppression and discrimination as experienced by marginalized people (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). Ana’s counterstory is accordingly framed by Latinx Critical Race Theory, or LatCrit, which illuminates the “multidimensional” identities of Latinx people to “address the intersectionality of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression” which they experience (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001, p. 312). This theoretical framing is supplemented by Dis/Ability Critical Race Theory, or DisCrit, applied here to interrogate the intersections of race/ism and dis/ability which form the basis for the marginalization of Ana’s daughter within the school (Annamma et al., 2013). These combined bodies of literature provide a powerful mechanism to examine how Ana’s counterstory talks back to the intertwined discourses that (1) position her as unable or unwilling to contribute to her daughter’s trilingual schooling (García & Kliefgen, 2018), and (2) position her daughter as unfit for this language immersion school due to being labeled as dis/abled (Cioè-Peña, 2020).

Ana’s counterstory critically illuminates the subtle ways in which teachers and administrators reproduce the racist and ableist ideologies that position minoritized parents like herself as uncaring or unwilling to support their children’s bi/multilingual education. Ana challenges this positioning by using Spanish with her children and their Latinx teachers, and by educating her children about Mexican culture. However, Ana also feels she has had to negotiate the White-centric norms of family involvement in order to more effectively advocate for her daughter’s full inclusion, through school board membership and by frequently attending parent-teacher conferences, school events, and meetings for her daughter’s Individualized Education Plan, or IEP.

This counterstory contributes to the literature on the gentrification of bi/multilingual education (Freire et al., 2021), by illuminating how structures of ableism and racism produce discourses which limit opportunities for intersectionally-minoritized children to access these educational programs. Countering these trends, the paper also visualizes the ways in which intersectionally-minoritized mothers like Ana advocate for their children by skillfully negotiating with educational systems that seek to disempower them.

Author

• Cory Alan Buckband, Arizona State University