Healing Intergenerational Sustos in Otherwise Communal Bilingual Educational Spaces: A Case in the Midwest

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

Abstract

The field of bilingual education in the United States has a long legacy of the active injury displaced working-class communities face due to the necropolitical nature of the educational system for culturally, racially, and linguistically marginalized communities, which keeps on yanking their/our tongues (Anzaldúa, 1987) through covert and overt English only language policies and the ongoing gentrification (Heiman & Murakami, 2019) and the ongoing whitening of K-16 dual language (teacher) programs (Flores & Garcia, 2017). This whitening has led to the purposeful dehistoricization of bilingual education, with the extirpation of the tongue from the speakers, their communities, cultures, and struggles, or as Gounari puts it, “it erases a long history of immigration, bilingualism, linguistic oppression, and racism and reduces the issue to simply “teaching English” (2006, p. 41). This is true not only in bilingual/dual language/immersion programs but also in teacher preparation (or lack thereof), thus widening the wound and creating intergenerational susto. This susto, the expression of "soul sickness" or "soul displacement" as a result of trauma (Gonzalez, in Zepeda, 2020, p. 230), has affected the working-class, Black/Brown/Indigenous, Spanish speaking Latinx community with those markers of disposability and which consequences ripple until this day for the people who inherited these wounds. Understanding and reframing sustos can become a way to heal this communal intergenerational trauma with the tools and knowledge offered by traditional medicine.

Through storytelling glimpses as limpias, I describe how local Latinx bilingual community members (e.g., teachers, parents, educators) in the midwest have done with what intergenerational sustos as colonial injuries left in their wake through an ongoing project that merges linguistic liberation and ethnic studies for elementary-aged children. Preliminary findings describe the creation of what Sartorello calls milpas educativas (2021) as a legacy of ongoing working-class resistant agency through terquedad (Salas-SantaCruz, 2020) of the bilingual community to maintain their bilingual and bicultural voice (Darder, 2011) in their self-generated spaces. Even in this estranged land where neoliberal forces invade every aspect of social life, we try to build a home in the cracks through the healing as a terquedad despite intergenerational sustos through rasquache epistemologies that makes the most from the least and reconstitutes/(re)invents the discarded and turns it into something beautiful as both resistance and affirmation, (Mesa-Baines, 1995) even in its ephemerality. Findings show how the participants engaged in home-building in the interstices of K-16 schooling and within their communities in their search for opportunities to be part of hopeful educational spaces to engage in “simultaneous doing-thinking-sowing-cultivating-creating-re-existing-living” (Walsh, 2021, p. 10) through diverse forms of advocacy and activism.

Author

• Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota