Linguistic Confinement: Rethinking the Racialized Interplay between Educational Language Learning and Carcerality

ABSTRACT

Language assessments are often framed as benign mechanisms needed to objectively classify people’s linguistic proficiencies. In this article, I argue for the need to critically re-examine how purportedly objective institutional language assessments and our participation in them deceptively reify historical and contemporary inequities. I offer the analytic of linguistic confinement that is structured by an ideological bundle of race, language, and disability. Linguistic confinement aims to re-think the racialized interplay between educational language learning and carcerality. I show this through examination of the ‘long-term English learner’ (LTEL) category. More specifically, I explore what insights we gain into the experiences of racialized students when we consider how colonial and carceral strategies structure educational language learning and access to broader learning opportunities. By doing this, I urge educational language scholars to attend to carcerality and scholars of carcerality to reckon with language.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• language ideology
• disability
• carcerality
• linguistic confinement
• english language learners

Acknowledgements

First, I’d like to thank the generous guidance and support provided by the editorial team, including the anonymous reviewers. Second, I thank my faculty advisors and mentors Jonathan Rosa, Guadalupe Valdés, Subini Annamma, Matthew Clair, and Asad Asad for their helpful suggestions on refining various components of the arguments included throughout this manuscript. I’d also like to thank Sam Weinberg for the professional nudge to push this work along the publishing pipeline. I, of course, thank my friends and colleagues who supported me with different aspects of this work, including pushing ideas forward with their wonderful insights, Victoria Melgarejo, China Stepter, Alé Romero, Uriel Serrano, Brianna Harvey, Danielle Greene, and other folks in the Praxis Collective. Lastly, this work would not have been possible without Blanca and Martin Cabral, my parents, who envisioned a better educational trajectory for me that is continuing to materialize. The struggle continues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Ethnoracial is a descriptor term incorporating understandings of race/ethnicity as categories and structures. I also use ‘racialized’ to index U.S.-based racialization processes of ethnoracial categories for those placed into them. For example, I use the term ‘Latinx’ in this article, which is one ethnoracial category that “does not have a country or fixed geography” (Milian, 2019, p. 5), but is instead an index towards a broader political project of Latinidad that does not essentialize one’s personhood; for example, it is a racialization process that happens to people, it does not signal who someone is (Beltrán, 2010).

2. I explicitly use ‘Latinx-identified’ to signal institutional practices that often homogenize the heterogeneity of racialized populations and clump them together as ‘Latinx’. In fact, while the project I worked on in Northern California used the broader ‘Latinx’ term, most of our participants identified as migrant Mexican or Mexican-American whose heritage language was Spanish. This specific population is central to my theorization of linguistic confinement because of their precarious vulnerability to historically-informed experiences of carceral-colonial statecraft in California. However, there is apt diversity in the racialized category of Latinx (e.g. the many Central American nationalities and ethno-racial categories). Similarly, the English learner category encompasses broader heritage languages from other global hemispheres and nation-states. For this article, my initial focus is Mexican/Mexican-American youth who are often Spanish language heritage speakers.

3. This article is informed by working in a multiple-year research partnership where I collaboratively studied institutional language designations and instruction. I am indebted to the PI’s and research team for their guidance that served as an entry point into this conceptual work. I do not include any original empirical data from that project here.

4. Thanks to Guadalupe Valdés for recommending that I trace the history of educational language designations prior to moving forward in understanding the contemporary moment of the LTEL category’s institutionalization.

5. See Lau v. Nichols court case decision of 1974 and Castañeda v. Pickard of 1981 as examples.

6. In California, the LTEL category is loosely defined as an “English learner who is enrolled in any of grades 6 to 12, inclusive, has been enrolled in schools in the United States for more than six years, has remained at the same English language proficiency level for two or more consecutive years as determined by the English language development test” (California Education Code §313.1; California A.B. 2193, 2012).

7. I employ intersectionality in the Black feminist tradition. I cite Crenshaw, (1989), noting that while I do not use gender as a primary analytical focus, applying a gendered lens to this work is necessary for future research, although it is not within the scope of this article.

8. I refrain from misusing intersectionality or diluting its complexity and rigor. I view the mischaracterization of the problem in institutional educational language learning through a feminist vantage point of both/and – race, language, and disability – in lieu of either/or (Alway, 1995; Collins, 1990). This moves discourse forward in directions and theoretical possibilities that we have been unable to reach by viewing educational language learning in narrow, singular ways.

9. There are ongoing efforts towards abolishing the ‘LTO’ category and condition within prison settings, along with the long-term sentencing process associated with it.

10. Consider the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, which led to militant and bloated funding streams for the Border Patrol agency and the creation and maintenance of the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) force in 2003, along with the continuation of detention centers (De Genova, 2002; Hernández, 2009; Massey et al., 2016).