El Limbo de la Bemba: Puerto Rico Educators’ Resisting Cultural Erasure in Language Education Spaces

• In Event: Critical Ethnography to Interrogate, Organize and Imagine Justicia: Learning in, from, with, and amongst comunidad

Abstract

Language is racialized through standardized practices, isolating learners from their identity, especially within the trials of the oldest colony (Martinez-Fernandez & Monge, 1998), Puerto Rico. Language educational settings and throughout dominant curricula, students’ home language is expected to be lost or “fixed” to obtain standard language proficiency (Flores & Rosa, 2015). This study offers insight into Puerto Rican educators' approaches within language education classes, fostering cultural and linguistic identity through Translanguaging practices (Garcia & Wei, 2015). Exploring ways the United States’ ideologies have mapped the language education of Puerto Rico and how race or raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015) impact the curriculum today through educators’ perspectives, interweaving languages, without constraints, and implementing liberating practices (España & Herrera, 2020). Focusing on language as a social act (Otheguy, Garcia, & Reid, 2015; Vygotsky, 1978), these educators and emergent bilinguals co-construct classes to foster cultural customs and language practices often forgotten or erased by the United States’ hegemonic influences.

Author

• Sheila Marie Feliciano, Rutgers University