“Se me sale el Español y se me pega el Spanglish!”: Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates’ racialized notions of bilingualism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways Latino/a bilingual teacher candidates (TCs) talk about their own and others’ language practices and the ways this talk reflects and reproduces racialized notions of bilingualism. Drawing on data from a one-year critical ethnography at a Hispanic-serving institution in Southwest Texas, this article demonstrates that TCs have been socialized into raciolinguistic ideologies of Spanish as language to be contained and Spanglish/code-switching as disease or bad habit. TCs’ unconscious adoption of raciolinguistic ideologies was evident in their use of the phrases ‘se me sale’ and ‘se me pega’ to characterize fluid and dynamic languaging in a variety of settings. Findings have implications for bilingual teacher education research and practice, as regards bringing attention to the ways TCs depict the language practices of racialized individuals and encouraging TCs to critically engage marginalizing notions of bilingualism that might be in circulation in Latinx homes and communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Latina/o bilinguals
• bilingual teacher education
• raciolinguistic ideologies
• raciolinguistic metacommentary
• racialized notions of bilingualism

Acknowledgments

Part of this research was supported by The International Research Foundation (TIRF) for English Language Education via a doctoral dissertation grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use Latinx as an inclusive term for non-gender conforming individuals. I employ Latina/o to refer to the participants in this study, all of whom self-identified as either male or female. Occasionally, I also employ the term Hispanic when refering to census data and institutional classifications (e.g., Hispanic-serving). Also, in this study I understand Latina/o/x as a racial category referring to individuals who have historically been the subject of multiple colonialisms: the Spanish conquest on the one hand and U.S. imperialism on the other (Chávez-Moreno, 2021b).

2. I acknowledge that many language scholars have moved from framing fluid language practices as Spanglish to translanguaging. However, in this article I continue to use Spanglish because that was the term participants used to describe their own and others’ linguistic repertoires.

3. I acknowledge that the Mexican American and Chicana/o/x community has gradually taken the concept of Spanglish and given it a positive meaning that celebrates and takes pride in their linguistic and cultural hybridity. However, in the broader study from which this article draws, most participants (except for two) mobilized negative meanings of the term in connection to U.S. Latinxs’ language practices.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The International Research Foundation (TIRF) for English Language Education.