Healing Raciolinguistic Wounds: An Autohistoria-teoría in Relation with Dual Language Bilingual Students

• In Event: Racial Justice in Multilingual Education: What Is It and How Do We Realize It?

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation combines autohistoria-teoría and ethnography to critically examine raciolinguistic ideologies within the context of dual language bilingual (DLB) education. The author— a Kiskeyana (Dominican) bilingual teacher educator, researcher, and former DLB teacher—demonstrates ongoing self-examination and reflexivity as she conducts an ethnographic case study and examines how Kiskeyanx DLB fourth graders navigate oppressive ideologies about themselves. The collective healing power of autohistoria-teoría is illuminated alongside the need for remedy and repair of a bilingual education model that is supposed to be culturally and linguistically sustaining.

Framework
This study is grounded in Flores and Rosa’s (2015) theorization of raciolinguistic ideologies, which merges critical theories of race and language to examine the ways in which language and race are co-constructed and thus intricately interrelated. A raciolinguistic lens elucidates the racist ideologies that inherently position Kiskeyanxs and other people of color as linguistically deficient. This study is guided by decolonial frameworks (Smith, 1999) and Chicana feminism (Anzaldúa, 1987), which call for the centering of testimonio and the reclaiming of theories from the flesh for individual/collective transformation (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2009; Perez Huber, 2009).

Methods
This study utilizes autohistoria-teoría, a decolonial method that invites researchers to analyze the self in relation to wider sociopolitical dynamics through creative modes of storytelling to gain and contribute to greater conocimiento and collective healing (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2009; Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018). The researcher engages in self-examination as she conducts an ethnographic case study (Creswell, 2013) of fourth graders in a New York City Spanish/English DLB public school. Data collection and analysis are informed by conocimiento del cuerpo (Juarez Mendoza & Aponte, 2021), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001), and moment analysis (Li Wei, 2011).

Data
Data includes classroom observations, students’ schoolwork, and student interviews juxtaposed with the author’s testimonios, flashbacks, family photos, journal entries, poems, letters, and field memos.

Results
The children’s and the authors’ resistance to, alongside their internalization of, raciolinguistic dialogues of inferiority point to the complicated tensions experienced as one aims to survive within hegemonic structures. This study shows that even bilingual education programs that aim to sustain minoritized languages and cultures can inadvertently work to eradicate the home language practices of raciolinguistically marginalized students who do not speak the standardized version of the colonizer’s language.

Significance
This study highlights the need to repair wounds caused by raciolinguistic ideologies and remedy DLB education to bring about the anti-racist bilingual schooling that civil rights activists envisioned— a bilingual education that averts, rather than reproduces, narratives of deficiency and inferiority that raciolinguistically marginalized children are constantly fed in a white supremacist society that privileges colonial languages in standardized forms only. By centering a relational/collective theorizing that lives between the author’s lived experiences and the students’ lived experiences, this study compels us to think about bilingual education research “in imaginative ways that integrate self-care and collective healing of traumatic wounds” (Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018, p. 345).

Author

• Gladys Yacely Aponte, Arizona State University