(Dis)Possessing Racial and Linguistic Identities: Rethinking Colonialism in the Learning of Latinidad

• In Event: Unsettling Educations: Language, Race, and Learning in White Settler Colonial Societies

Abstract

This presentation analyzes legacies of colonialism that shape the joint learning of race and language in the context a predominantly Latinx Chicago public high school. Drawing from over two years of ethnographic research, it explores how (trans)national formations of race and (pan)ethnicity are negotiated locally in Chicago through historically situated interrelations between self-identified Mexican and Puerto Rican students. Ideological constructions of varieties of English and Spanish play an important role to unify and distinguish between these Latinx subgroups. A colonial lens makes it possible to understand modes of marginalization that continually frame Latinx students’ Spanish and English use as deficient on the one hand, and make precarious their claims to Americanness, Latinidad, Puerto Ricanness, and Mexicanness on the other. Thus, dispossession (Aparicio 2000), a chief characteristic of colonialism, powerfully shapes the learning of race and language in this setting.

Insofar as Latinx identities are produced as part of a U.S. settler colonial history and a broader European colonial history in Latin America, we must continually attend to the ways that these forms of colonialism shape perceptions of Latinx bodies in relation to an imagined phenotypic spectrum from Blackness to whiteness (Fergus, Noguera, and Martin 2010) and Latinx communicative practices in relation to an imagined linguistic spectrum from Spanish to English (Valdés 2016). These spectra hinge on the reproduction of anti-Blackness and the erasure of Indigeneity, and as such should be interrogated as racialized colonial logics rather than empirical rubrics within which bodies and linguistic practices can be objectively situated. Millions of people are perceived from some perspectives as Indigenous, Afro-Latinx, white, and/or some combination thereof, yet self-identify as “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or “Spanish”; similarly, millions of Latinxs identify as monolingual English users or English-dominant, yet often engage in practices that could be classified as bilingual or multilingual. The inability to apprehend the role of colonialism in shaping the learning of these modes of identification leads to the indictment of individuals and populations as suffering from racial and linguistic denial, rather than the indictment of colonialism as an historical and contemporary power formation that profoundly circumscribes desirable and possible subjectivities and language practices. By attending to the rearticulation of colonial hierarchies in the learning of race, language, and Latinidad, this presentation proposes new ways of conceptualizing the reproduction of educational inequity.

Author

• Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University