The Second Cortina War, Texas Escuelitas, and Bilingual Maestras: The Racial Geography of Bilingual Education on the Border

• In Event: Bilingual Education as Home-Land: Healing Roots, Reclaiming Community Power

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how bilingual education ideologies are rooted in the racial geographies of the border. I trace bilingual educators’ narratives on the border through historical and narrative analysis across time and space.

I take up Saldaña-Portillo’s (2016) call to think with racial geographies as my theoretical framework. For Saldaña-Portillo (2016) “heterotemporality and racial geography as a theory of the present offer a model for understanding the clash of the multiple racial epistemologies of the coloniality and postcoloniality transpiring in one region, one citizen subject at a time” (p. 25). These geographies operationalize the indo barbaro in different ways that creates the clashing of legal/cultural/and psychic landscapes.

I draw on three data sets for this paper: The first of the three data sets is a historical analysis of two political figures from the early making of the border–Juan Cortina and Santos Benavides. These two men came from landowning families in South Texas but diverged in their resistance towards American and English cultural and linguistic hegemony. Then, I analyze the oral histories of those who attended Texas escuelitas–or little schools where they learned to read and write in Spanish before attending all English public schools in the 1940s. Lastly, I end with a conversation from a convivio of present day bilingual education maestras from the border and their musings of what bilingual education on the border is and is not. To this end, I ask: How does the border produce bilingual education ideologies across time and space? How are contemporary ideologies of bilingual education genealogically rooted in border productions?

The findings of this study indicate that bilingual education ideologies and discourses are replete in the racial geography of the border and the production of the indio barbaro. The first finding demonstrates how Cortina and Benavides battled each other despite having a common heritage. While Cortina was considered a Mexican rebel, Benavides took up a play-the-game attitude. Both ways of being and knowing became necessary for resistance to cultural and linguistic hegemony. This resistance appears again in the oral histories of the escuelitas attendees who learned to read and write in Spanish before entering English public school. The act of teaching Spanish literacy itself was a form of resilience and resistance. Lastly, the maestras articulated complex ideologies that resisted Spanish but in practice was very much a part of their teaching. Their discourses as such engaged in the racial geography of US ideologies that they resisted in their classrooms for their students' benefit.

In understanding the production of the border through racial geographies we can better understand contemporary ideologies of language and the gentrification of bilingual education. In keeping with the theme of the conference, we must understand the history of the border and how borderlanders have survived the racial geographies of Mexico and the US to begin repairing the future of bilingual education.

Author

• Enrique David Degollado, University of Iowa