Discourses of Racist Nativism in California Public Education: English Dominance as Racist Nativist Microaggressions

Abstract

This article uses a Latina/o critical theory framework (LatCrit), as a branch of critical race theory (CRT) in education, to understand how discourses of racist nativism—the institutionalized ways people perceive, understand and make sense of contemporary US immigration, that justifies native (white) dominance, and reinforces hegemonic power—emerge in California public K–12 education for Chicana students. I use data from 40 testimonio interviews with 20 undocumented and US-born Chicana students, to show how racist nativist discourses have been institutionalized in California public education by English hegemony, that maintains social, political, and economic dominance over Latina/o students and communities, regardless of actual nativity. Teacher practices of English dominance is a manifestation of this hegemony that can be articulated by the concept of racist nativist microaggression—systemic, everyday forms of racist nativism that are subtle, layered, and cumulative verbal and non-verbal assaults directed toward People of Color.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the mujeres that shared their lives through the process of testimonio during this study. I also thank Dr. Daniel Solorzano, Professor of Social Science and Comparative Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles for his foundational work on racial microaggressions in education and unending support. Also, an appreciation for Mr. Raúl Alarcon, demonstration teacher in the Learning in Two Languages (LTL) program for the UCLA Lab School for sharing his resources.

Notes

1. Racist nativism is a conceptual tool that has been developed from critical race theory (CRT) and Latina/o critical theory (LatCrit) to understand the experiences of Latinas/os at the intersection of race, immigration status, class, gender, and other marginalized positionalities. This concept is further discussed in the “theoretical framework” section.

2. Generally, the term hegemony refers to the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971) who used the term to describe how an elite ruling class could politically and economically control the working class segment of a capitalist society through ideological coercion. Specifically, he links the role of language in the process of ideological domination.

3. The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act was introduced as Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) and signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer in April 2010. An injunction has been filed, blocking the implementation of the law and challenging its constitutionality. See the official Website for Arizona Senator Russell Pearce, author of SB 1070, for the law's rationale focusing on the criminality and danger of undocumented immigrants crossing the Arizona-México border, at http://russellpearce.com.

4. Henry Giroux (2001) explains how social and cultural theories of reproduction help us understand how schools “utilize their material and ideological resources” to maintain and reproduce “the social relations and attitudes needed to sustain the social divisions of labor necessary for the existing relations of production” (76).

5. I use the terms English as hegemony and the hegemony of English interchangeably throughout this article.

6. See generally, Gándara and Hopkins (2010) on the history of restrictive language policies for EL students. See Wentworth, Pellegrin, Thompson, and Hakuta (2010) for results of their study on EL student achievement since the implementation of Prop 227 in California.

7. Linguistic terrorism (Anzaldúa 1999), linguistic colonialism (Freire 1985), linguistic hegemony (Shannon 1995), and language restrictionism (Galindo and Vigil 2000) are some of the terms other scholars have used to explain the relationship between language, power, and domination in the subjugation of People of Color.

8. All names used in this article have been changed to protect confidentiality, including those of participants, schools, and teachers the students described. Before describing each woman's experience, I provide a brief background about of the student, which provides a context to their K-12 schooling experiences.

9. California Education Code uses the terms bilingual education and native language instruction interchangeably, defining bilingual education as, “a language acquisition process for pupils in which much or all instruction, textbooks, and teaching materials are in the child's native language” (See section 306, article 3, part e).

10. The father's educational advocacy to place his daughter in English-instruction classrooms could also be understood as a response to racist nativist microaggressions, an element of Solorzano's (2010) racial microaggressions model presented earlier. It also challenges deficit perspectives of Latina/o families as uncaring and uninvolved in their children's education.

11. Under California Education Code that was implemented as a result of Prop 227, Yadira had a right to participate in a sheltered/structured English immersion program for at least her first year of attending public school and receive classroom instruction in her home language (See article 305). Thus, her teacher should have translated classroom instruction for Yadira. However, the rhetoric of English-only instruction that educational policies like Prop 227 produce can disarticulate teacher practices and immigrant student's rights.

12. Understanding racism as a function of power and ideologically imbedded in white supremacy, People of Color cannot be racist. However, People of Color can internalize that very notions of inferiority oppress them and use these same practices against other People of Color. In previous work, I have used the term internalized racist nativism to describe the ways Latina/o students come to accept racist nativism and commit racist nativist acts (Pérez Huber 2010). The actions of the African American students in Lorena's testimonio could be explained by the same concept.