Power Dynamics of Belonging and Rejection at School for Spanish Heritage Speakers

• In Event: Creando Senderos en Comunidad: Working Towards Lifelong Language Learning with Latine Communities

Abstract

This study investigates how heritage speakers (HS) of Spanish in the U.S. reflect on their K-12 schooling experiences, focusing on how school environments either foster or constrain their linguistic agency and identity formation. The paper centers three key schooling experiences: (1) collaborative power dynamics, (2) coercive language suppression, and a (3) later shift away from Spanish, to explore how institutional norms shape students’ language investment and sense of belonging.

The study is grounded in Critical Language Awareness (CLA), raciolinguistics, and Norton’s (2013) theory of language investment and identity. These frameworks guide an analysis of how linguistic hierarchies, ideologies, and educational structures mediate access to language legitimacy, shaping students’ perceptions of their bilingualism as either valued or stigmatized. The notion of critical linguistic agency (Cibils, 2011) is employed to understand students’ ability to critically navigate and contest these power structures.

Using qualitative inquiry, the study draws from testimonios, linguistic autobiographies, and semi-structured interviews with 10 college-aged Latine students reflecting on their K-12 schooling. Group conversations were also held to collaboratively reflect on emerging themes and deepen the interpretive process. This narrative methodology centers lived experiences as valid knowledge and highlights agentive meaning-making in participants’ reflections. Primary data sources include oral interviews and written linguistic autobiographies. Participants shared experiences across diverse school settings (urban and suburban) in the Chicago area. These sources provided rich insights into how students negotiated language use across elementary, middle, and high school, as well as how they interpreted institutional responses to their bilingualism.

Findings highlight a continuum of linguistic agency shaped by institutional practices. In schools that fostered translanguaging and inclusivity, students developed a “shield” of linguistic confidence, viewing Spanish as a legitimate and empowering part of their identity. In contrast, participants in English-dominant schools experienced subtle and overt forms of linguistic marginalization, often internalizing language hierarchies that pushed Spanish into private domains and created fragmented identities. High school emerged as a particularly fraught site: students either distanced themselves from Spanish or experienced erasure of their home varieties in second-language curricula, leading to diminished confidence and investment. Participants exercised varying degrees of critical agency—from resistance and advocacy to tactical silence—demonstrating that school contexts mediate both the form and reach of student agency.

This study contributes to educational research by revealing how institutional language ideologies and power dynamics shape the linguistic identities of heritage speakers. It challenges prevailing models of language education that ignore students’ sociocultural and emotional investments in Spanish, and calls for systemic change toward truly inclusive, justice-oriented schooling. By illuminating how heritage speakers interpret and resist linguistic marginalization, this work aligns with AERA’s 2026 theme of “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures,” advocating for educational spaces where multilingualism and Latinidad are affirmed, visible, and celebrated.

Author

• Lidia Aguilera, University of Illinois at Chicago