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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The historicization of bilingual education highlights Latinx communities' creation of safe spaces, or home-lands, amid historical discrimination. This legacy of resistance illustrates the quest for cultural and linguistic self-determination. Despite neoliberal pressures in schools, these communities strive to build educational environments that honor their cultural and linguistic heritage. The panel examines the collective construction of bilingual spaces as a legacy of transformational resilience to resist epistemicide. We center this ongoing communal home-building through ancestral healing practices to address and remedy the legacy of colonialism in education, empowering Latinx communities in bilingual settings in and outside schools. Aligned with the AERA 2025 theme, this panel seeks to reclaim this inherited history and demand autonomy toward just bilingual/bicultural education futures.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Bilingual Education Research

Chair

• Melissa A. Garza, Texas A&M University - San Antonio

Papers

• Abuelitas Speak: Cafecitos as a Conduit for Latinx Family Engagement Through Community Cultural Wealth - Katherine Espinoza-Talati, Trinity University

• The Second Cortina War, Texas Escuelitas, and Bilingual Maestras: The Racial Geography of Bilingual Education on the Border - Enrique David Degollado, University of Iowa

• Healing Intergenerational Sustos in Otherwise Communal Bilingual Educational Spaces: A Case in the Midwest - Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota

• Storying healing connections to lands: Latine/x children co-constructing spaces for them - Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Discussant

• Raul Olmo Fregoso Bailón, University of Nevada - Reno