Transformative Translanguaging Espacios: Latinx Students and their Teachers Rompiendo Fronteras sin Miedo 9781788926065

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Transformative Translanguaging Espacios

BILINGUAL EDUCATION & BILINGUALISM Series Editors: Nancy H. Hornberger (University of Pennsylvania, USA) and Wayne E. Wright (Purdue University, USA) Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is an international, multidisciplinary series publishing research on the philosophy, politics, policy, provision and practice of language planning, Indigenous and minority language education, multilingualism, multiculturalism, biliteracy, bilingualism and bilingual education. The series aims to mirror current debates and discussions. New proposals for single-authored, multiple-authored or edited books in the series are warmly welcomed, in any of the following categories or others authors may propose: overview or introductory texts; course readers or general reference texts; focus books on particular multilingual education program types; school-based case studies; national case studies; collected cases with a clear programmatic or conceptual theme; and professional education manuals. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

BILINGUAL EDUCATION & BILINGUALISM: 133

Transformative Translanguaging Espacios Latinx Students and their Teachers Rompiendo Fronteras sin Miedo Edited by

Maite T. Sánchez and Ofelia García

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/SANCHE6058 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Sánchez, Maite T., editor. | García, Ofelia, editor. Title: Transformative Translanguaging Espacios: Latinx students and their Teachers Rompiendo Fronteras sin Miedo/Edited by Maite T. Sánchez and Ofelia García. Description: Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, 2022. | Series: Bilingual Education & Bilingualism: 133 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book shows the transformative power of placing translanguaging at the center of teaching and learning. It shows how the centering of racialized Latinx bilingual students, including their knowledge systems and cultural and linguistic practices, transforms the monolingual-white supremacy ideology of many educational spaces”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021032527 (print) | LCCN 2021032528 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788926041 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788926058 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788926065 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788926072 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic Americans—Education. | Hispanic Americans— Languages. | Translanguaging (Linguistics) | Education, Bilingual—United States. | Language and education—United States. Classification: LCC LC2669 .T73 2022 (print) | LCC LC2669 (ebook) | DDC 371.829/68073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032527 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032528 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-605-8 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-604-1 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2022 Maite T. Sánchez, Ofelia García and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India.

A mi mamá, porque todos sus sacrificios no han sido en vano. A Tomás, por el translanguaging de nuestra vida. A Florencia y Cayetano, porque sin miedo, son el presente y el futuro del multilingüismo. A Margarita, porque su fuerza es una inspiración. Maite A todos los que llevamos Maite y yo en nuestros translanguaging tejidos – colegas, investigadores, maestros, estudiantes y sobre todo amigos y familia – who through commitment y amor have joined us in this Pa’lante! Ofelia

Contents

Agradecimientos Contributors Foreword: The Transformative Possibilities of Translanguaging Nelson Flores Introducción: Transforming Educational Espacios – Translanguaging Sin Miedo Maite T. Sánchez and Ofelia García

ix xi xix

1

Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation 1

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs: Translanguaging Tejidos Ofelia García and Maite T. Sánchez

19

Part 2: Good and Agency ¿Para Quién? 2

3

‘Well Good Para Quién?’: Disrupting Two-Way Bilingual Education Gentrification and Reclaiming Space through a Critical Translanguaging Pedagogy Dan Heiman, Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon and Andrew H. Hurie

47

‘They Are Going to Forget about Us’: Translanguaging and Student Agency in a Gentrifying Neighborhood Luis E. Poza and Aaron Stites

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Part 3: Possibilities from the Fronteras 4

5

Prefiguring Translingual Possibilities: The Transformative Potential of Translanguaging for Dual Language Bilingual Education Ramón Antonio Martínez, Victoria Melgarejo Vieyra, Neida Basheer Ahmad and Jessica Lee Stovall

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Translanguaging and Other Forms of Capital in Dual Language Bilingual Education: Lessons from la Frontera María Teresa (Mayte) de la Piedra and Alberto Esquinca

113

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6

Student Inquiry into the Language Practices de sus Comunidades: Rompiendo Fronteras in a Dual Language Bilingual School 134 Maite T. Sánchez, Ivana Espinet and Victoria Hunt

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An Experienced Bilingual Latina Teacher and Pre-K Latinx Students in the Borderlands: Translanguaging as Humanizing Pedagogy Suzanne García-Mateus, Kathryn I. Henderson, Mónica Téllez-Arsté and Deborah K. Palmer

156

Part 4: Corridos y Cuentos Across and Beyond 8

Collaborative Corridos: Ballads of Unity and Justice Cati V. de los Ríos and Kate Seltzer

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Critical Translanguaging Literacies and Latinx Children’s Literature: Making Space for a Transformative and Liberating Pedagogy Luz Yadira Herrera and Carla España

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Part 5: Raising the Potencial of ‘Los Otros’ Latinx Bilingual Children and Youth 10 The US Latinx Deaf Communities: Situating and Envisioning the Transformative Potential of Translanguaging Maribel Gárate-Estes, Gloshanda L. Lawyer and Carla García-Fernández 11 What We Experience is What We Value: Perceptions of Home Language Practices by Latinx Emergent Bilinguals Labeled as Disabled María Cioè-Peña and Rebecca E. Linares

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Part 6: Conclusión 12 A Path Pa’lante! Amplifying Translanguaging Espacios Sin Miedo Maite T. Sánchez Afterword – No Quiero Que Me Le Vayan A Hacer Burla: Issues to Ponder and Consider in the Context of Translanguaging Guadalupe Valdés

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Author Index

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Subject Index

305

Agradecimientos

We would like to agradecer the wonderful artistas that helped us with our book cover art. Ángela Paredes Montero designed the powerful image of Latinxs standing Sin Miedo; gracias por crearla y dárnosla con tanto desprendimiento. Gracias también a Florencia Blanco Sánchez and students in la maestra Ashley Busone Rodríguez’s classroom for drawing beautiful and inspiring images that while they didn’t end up in the book, we hope to use them in other projects. A big ¡gracias! to our blind peer reviewer who gave us thoughtful and detailed feedback that has helped strengthen the manuscript. Finally, Maite would like to thank Tatyana Kleyn, Sara Vogel, Kate Menken and Laura Scheiber for su apoyo y presencia during the preparation of this manuscript. MS & OG

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Contributors

Neida Basheer Ahmad is a doctoral student in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education program in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research explores the intersection of language and race and the ideologies related to this intersection with regard to the implementation and maintenance of restrictive language policies, as well as their influence on the schooling experiences of language-minoritized students of color. Neida is also concerned about asymmetrical power relationships in research and seeks to create reciprocal relationships with her research participants. Before beginning graduate school, she graduated from the University of Arizona with a BA in Spanish and Linguistics and BS in Psychology. Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon is an Associate Professor of Bilingual Education at Arizona State University. Her research interests center on critical ethnographic and anticolonial approaches to studying the cultural production, pedagogies, identity and agency enacted among historically marginalized communities and youth in bilingual, bicultural and borderlands contexts. María Cioè-Peña is an Assistant Professor and a Community-Engaged Teaching Fellow at Montclair State University. María earned her PhD in Urban Education from The Graduate Center – City University of New York, where she was also an Advanced Research Collaborative Fellow and a Presidential MAGNET Fellow. She is a bilingual/biliterate education researcher and educator who examines the intersections of disability, language, school–parent partnerships and education policy. Taking a sociolinguistic approach and stance, she pushes and reimagines the boundaries of inclusive spaces for minoritized children. Stemming from her experiences as a former bilingual special education teacher, María’s research focuses on bilingual children with dis/abilities, their families and their ability to access multilingual and inclusive learning spaces within public schools. Her interests are deeply rooted in political economy, raciolinguistic perspectives and critical dis/ability awareness within schools and families. Her book, (M)othering Labeled Children: Bilingualism and Disability in the Lives of Latinx Mothers, was published by Multilingual Matters in 2021. xi

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María Teresa (Mayte) de la Piedra is Professor of Bilingual Education at The University of Texas at El Paso, and a Peruvian educational anthropologist. Her research explores language and literacy practices in indigenous and immigrant communities. Her book Educating Across Borders studies the language and biliteracy practices of transfronterizxs or border crossers, documenting the multiple and complex ways children on the US–Mexico border use their knowledge of two languages, nations, educational contexts and cultural practices for learning. Mayte’s current ethnographic project centers on engineering education in dual language elementary classrooms. Cati V. de los Ríos is an Assistant Professor of Literacy, Reading, and Bi/ Multilingual Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Cati is a former ESL, Spanish and ethnic studies teacher in Massachusetts and California public schools. Her research interests include Latinx adolescent translingual and transnational literacies, critical digital literacies, youth community engagement and the teaching and learning in secondary ethnic studies classrooms. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). With her co-author, Kate Seltzer, she was awarded the 2018 Alan C. Purves Award and the 2019 Janet Emig Award. Some of Cati’s latest research can be found in Reading Research Quarterly, Harvard Educational Review and Journal of Literacy Research. Carla España, is a middle grade teacher, literacy consultant, researcher, author and co-founder of the En Comunidad Collective. She partners with K-12 schools and teacher preparation programs to support teachers, librarians, coaches and administrators. Her teaching, writing, research and workshops live at the intersection of critical literacies, bilingual/multilingual education, children’s literature, language ideologies, curriculum development and teacher education. Carla is the co-author of En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students with Luz Yadira Herrera. Ivana Espinet is an Assistant Professor at Kingsborough Community College. She holds a PhD in Urban Education from the CUNY Graduate Center and an MA in Instructional Technology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a former project director for the CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNYNYSIEB). Ivana is interested in the use of multimodal and collaborative methodologies to learn about emergent bilinguals in school and in outof-school programs. Alberto Esquinca is an Associate Professor in the Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education at San Diego State University.

Contributors

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His research interests are immigrant and transnational people’s languages, literacies and identity construction in educational contexts. In Alberto’s current research projects, he collaborates with dual language educators and engineering educators across the United States to identify and research equity-minded practices to best serve immigrant and working-class emergent bilinguals. Along with Mayte de la Piedra and Blanca Araujo, he co-authored Educating Across Borders. Nelson Flores is an Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the intersection of language, race and the political economy in shaping US educational policies and practices. Nelson has been the recipient of many academic awards, including the 2017 AERA Bilingual Education SIG Early Career Award, a 2017 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and the 2019 James Atlas Prize for Research on Language Planning and Policy in Educational Contexts. He also serves on several editorial boards including The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics and Multilingua. Maribel Gárate-Estes is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Education at Gallaudet University. She has two Master’s degrees: Deaf Education: Elementary and American Sign Language Linguistics, and a PhD in Deaf Education with a focus on Bilingual Education. Her research interests focus on the implementation of bilingual methodologies in ASL/ English bilingual classrooms for Deaf and Hard of Hearing children, and the ways in which teacher beliefs about Deaf bilingual education influence their practice. Maribel is a former K-8th grade ESL teacher for Deaf students. She is the co-editor of Maximizando el Potencial de los Niños, Jóvenes y Adultos Sordos, and author of ‘Educating children with cochlear implants in an ASL/English bilingual classroom’ and ‘Developing bilingual literacy in Deaf children’, among others. Her book, articles and book chapters have been published in the United States, Italy, Germany, Panama and Japan. Ofelia García is Professor Emerita in the PhD programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Ofelia has published widely in the areas of bilingualism/multilingualism and bilingual education, language education, language policy and sociology of language. The American Educational Research Association has awarded her three Lifetime Research Achievement Awards – Distinguished Contributions to Social Contexts in Education (2019), Bilingual Education (2017) and Second Language Acquisition Leadership through Research (2019). She is a member of the US National Academy of Education. For more, visit www.ofeliagarcia.org.

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Carla García-Fernández, a proud Deaf-Chicana, is an Assistant Professor in the Deaf Studies department at California State University Northridge. She holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction: Cultural Studies in Education with a graduate portfolio in Mexican American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. She received a Master’s degree in Language, Reading, & Culture: Bilingual and Multicultural Education from the University of Arizona. Carla’s research interests center around Critical Race Studies, Deaf-Latinx Critical Studies, Ethnic Studies and Multilingual and Multicultural Education. Using her Deaf-Latinx epistemology, she is currently working on incorporating Ethnic Studies with an intersectional lens in Critical Deaf Studies curriculum. She is one of the founders of Teachers for Social Justice: Deaf Learners organization. Suzanne García-Mateus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Leadership and Director of the Monterey Institute for English Learners (MIEL) at California State University – Monterey Bay. She completed her PhD (2016) at The University of Texas at Austin in the Bilingual/Bicultural program. After completing her MA in Elementary Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Suzanne taught as a bilingual educator for six years in various bilingual education models. Her dissertation entitled ‘She was born speaking English and Spanish! Co-constructing identities and exploring children’s bilingual practices in a two-way immersion program in central Texas’ won second place in the AERA Bilingual Sig outstanding dissertation awards (2018). Suzanne is published in journals such as The Urban Review, The Modern Language Journal and the Journal of Language, Identity & Education. Her education interests include examining the intersections between race, language and class in bilingual education contexts. Dan Heiman is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education in the Department of Teacher Education & Administration and a faculty affiliate in the Latina/o and Mexican-American Studies Program at the University of North Texas (Denton). A former bilingual teacher in El Paso, TX and a teacher educator at the University of Veracruz (México), his critical ethnographic research examines critical pedagogies, social justice, and acompañamiento in Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE), and bilingual teacher preparation contexts. Kathryn I. Henderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies, College of Education and Human Development at The University of Texas at San Antonio. She completed her PhD (2015) at The University of Texas at Austin in the Bilingual/ Bicultural program. After completing her BA (2004) at Washington University in St Louis, she taught elementary school for five years in Guadalajara, Mexico, during which time she earned her MA (2009) in

Contributors xv

Education. Her dissertation entitled ‘Dual language bilingual education program implementation, teacher language ideologies and local language policy’ won the AERA Bilingual Sig outstanding dissertation award (2016). Kathryn won the emerging scholar award from the International Society of Language Studies (ISLS) in 2018. She is published in journals such as The Modern Language Journal, Language Policy and the Bilingual Research Journal. Her education interests include language ideologies, language policy and dual language bilingual education programs. Luz Yadira Herrera is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education in the School of Education at California State University, Channel Islands and co-founder of the En Comunidad Collective. She has over 16 years of experience in the education of emergent bilinguals in New York and California. Luz’s teaching and research are in culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy, translanguaging, critical pedagogies and bilingual education policy. She is the co-author of En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students with Carla España. Victoria Hunt is a Principal for the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE). She is the founding principal of a full dual language bilingual elementary school in upper Manhattan. She began her career as a bilingual teacher in Houston Independent Schools in 1991. She has been both a teacher and an administrator for the NYCDOE for more than 20 years. Victoria holds a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2009. Her dissertation considers transformative leadership in established dual language programs. As Victoria leads her school through the COVID-19 pandemic, she is committed to continuing to push for racial, linguistic and academic equity for all the students and families in her school community. Andrew H. Hurie is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education at Carroll University in Wisconsin. His research uses qualitative methods and critical theories to examine multilingual education policies and practices, with specific attention to complementary and incommensurate visions of educational justice. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Andrew worked as a teacher assistant, bilingual teacher and school administrator in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Gloshanda L. Lawyer is an Assistant Professor of Languages and Cultures at Utah Valley University. She holds a Master’s degree in Special Education with dual teaching licenses in Deaf Education and Early Childhood Special Education. She has a PhD in Special Education with an emphasis on Deaf Education and Educational Interpreting. Gloshanda is a former

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PK-12 teacher of the Deaf and former Birth-3 early interventionist. Her research interests focus on multilingual and multimodal development in young children, colonization and intersectionality within US schooling systems, and theorizing decolonizing methodologies and pedagogies in teacher/interpreter preparation programs. She applies a Disability Justice framework to her teaching, research, invited presentations and workshops with the hopes of combating abled-normativity. Rebecca E. Linares is an Assistant Professor of Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy at the University of Colorado Boulder. Rebecca earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Through her research, Rebecca examines the bilingual and multilingual literacies, transnational literacy practices, and translanguaging practices of emergent multilingual adolescents, particularly those who are speakers of Indigenous languages. She is specifically interested in understanding how young people access and utilize literacy knowledge in their home language(s) to negotiate their participation in new and shifting cultural and linguistic landscapes. Ramón Antonio Martínez is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. His research explores the intersections of language, race and ideology in the public schooling experiences of students of color, with a particular focus on bi/multilingual Chicanx and Latinax children and youth. Ramón has published articles in journals such as Linguistics and Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Anthropology & Education Quarterly and Review of Research in Education. Before entering academia, he was an elementary school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Deborah K. Palmer is Professor of Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. A former dual language bilingual teacher in California and bilingual teacher educator in Texas, she conducts qualitative research in culturally/linguistically diverse settings with particular focus on equity in dual language bilingual programs. Deborah’s interests include bilingual education policy and politics, critical dual language bilingual education, teacher preparation for linguistically/culturally diverse teaching contexts, teacher advocacy and activism, and issues of language, power and identity in schools. Her 2018 book, Teacher Leadership for Social Change in Bilingual and Bicultural Education, published by Multilingual Matters, explores and defines teacher agency, activism and leadership for bilingual educators. Deborah’s articles have appeared in a range of journals, including Theory Into Practice, Review of Research in Education, TESOL Quarterly, Language Policy and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

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Luis E. Poza is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University. His research and teaching focus on how beliefs about language, race and nation operate within educational policy and practice to shape the schooling experiences of minoritized youth. Luis has published on parent involvement in the schooling of immigrant youth, on improving instructional practices and assessment for bilingual students and on better aligning policy and curriculum to new understandings of bilingualism and second language acquisition. Prior to his doctorate, Luis taught in a bilingual 3rd grade classroom in East Palo Alto, CA, and K-2 science and literacy in Harlem, New York City. He is a proud husband and father. Maite T. Sánchez is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She earned a PhD in Education from Boston College. Her research focuses on language education policy and practice, particularly related to Latinx and other minoritized bilingual students, translanguaging pedagogy and the experiences of novice bilingual education teachers entering the profession. Maite has published in journals such as Bilingual Research Journal, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and TESOL Quarterly. Kate Seltzer is an Assistant Professor of ESL and Bilingual Education at Rowan University. A former high school English teacher in New York City, she now teaches pre- and in-service teachers of bilingual students. Kate’s research seeks to translate theory to practice, demonstrating how language and literacy teachers can make space for students’ translanguaging and ways of knowing through critical, innovative and engaging classroom instruction. With her co-author Cati de los Ríos, Kate has been awarded the 2019 Alan C. Purves Award and the 2019 Janet Emig Award. She is coauthor of the book, The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning, and her research has been featured in Research in the Teaching of English, English Education and TESOL Quarterly. Aaron Stites has been a teacher for Denver Public Schools since 2014. For four years, he taught at a dual language K-8 school as a social studies teacher in Grades 7 and 8. For the last two years he has taught 9th grade social studies in a high school. He was inspired to teach based on his previous experiences working in educational programs in Latin America. As a teacher, Aaron focuses on engaging students in content by connecting concepts to the everyday lives and cultures of students. Further, he strives to encourage student voice in the classroom and student choice in terms of how students represent their learning. Aaron believes social studies cannot be taught in a scripted or generic manner but must incorporate the mosaic of lived experiences of students living in this country; students should be the drivers of curriculum and instruction.

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Jessica Lee Stovall is a doctoral student in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and a Teaching Fellow for Stanford University’s Teacher Education Program. Her current research explores Black teacher retention through examining how discourses of storytelling and ratification in Black teacher affinity groups reverse Black teacher attrition. Her previous work examined how teacher empathy can work to eliminate the racial predictability of student academic achievement. Before beginning her PhD, she received her MA in Literature at Northwestern University and taught English Language Arts for over a decade. Mónica Téllez-Arsté is a dual language bilingual educator at ‘Hillside’ Elementary in Austin, Texas. After she completed her BA at The University of Texas at Austin, she began her 20-year teaching career in bilingual/DL settings. She earned National Board Certification (2009) in Early Childhood Education. Mónica was selected to partake in Proyecto Maestría at The University of Texas at Austin and earned her MA in Bilingual/Bicultural Education. She became a recertified NB Teacher (2018) in Early Childhood. Mónica has been honored with various awards such as Campus Teacher of the Year (2005), Office Depot’s A Day Made Better Teacher Award (2007) and The University of Texas at Austin’s Zarrow Outstanding Teacher Award (2011) for her passion in hosting student teachers. Her teaching philosophy lies within the idea that language is culture and culture is self. She teaches her young learners to take pride in their heritage. Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Emerita at Stanford University. Working in the area of applied linguistics, much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities. Victoria Melgarejo Vieyra is a doctoral student in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education program in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research interests include raciolinguistic ideologies, bilingual education and the educational experiences of Latinx students. Her current research focuses on the classification of Latinx students of Spanish speaking heritage as long-term English language learners. Victoria’s previous research examined linguistic representation of Latinxs in popular media and the linguistic ideologies of bilingual and English-dominant Latinxs and their perceptions of Spanish as a marker of cultural identity. She is a former McNair Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she earned a BA in Linguistics and Spanish.

Foreword: The Transformative Possibilities of Translanguaging

Every so often we encounter a word that puts a name to a phenomenon that we have always experienced but have never known how to describe. Translanguaging has been one of those terms for me. It is a term that has helped me to make sense of the language practices of my childhood with English and Spanish coexisting in my home without any clearly demarcated boundaries between them. It has also helped me make sense of my experience as a high school ESL teacher who was forced to grapple with the tensions between the deficit discourses I relied on to make sense of the language practices of my bilingual Latinx students and their seamless ability to transcend the linguistic borders of English and Spanish on a daily basis. In short, it has provided me with tools for challenging the dominant language ideologies that pathologize the language practices of my community. For me, translanguaging has never simply been about theory – it has been about my life, my family, my students and my community. I was fi rst introduced to the term translanguaging when I took a doctoral seminar with Ofelia García in 2008. In this seminar, she shared chapter proofs from Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective, which would be published the following year. Reading these chapter proofs provided me with the first glimpse into what it would look like to reimagine conceptualizations of language in ways that start from the perspective of racialized bi/multilingual communities and the implications of this for how we think about language education as part of broader efforts at social transformation. In treating the perspective of racialized bi/multilingual communities as the norm, rather than the exception, the book pushed me to question a code-centric view of language that seeks to objectively document the linguistic features of purported switches between multiple named languages and instead to embrace a personcentric view of language that did not start from the perspective of named languages but rather from the meaning-making of racialized bilingual communities. This shift in perspective empowered me to develop a counternarrative to dominant conceptualizations of bilingualism that not only shaped my professional trajectory but also helped me to embrace my own bilingualism which, until that point, I often refused to acknowledge as xix

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being ‘truly’ bilingual. I came to realize that I, my students, my family and community, were, in fact, truly bilingual regardless of what dominant conceptualizations of bilingualism suggested. While the term resonated deeply with me, I could not predict how much the term would resonate with others after the publication of the book. Over the past decade it has gone from being a term used primarily to describe bilingual education policy and practice in the United States to a term used in applied linguistic studies of bi/multilingual both inside and outside of classrooms around the world. While there are many great opportunities that come with such a development, there are also dangers of the term being taken up as a buzzword in ways that remove it from the perspectives of the racialized bi/multilingual communities that were its original locus of enunciation in Bilingual Education in the 21st Century. Indeed, as I have seen the term being taken up over the past several years, I worry that this is precisely what is happening. The more I have heard the term used at academic conferences, the more disconnected it has seemed from this locus of enunciation. At fi rst, I assumed that I had become so acclimated to the term that it no longer felt revolutionary to me in the ways that it did before. But the more I have heard, the more I have realized that it has, in fact, begun to be used in ways that were disconnected from this locus of enunciation. Transformative Translanguaging Espacios brings translanguaging back to its roots and offers a path forward for those of us committed to embracing translanguaging not simply as an academic concept but rather as a political commitment. For one, I have noticed a growing trend of translanguaging being treated as an empirical question. The questions that emerge from this mindset are what counts as translanguaging (and implicitly what does not count as translanguaging) as well as attempts to objectively determine the linguistic features that constitute translanguaging. This ironically, reinscribes the code-centric view of language that translanguaging originally rejected. In contrast, Transformative Translanguaging Espacios treats translanguaging as a political stance that centers the perspectives and needs of Latinxs and other racialized bi/multilingual communities. This can be seen in the ways in which the various chapters in this volume both work to challenge existing social hierarchies through a focus on political and economic issues such as gentrification and immigration and center the voices and perspectives of Latinx students and families through the incorporation of cultural and linguistic knowledge such as corridos and cuentos. The overall message of the volume is clear: centering the cultural and linguistic practices of Latinx children through the incorporation of translanguaging pedagogy must occur in conjunction with the transformation of the broader society that has deficitized the language practices of these communities to begin with. Secondly, I have noticed a growing trend of translanguaging being treated as temporary scaffolding to dominant language practices. The questions that

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emerge from this mindset are attempts to determine ‘best practices’ for supporting bilingual Latinx and other racialized bi/multilingual students in mastering ‘academic language’ in English and sometimes their home language. This ironically, re-inscribes the deficit discourses that translanguaging originally rejected. Transformative Translanguaging Espacios is not interested in ‘best practices.’ Instead, it is interested in theorizing the relationship between linguistic transformation and broader social transformation and the role of education in facilitating both forms of transformation. From this perspective, the question is not whether translanguaging pedagogy is effective at increasing test scores or developing ‘balanced’ bilingualism, but the affordances of translanguaging pedagogy as a tool for a broader decolonial project that challenges dominant language ideologies and the broader structural processes that produce and reify these language ideologies. Thirdly, I have seen translanguaging increasingly used simply as a substitute for code-centric views of language often associated with theories of code-switching. This serves to frame translanguaging as the language practices of the Other – as something exotic in comparison to the monolingual white middle-class norm. Transformative Translanguaging Espacios rejects this exoticization by framing the cultural and linguistic practices of bilingual Latinx children as the norm. By doing so, it points to the ways in which translanguaging offers a new framework for understanding the language practices of all people. Everybody, whether they are positioned as monolingual, bilingual or multilingual, has to negotiate the sociohistorical construction of languages, dialects and registers, and often to do this in ways that deviate from the arbitrary linguistic boundaries produced by these sociohistorical constructions. The translanguaging perspective offered here provides a point of entry for critically interrogating why the linguistic border crossing of Latinx and other racialized bilingual communities are positioned as deviant while white middle-class communities who engage in similar linguistic border crossing continue to be perceived as the unmarked norm. In short, racialized bi/multilingual communities were the initial locus of enunciation from which contemporary theorization of translanguaging has emerged. Transformative Translanguaging Espacios uses the case of Latinxs in US schools as a point of entry for reconnecting translanguaging to this locus of enunciation. Through its unapologetic centering of the lives and experiences of Latinx bilingual children, through its insistence on the inherent worth of their cultural and linguistic practices and through its commitment to envisioning classroom spaces that normalize and extend their cultural and linguistic practices, this volume points to the transformative possibilities of translanguaging. Each of the chapters in this volume shows the other worlds that already exist if we know where to look for them and offers guidance on how to amplify these worlds in ways that lead to social transformation. Nelson Flores

Introducción: Transforming Educational Espacios – Translanguaging Sin Miedo Maite T. Sánchez and Ofelia García

The year 2020 was marked by increased attention to the institutionalized racism that has been normalized in the United States. During the COVID19 pandemic, Latinx and non-Latinx Blacks were the majority of the lowincome frontline or essential workers keeping the economy afloat, but many were left unemployed (Brown, 2020; Gould & Shierholz, 2020; Lopez et al., 2020). Latinx and non-Latinx Blacks were also more likely to get sick, and they had the highest rates of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 (CDC, 2021). In July 2020, the death rate of Latinx with COVID-19 aged under 60 was 25%, whereas for whites it was 6% (Oppel et al., 2020). Remote schooling has also left Latinx and non-Latinx Black children and youth more disconnected from their schools, teachers and classmates, given the disparities in access to computers, home internet connections and other types of support (Goldstein, 2020). Anti-racist work overall, and in education specifically, has also received widespread attention as the US population watched for eight minutes and 46 seconds the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. Whereas Black bodies have been killed by police brutality for centuries, this time the world paid attention (Ramsden, 2020). We stand for Black Lives Matter and join the fight to dismantle racist structures overall and specifically in educational settings. In this book we focus specifically on Latinx children and youth who have been minoritized and racialized through institutions that have inherited a legacy of ideologies based on monolingual white supremacy. In Chapter 1 we expand on the reasons why this book focuses on Latinx students. We consider the incorporation of translanguaging in schools as contributing to anti-racist work in education. Translanguaging, ‘the use of language as a dynamic repertoire and not as a system with socially and politically defi ned boundaries’ (García & Li, 2018: 1), has received increased attention in the education of minoritized bi/multilingual students (Vogel & García, 2017). But translanguaging cannot be considered 1

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a simple scaffold. We join efforts to reclaim the language practices of bilingual Latinx students and put them at the center of their schooling experiences. In this way, we envision translanguaging as a transformative endeavor which reframes solidified ideologies of double monolingualism and linguistic hierarchies that posit the language practices of white monolingual middle-class speakers as better than those of others. In centering the anti-racist aspects of translanguaging, we go beyond the focus of most English as a second language and bilingual education programs in the United States today, with their emphasis simply on the development of language(s) or on what Melamed (2011) has called ‘liberal multiculturalism.’ By liberal multiculturalism, Melamed refers to how the demands of minoritized bi/multilingual communities, especially for a just education for their children, have been ‘depoliticized’ by the political elite. As we will see, the opening up of some bilingual education spaces today, under the label of ‘dual language,’ can be interpreted as ‘liberal multiculturalism,’ ignoring the wishes of Latinx communities for a critical and fitting bilingual education for their children (for more on this, see Flores & García, 2017; García & Sung, 2018). Our Positionalities and Decisions as Editors

We are Latinas of different generations, countries of origin and immigration experience. And yet we have similarly experienced how raciolinguistic ideologies about US Latinx people have shaped our educational experiences, as students, teachers, teacher educators and scholars. Maite came to the United States from Peru to go to graduate school in Boston. Ofelia arrived in New York City at the age of 11 from Cuba. We met when Maite was hired as Project Director of CUNY-NYSIEB (City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals), a project in which Ofelia served as co-principal investigator (CUNY-NYSIEB, 2021; for more on CUNY-NYSIEB, visit www.cuny-nysieb.org). This edited volume is a result of our joint commitment to bring forth the perspectives and actions of Latinx students and their teachers with regards to translanguaging, as they work against the raciolinguistic ideologies that are prevalent in the school system. We have made a series of editorial decisions that point to our commitment to make this Latinx perspective central. We are using the gender inclusive term Latinx to join the movement that seeks to combat discrimination and invisibility through language, particularly of women and nonbinary people (Salinas & Lozano, 2019). By Latinx children and youth, we refer to students in the United States whose family backgrounds have connections with people of Latin American origin. Latinx is an umbrella term that includes a diverse group of individuals, those born in the United States or who emigrated to the United States from a variety of countries of origin, and those with membership, or inclusion, in other marginalized

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communities, as defi ned along the lines of race, linguistic practice, socioeconomic status and/or physical and intellectual ability. Most Latinx students attend schooling in the United States in English where their dynamic language practices are made invisible (García & Kleifgen, 2018; Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Martínez, 2013; Martínez et al., 2015). Even the few who attend bilingual education programs are often educated in the ideologies of double monolingualism and that of standardized mainstream forms of speech as the ideal (Howard et al., 2018; Sánchez et al., 2018). This leaves their dynamic language practices and those of their families as forms to be ashamed of and erased. In this book, we provide a window into some of those bilingual education classrooms that serve Latinx children and youth and have the goal of biliteracy in English and Spanish for Latinx students, although some of them also include white monolingual English speaking students. You will notice different labels to refer to those bilingual programs (for example, dual language, two-way, dual immersion); we have kept the label used by the authors of the chapters given that they correspond to how those classrooms are known in their schools and districts. These labels are in line with dominant tendencies in the past two decades to move away from those that were common in the 1980s and 1990s (‘developmental’ or ‘maintenance’ bilingual) that served minoritized and racialized bilingual communities (Crawford, 2004). The new labels underscore an effort to attract white monolingual English speaking communities and regain interest in bilingual education (Sánchez et al., 2018). Alongside the new labels came guidelines for teaching two languages separately using immersion pedagogies of double monolingualism that continue until today (Howard et al., 2018; Soltero, 2016). In this volume, however, these labels are accompanied by the word ‘bilingual’ to emphasize that these classrooms are in reality bilingual programs with translanguaging as the core. We follow critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991: 1244, footnote 6) in not capitalizing white because, as she says, ‘whites do not constitute a specific cultural group,’ and we use it for representations of white supremacy. However, we are capitalizing the labels Black and Brown to highlight how they have been constituted into specific racial and cultural groups through colonial ideologies and shared experience of racism. Writing is political and we are making a political statement with our choices of spelling and labels. Este Libro: Translanguaging Sin Miedo

The authors in this book include young Latinx scholars located in different areas of the United States who are courageously raising their voices sin miedo. Together with their co-authors, these Latinx scholars are distancing themselves from earlier scholarship about bilingualism that  looked at the communities as objects of study. Here, Latinx

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communities  – with their diversity – become the subjects, acting and doing bilingualism without being apologetic – sin miedo. The authors portray teachers and students who are opening up spaces for their own voices, despite language education policies that increasingly move their attention from Latinx communities to protect the privilege of others. Taking the perspective of language as performed by Latinx bilingual students, this book attempts to respond to the criticism raised by some authors (for example, Jaspers, 2018, 2019) of whether translanguaging could be transformative. The authors of the chapters show different instructional spaces that start with the bilingual students’ translanguaging, and not with named languages as state defi ned. In doing so, the authors show how it is possible to transform the monolingual-white supremacy of educational spaces into spaces where Latinx bilingual children and youth are at the center. These translanguaging spaces are meant to change the locus of enunciation from that of dominant institutions to that of minoritized bi/multilingual communities. Rooted in the border theory work of the Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 2002), the authors in this book use translanguaging theory alongside critical race theory (CRT), Latinx critical race theory (LatCrit) and decolonial theories to understand the transformative power of translanguaging in schools. Most of the chapters go in depth into classroom environments where different groups of Latinx children and/or youth and their language practices are at the center of teaching and learning in different ways, according to their context and characteristics. A few of the chapters, as we will see, offer examples of carefully designed translanguaging spaces, whereas others highlight unplanned moments of translanguaging. And a handful of chapters imagine how translanguaging pedagogy can be envisioned in the schooling of Latinx children and youth. The book has six parts in addition to the Foreword by Nelson Flores and the fi nal reflections by Guadalupe Valdés. We would like to agradecer sinceramente the collaboration to this endeavor of Nelson y Guadalupe. Their work has provided alternative spaces from which to view Latinx children and youth with respeto, and as gifted language architects. Part 1, ‘Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation’ includes the first chapter where we explore why we are focusing on Latinx children and how the concept of translanguaging might be able to crack the fronteras y muros that have been raised in their education. The chapter provides a critical historical framework to understand how the language of Latinx communities has been discursively ‘made’ and ‘re-made’ in order to minoritize and racialize Latinx people in the United States. We show how these language constructions, which leave out the ways in which Latinx bilingual communities ‘do’ language, have then been used in language education policy that produces failure among Latinx students. The chapter discusses the theory of

Introducción

5

translanguaging as a political act that centers Latinx lives, experiences, knowledge systems and especially language. Translanguaging disrupts the externally given and assigned constructions of Latinx language, highlighting how Latinx families ‘do’ language critically and differently from the given language that they are expected to ‘have’ in school. We also discuss the importance of opening up translanguaging spaces in the education of Latinx students, focusing on its transformative potential. Part 2, ‘Good and Agency ¿Para Quién?’ centers the political and critical work at the heart of translanguaging that this volume highlights. We start with these two chapters because we want to emphasize how translanguaging pedagogy is being used to critically question the relationship of the program to gentrification processes that are threatening different Latinx communities. Chapter 2, by Dan Heiman, Claudia CervantesSoon and Andrew Hurie, focuses on ways in which a Latina 5th grade teacher in a two-way bilingual education program in Central Texas enacted a critical translanguaging pedagogy through a unit on the gentrification of their neighborhood and school. Through analyses of the teacher’s and students’ discussions and reflections during classroom instruction, the authors show how the teacher actively worked to reclaim spaces for her Latinx students and families. The teacher transgressed the instructional spaces in one named language or the other and leveraged the authentic language practices of bilingual Latinx. In doing so, she decentered the hegemonic knowledge and dominance of white, monolingual English-speaking and affluent students. In Chapter 3, Luis Poza and Aaron Stites develop and implement a six-week unit in an 8th grade social studies classroom in a dual immersion bilingual program that connected settler colonialism and the current patterns of gentrification of the school’s neighborhood. Translanguaging pedagogies in the unit created a space in which dialogue, empathy and humanistic principles catalyzed learning, deeply interrogated social power relations, and positioned students as capable representatives for their families and community. The students became aware of how to advocate for more equitable approaches to community development that could foster integration without as much displacement and hardship for poor and working-class families. Part 3, ‘Possibilities from the Fronteras,’ includes four chapters where translanguaging pedagogy transcended different kind of fronteras in various types of dual language bilingual programs across the United States. While geographic location is one type of frontera that chapters in this section portray (at the border of US-Mexico, in diverse cities, and in more established Latinx communities), there are more subtle fronteras that strict language separation create in dual language programs and that teachers and students in these chapters push back on, crack and reconfigure. In Chapter 4, Ramón Antonio Martínez, Victoria Melgarejo Vieyra, Neida Basheer Ahmad and Jessica Lee Stovall describe examples of

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Transformative Translanguaging Espacios

spontaneous translanguaging by Latinx students and their teachers in a middle school English immersion and an early elementary dual language Spanish-English classroom. The instances of translanguaging that the authors identify happened despite the constraints of the monoglossic ideologies about language that the programs held. These examples provide glimpses of how students and teachers are disrupting and contesting the interactional norms prescribed by restrictive language policies of monoglossic schooling. They also provide a vision for the potential in dual language education where dynamic translingual spaces could facilitate learning, interaction and meaning making for bi/multilingual Latinx learners. Mayte de la Piedra and Alberto Esquinca in Chapter 5 zoomed in on a 4th grade science classroom in a dual language bilingual education program in El Paso, Texas. There, the transfronteriza teacher centers her pedagogy in Latinx ways of being and knowing through relationships of confianza, cariño and convivencia. Through what the authors, following Anzaldúa (2002), call a ‘nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy,’ transfronterizx students and their teacher question hegemonic stances toward language and ways of being and knowing. In this classroom centered on community cultural wealth, Latinx transfronterizx students position themselves as experts and claim the classroom as their space. In Chapter 6, Maite Sánchez, Ivana Espinet and Victoria Hunt analyze how teachers and (mostly) Latinx students in two 3rd grade classrooms in New York City explore and interrogate how language practices have been understood and performed in their dual language bilingual school. These educators designed and implemented a social study inquiry project that built a translanguaging space where flexible language practices, and the exploration of the role of language in people’s life, were the focus. This unit was transformative given that it disrupted the strict day-by-day language separation practices that have privileged monolingual spaces for ‘English’ and ‘Spanish’ time that center on monolingual, standardized named languages, and that have left invisible the dynamic language practices of the community and families. This transformative space expanded teachers’ and students’ understanding of their language practices and that of their communities by positioning the language practices of bi/multilingual people as the norm, rather than at the periphery and as undesirable. In so doing, teachers and students also started to interrogate connections between power and language. The last chapter of Part 3 (Chapter 7) by Suzanne García-Mateus, Kathryn Henderson, Mónica Téllez-Arsté and Deborah Palmer explores the linguistic experiences of pre-kindergarten Latinx students in a dual language bilingual education classroom fostered by a Latina teacher (Téllez-Arsté) in Central Texas. Through analysis of classroom interactions and interview data, the authors describe how the teacher opened translanguaging spaces centered on the children’s bilingual development

Introducción

7

that disrupted hegemonic ideologies of whiteness and monolingualism. Through these humanizing pedagogical approaches, the teacher developed, ratified and celebrated her Latinx students’ linguistic and cultural identities, alongside her own, and made her classroom a translanguaging and humanizing transformative space. It is revealing, however, that because of policy changes that moved the bilingual program toward a ‘two-way dual language’ model, Téllez-Arsté has found it more difficult to focus on her Latinx children’s languaging, as the program becomes more and more focused on the development of Spanish as a second language for the English-speaking children. Part 4, ‘Corridos y Cuentos Across and Beyond,’ includes two chapters that move away from bilingual education programs to center translanguaging pedagogy in the education of Latinx students across educational spaces. In Chapter 8, Cati de los Ríos and Kate Seltzer focus on a Chicanx/Latinx Studies curricular unit in an 11th grade classroom in the US Southwest that served both Latinx bilingual and African American students from working-class backgrounds. The Chicano teacher designed a transformative critical translanguaging space through the literary and oral history genre of corridos, which encouraged students of color to take risks and draw from their fluid linguistic and cultural repertoires to break out of the monoglossic confi nes of traditional school writing. Through this process, they engaged with humanizing counter-narratives of people of color, particularly at the intersections of Black and Latinx people’s sociopolitical experiences and histories. Luz Yadira Herrera and Carla España analyze in Chapter 9 the importance for teachers of developing a critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy by using textos that portray temas that are important to diff erent Latinx communities, and of leveraging the translanguaging that is prevalent in Latinx communities. They provide examples of elementary, middle and high school literature that can facilitate the inclusion of Latinx students’ translanguaging literacies in curriculum design and instruction. In this way, classroom spaces are transformed into translanguaging spaces in which the entire classroom community examines the histories, experiences and lives, as well as the language and cultural practices, of the Latinx and other minoritized bi/multilingual communities. In so doing, students are engaged in thinking about the ways in which the experiences of racialized communities, and in particular those of Latinx, have been silenced and stigmatized through textos. Part 5, ‘Raising the Potencial of “Los Otros” Latinx Bilingual Children and Youth,’ describes how translanguaging works in education taking place not only in schools but also in the family, and focuses on those Latinx students who have been further marginalized and perceived as ‘Los Otros’ – bilingual Deaf students and those who have also been

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labeled as disabled. In Chapter 10, Maribel Gárate-Estes, Gloshanda Lawyer and Carla García-Fernández advance the case of how translanguaging can be a transformative pedagogy for educating Deaf Latinx students in the United States. They fi rst focus on the historical and current contexts that impact the language use of bilingual Latinx Deaf students, and the complexity of Deaf Latinx identities and experiences. They zoom in on a 3rd grade classroom where the teacher enhanced the school experience of Latinx bilingual Deaf students by taking full advantage of the students’ translanguaging abilities. Finally, they envision how the education of all multilingual Deaf students could be transformed through translanguaging pedagogical practices. María Cioè-Peña and Rebecca Linares in Chapter 11 use interview data from three elementary school Latinx emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled. They show how these Latinx children have internalized regimented understanding of what language is, and when it is to be used. The authors indicate how despite the translanguaging spaces in which they lead their lives at home, these students do not perceive them as serving an educational purpose. The authors then envision how educational experiences could explicitly incorporate translanguaging spaces that validate students and families’ bilingualism and support these children’s academic development across spaces. Not only would this transform learning, but it would also change how Latinx children understand their own linguistic practices and those of their families, and the relationships that these practices facilitate. Maite Sánchez then closes the book in Chapter 12 with a last section, ‘A Path Pa’lante! Amplifying Translanguaging Espacios Sin Miedo.’ She provides questions for teachers and school leaders to support the amplification, sin miedo, of la transformación that translanguaging makes posible at the classroom and school levels. Translanguaging and Transformation: ‘Looking Under the Rug’ Sin Miedo

The chapters in this book do not simply look at translanguaging in classrooms as a linguistic issue, or as just fluid language practices. The struggles about the language of Latinx have never been solely about Spanish or solely about English. By drawing on translanguaging in the education of a group that has been colonized, minoritized, racialized and Otherized, Latinx students are able to, as a student in Chapter 8 by de los Ríos and Seltzer said, ‘look under the rug’ at their histories and linguistic and cultural practices that had been ‘left to rot.’ In Chapter 1 we discuss why and how Latinx experiences and students have been left to rot in education. Through the chapters of the book, authors have tried to answer the question: ‘Is it possible for translanguaging processes to help lift the rug and bring Latinx students into the light?

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9

The authors show what happens when educators use translanguaging as the lever to pull off this weight from Latinx bodies. In so doing, they show the transformative potential of translanguaging to, as we will see: (1) (2) (3) (4)

reconfigure power; disrupt established knowledge; develop Latinx students’ critical consciousness; and humanize education for Latinx students.

According to the authors of these chapters, the transformational promise of translanguaging is not limited to what happens in classrooms, as pedagogies and Latinx students’ consciousness are shaped. Translanguaging also reconfigures power and disrupts established knowledge. Many of the authors point to the connections, the interrelationships, the webs of associations between these four transformational strands. As García-Mateus, Henderson, Téllez-Arsté and Palmer say in Chapter 7, it all works ‘in tandem.’ Here, however, we attempt to disentangle these four strands, starting with the most ambitious of the claims about the transformational potential of translanguaging – reconfiguring power. Reconfiguring power: Reinventando who can produce knowledge, who can name it and who can access it

Chapter 2 by Heiman, Cervantes-Soon and Hurie shows how the teacher’s praxis in a thematic unit around gentrification challenges not only the oppressive regulation of Latinx students’ language practices, but also who can produce knowledge, who can name it and who can access it. In other words, the teacher’s translanguaging praxis is a way of making visible, as Cervantes-Soon said in 2018: the coloniality of power masked as modernity with all of its systems of racist and heteropatriarchal oppression and the colonial blindness prevalent among most educators, which perpetuates Eurocentrism and settler colonialism as the dominant ideological frameworks of U.S. education. (Cervantes-Soon, 2018: 865-866)

The effect of translanguaging in reconfiguring power and subverting power relations in US society is made evident in other classroom cases described in this book. This is attested in the resistance by teachers and students to the hegemonic power of English and of those whom Flores and Rosa (2015) have called ‘white listening subjects’ because they inhabit positions of institutionalized power. This is also evident in the struggles of the Deaf Latinx communities in Chapter 10 by Gárate-Estes, Lawyer and García-Fernández to resist the hegemonic power of spoken language, ensuring a space for American Sign Language as they engage in complex translanguaging. The chapters disrupt other patterns of power

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maintained through racism, sexism, audism and ableism. The authors question the authoritative power of white monolingual teachers and students with respect to bilingual Latinx students. By including all students, and nurturing comunidad, Latinx students take control of their lengua – they are able to act as themselves. In their translanguaging actions, they reconfigure the power dimensions that have operated in US society. Disrupting established knowledge: Opening sitios of ideological contestation where decolonized lenguas (and bodies) can unfold

In ‘opening up sitios where decolonized lenguas can unfold,’ as de la Piedra and Esquinca say in Chapter 5, the chapters foreground the knowledge systems and ancestral wisdom of comunidades and Latinx people. The opening up of these translanguaging sitios in school means that Latinx students are able to understand their home language practices from a strength-based perspective and contest raciolinguistic ideologies that have kept Latinx oppressed. The decolonized lenguas and hands unfold as communal testimony is privileged over institutional authority. This unfolding is a way of making space for multiplicities so that the lengua of Latinx students is seen as active and dynamic, rather than, as Cioè-Peña and Linares say, ‘static and (im)perfect.’ In order to start the unfolding, Latinx students need textos where they see themselves in action so that they can question their histories, experiences, lives, and language and cultural practices. To disrupt established knowledge, as Herrera and España state, Latinx students need textos about critical temas into which they can enter with all their network of meanings, with their translanguaging. The chapters in this book reject dominant idealized notions of language and of bilingual students. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the challenge that the chapters present to the established language policy of strict language separation of many ‘dual language’ bilingual education programs. In particular, the chapters in Part 3 show how in pre-schools (García-Mateus, Henderson, Téllez-Arsté & Palmer), elementary schools (de la Piedra & Esquinca; Sánchez, Espinet & Hunt), middle schools (Martínez, Vieyra, Ahmad & Stovall) and high schools (de los Ríos & Seltzer), teachers and students are engaging in translanguaging to work against the hegemony of standard named languages and of a language policy that does not allow Latinx students’ lenguas and bodies to unfold so as to act and be themselves. Translanguaging transforms established knowledge that has operated in society and in schools. Developing Latinx students’ critical consciousness: Unpacking good ¿Para quién?

The critical aspects of translanguaging are foregrounded in all chapters, as Latinx students are engaged in thinking about standard and

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‘academic’ language and language separation as good ¿para quién? This is a question raised by a student in Chapter 2 by Heiman, Cervantes-Soon and Hurie. As the students’ translanguaging unfolds through critical forms of education, issues that had been absent from the curriculum are named – race, privilege, power, oppression, colonialism, hegemony, sex and gender. The corrido of one of the students in Chapter 8 by de los Ríos and Seltzer suggests that through translanguaging: ‘We have realized an identity. And developed a new mentality.’ The greater critical consciousness driven by translanguaging is evident, for example, in the inquiry unit described by Sánchez, Espinet and Hunt in Chapter 6 as students question the reasons why English holds more power in the community, why the language policy of their school calls for separating languages, and why they are discouraged from accessing all they know as bilingual people. As students take control of their lengua in order to access and construct knowledge, they are able to perceive the force of the translanguaging housed within them. With a renewed critical consciousness, Latinx students push back against the silence and invisibility of who they have been. Translanguaging transforms Latinx students’ critical consciousness. Humanizing education for Latinx students: Relacionándonos con cariño, confianza and convivencia

The chapters also show that translanguaging opens up spaces for humanizing pedagogical practices. The ‘translanguaging nepantlera pedagogy’ that de la Piedra and Esquinca develop in Chapter 5 is based on cariño, confianza and convivencia. Translanguaging pedagogies in the chapters in the book create a pedagogical space in which, as Poza and Stites argue in Chapter 3, ‘dialogue, empathy and humanistic principles’ transform Latinx students’ position as ‘capable academics,’ and honor and affirm their human dignity. Translanguaging works in tandem with the humanizing pedagogical practices that García-Mateus, Henderson, Téllez-Arsté and Palmer describe in Chapter 7. Translanguaging enables the opening up of a humanizing education through which Latinx students can be educated with dignity. The transformative potential of translanguaging is evidenced in these chapters by the way in which power is reconfigured, traditional knowledge is disrupted, students develop a critical consciousness, and education takes on a humanizing dignity. It is true that, as Poza and Stites state in Chapter 3, translanguaging does not transform the material inequalities and systemic oppression that students face. Martínez and his colleagues insist in Chapter 4 that, even though translanguaging cannot transform the structural inequalities and histories of exclusion, marginalization and oppression that bilingual Latina/o/x students have endured,

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transformative is ‘an appropriate and necessary descriptor’ for translanguaging. The authors continue: ‘If we insist on excessively narrow criteria for what counts as “transformative,” we miss the transformative potential that is reflected in the everyday actions of students and their teachers’ (p. 110). The translanguaging spaces that the authors describe in these chapters provide students with the possibility of grappling with the tensions and power relations in society. Moving Translanguaging Beyond ‘Thin Ice’

In reflecting on the translanguaging actions of teachers and students in these chapters, we as co-editors often came back to the image of being ‘on thin ice.’ The teachers and students are moving gracefully across educational spaces that are reconfiguring power, disrupting established knowledge, developing critical consciousness and acting on a humanizing education. And yet, one gets the impression that despite the transformative potential of translanguaging, these Latinx teachers and students are ‘on thin ice,’ misunderstood by colleagues and peers, criticized by many. They are moving sin miedo, but their actions are risky and precarious because they are upsetting educational authorities and policymakers, and they are often seen as causing trouble. We write this as one of the greatest civil rights leaders, John Lewis, passed away. We are reminded of his call to get into ‘good trouble’ – ‘Speak up, speak out, get in the way,’ he said. Latinx scholars who are speaking out for translanguaging may be causing trouble, but it is ‘good trouble,’ and may be the only way to harden and thicken the ice in order to have a firm grounding in the future. Today, more than ever, opening up translanguaging spaces in the education of diverse groups of Latinx students is important because the times ‘they are a-changin’,’ as Bob Dylan once sang, and not always for the better. The spaces dedicated to the just education of Latinx students are shrinking, even with the explosion of ‘dual language’ bilingual classrooms. For example, in Chapter 7, Téllez-Arsté recounts how her experience teaching Latinx preschoolers in a bilingual education program 10 years ago has little to do with her experience today in a two-way ‘dual language’ program. To quote John Lewis again, ‘When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.’ Opening up translanguaging transformative espacios is a way of saying something sin miedo, and doing something sin miedo, about the unjust educational system to which Latinx students have been subjected. Transformations ¡Sin Miedo!

This book provides illustrative examples of the transformative power of translanguaging in the schooling of Latinx children and youth. For us,

Introducción

13

the most important transformation has been within ourselves as scholars. Without miedo we have been able to point out what we truly perceive – the giftedness of our diverse Latinx emergent bilingual students. Whereas much traditional scholarship has viewed these students through ‘language standards’ that are external to these students, we have focused our vision on the students themselves, as capable and gifted users of signed, verbal and written language, with multiple modes. When we focus on Latinx students in this way, we ‘see’ and ‘hear’ differently, without the ‘hegemonic eye’ or ‘ear’ with which these students’ potentials are invisibilized in schools. We do not reduce Latinx bilingual students to scores on standardized tests that are based on external standards that leave them out and that produce, as a result, the ‘word gap’ and ‘achievement gap.’ We look beyond the categories that have been created externally as a result of structural racism and heteropatriarchy. Sin miedo and with all our network of potential meanings, whatever these may be, we show here a different reality. We are no longer afraid to confront scholarship that has maintained the ‘abyssal thinking’ (Santos, 2014: 118) that legitimizes only the Eurocentric side of the line that was created by colonialism, and that validates only those who are white, monolingual, male, heterosexual, speakers and listeners with bodies that are considered abled. This book features scholars abriendo caminos hoy, as Gárate-Estes, Lawyer and García-Fernández say about the Latinx Deaf community. The authors of these chapters are sounding out their translanguaging practices, sometimes through signing, at other times through speech, storytelling, singing and art, and at yet other times through writing. As translanguaging disrupts traditional ideologies about ‘named languages,’ the adept signing and voicing actions of Latinx students clearly emerge. We hope that this then produces the force able to romper fronteras so that the social and political conditions of Latinx communities are also transformed. References Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, G. (2002) (Un)natural bridges, (un)safe spaces. In G. Anzaldúa and A.L. Keating (eds) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (pp. 1–5). New York: Routledge. Brown, S. (2020) How COVID-19 is affecting Black and Latino families’ employment and fi nancial well-being. Urban Wire: The Blog of the Urban Institute, 6 May. See https:// www.urban.org/urban-wire/how-covid-19-affecting-black-and-latino-families-employ ment-and-fi nancial-well-being. CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) (2021) Health equity considerations in racial and ethnic minority groups. CDC, 19 April. See https://www.cdc.gov/ coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html/. Cervantes-Soon, C.G. (2018) Using a Xicana feminist framework in bilingual teacher preparation: Toward an anticolonial path. The Urban Review 50 (5), 857–888.

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Crawford, J. (2004) Educating English Learners: Language Diversity in the Classroom (5th edn). (Formerly Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory, and Practice). Los Angeles, CA: Bilingual Educational Services. Crenshaw, K. (1991) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6), 1241–1299. doi:10.2307/1229039 CUNY-NYSIEB (2021) Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilinguals: Lessons from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project. New York: Routledge. Flores, N. and García, O. (2017) A critical review of bilingual education in the United States: From basements and pride to boutiques and profit. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 37, 14–29. doi:10.1017/S0267190517000162 Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015) Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Education Review 85 (2), 149–171. doi:10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 García, O. and Kleifgen, J. (2018) Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs and Practices for English Learners (2nd edn). New York: Teachers College Press. García, O. and Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging. In C. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (pp. 1–7). Oxford: Wiley. García, O. and Sung, K.K.-F. (2018) Critically assessing the 1968 Bilingual Education Act at 50 years: Taming tongues and Latinx communities. Bilingual Review Journal 4 (4), 318–333. doi:10.1080/15235882.2018.1529642 Goldstein, D. (2020) Research shows students falling months behind during virus disruptions. The New York Times, 10 June. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/ coronavirus-education-lost-learning.html. Gould, E. and Shierholz, H. (2020) Not everybody can work from home: Black and Hispanic workers are much less likely to be able to telework. Economic Policy Institute Blog, 19 March. See https://www.epi.org/blog/black-and-hispanic-workersare-much-less-likely-to-be-able-to-work-from-home/. Gutiérrez, K., Baquedano-López, P. and Tejeda, C. (1999) Rethinking diversity: Hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture and Activity 6 (4), 286–303. doi:10.1080/10749039909524733 Howard, E.R., Lindholm-Leary, K.J., Rogers, D., Olague, N., Medina, J., Kennedy, B., Sugarman, J. and Christian, D. (2018) Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education (3rd edn). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Jaspers, J. (2018) The transformative limits of translanguaging. Language & Communication 58, 1–10. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2017.12.001 Jaspers, J. (2019) Authority and morality in advocating heteroglossia. Language, Culture and Society 1 (1), 84–105. doi:10.1075/lcs.00005.jas Lopez, M.H., Rainie, L. and Budima, A. (2020) Financial and health impacts of COVID19 vary widely by race and ethnicity. Pew Research Center FactTank, 5 May. See https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/05/fi nancial-and-health-impactsof-covid-19-vary-widely-by-race-and-ethnicity/. Martínez, R.A. (2013) Reading the world in Spanglish: Hybrid language practices and ideological contestation in a sixth-grade English language arts classroom. Linguistics and Education 24 (3), 276–288. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2013.03.007 Martínez, R.A., Hikida, M. and Durán, L. (2015) Unpacking ideologies of linguistic purism: How dual language teachers make sense of everyday translanguaging. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (1), 26–42. doi:10.1080/19313152.20 14.977712 Melamed, J. (2011) Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Oppel Jr., R.A., Gebeloff, R., Lai, K.K.R., Wright, W. and Smith, M. (2020) The fullest look yet at the racial inequality of coronavirus. The New York Times, 5 July. See https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americanscdc-data.html.

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Ramsden, P. (2020) How the pandemic changed social media and George Floyd’s death created a collective conscience. The Conversation: Academic Rigour, Journalistic Flair, 15 June. See https://theconversation.com/how-the-pandemic-changed-socialmedia-and-george-floyds-death-created-a-collective-conscience-140104. Salinas Jr., C. and Lozano, A. (2019) Mapping and recontextualizing the evolution of the term Latinx: An environmental scanning in higher education. Journal of Latinos and Education 18 (4), 302–315. doi:10.1080/15348431.2017.1390464 Sánchez, M.T., García, O. and Solorza, C. (2018) Reframing language allocation in dual language bilingual education. Bilingual Research Journal 41 (1), 37–51. doi:10.1080/ 15235882.2017.1405098 Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge. Soltero, S.W. (2016) Dual Language Education: Program Design and Implementation. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Vogel, S. and García, O. (2017) Translanguaging. In G. Noblit (ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (pp. 1–21). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 The Making of the Language of US Latinxs: Translanguaging Tejidos Ofelia García and Maite T. Sánchez

Why does this book focus on US Latinx bilingual students? And what has been the role of language in drawing fronteras that have kept Latinx students from privilege and that have racialized them and enregistered them as deficient? How was the language of US Latinxs made and discursively constructed? These are the fi rst questions that we attempt to answer in this chapter. We do so by reviewing the history of Latinx communities in the United States and their education, as we focus on the relations between the making of language, race, and power. We argue that raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) have worked to produce Latinx people and their language as ‘mixed’ and ‘deficient’ in what Alim et al. (2016: 9) call ‘the White American imaginary.’ This chapter then goes on to analyze how the concept of translanguaging might be able to crack the many fronteras y muros that have been raised in US schools through language. In the lips and hands of bilingual Latinx children and youth, a different story of potential and renewal is weaved. This process is facilitated by teachers who understand and trust the bilingual Latinx students, and who sin miedo are now remaking Latinx language and freeing students from the strictures and muros to which their voices and bodies have been subjected. We point in this chapter to how translanguaging weaves new stories, opening up holes and spaces in the traditional narrative of Latinx failure, their ‘word gaps’ and ‘achievement gaps.’ In the entrelazados of the translanguaging tejidos/weaves, a different story emerges. Through the translanguaging tejidos, able Latinx voices and bodies with full human dignity reconfigure power, disrupt established narratives and knowledge, develop a critical consciousness, and push back the structural racism they have faced. Why Focus on Latinx Bilingual Students?

Our readers might wonder why the opening of translanguaging espacios in this book focuses on US Latinx bilingual students. After all, the 19

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Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

espacios for translanguaging in education have been shown to be good for all minoritized students, as de los Ríos and Seltzer claim in their chapter in this book. We focus on Latinx students, fi rst of all, because of their sheer numbers – 17.9 million students in 2016, making up 23% of all school-aged children and youth in the United States (Mather & Foxen, 2016). We also center Latinx students because of Latinx people’s long history in the United States. Along with Native Americans, many Spanish speakers were original settlers who were then conquered and colonized. Despite the rising number of Latinx immigrants in the adult population, 95% of the ‘Hispanic’ population under 18 years of age were born in the United States (US Census Bureau, 2018), and so they are ‘native speakers’ of English, and often also of Spanish. Finally, we focus on Latinx students because of the racialization processes to which they have been subjected, a process in which language has played an important part. The subjugation, oppression and murder of US Latinx people have been made more vivid than ever in recent years. We have seen images of Latinx children and youth in cages at the US/Mexico frontera, as they are separated from their familias. We have heard the 45th President of the United States call Mexicans ‘rapists.’ We have also watched the rampage at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where the shooter went to ‘kill Hispanics’ and murdered 23 of them. And we have witnessed the devastating effect that COVID-19 has had among Latinx families. From the very beginning, Latinx people have not enjoyed ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ as the US Declaration of Independence states, in the same ways as the white population. Language, and especially language in education, has been the material from which other muros and fronteras have been built to keep Latinx communities dominated. We start by narrating the history of how Latinx language has been ‘made’ and used in that domination. We follow here the work of other sociolinguists who have looked at how language has been discursively constructed as a political artifact, and how these language representations are then used in society for domination (Del Valle, 2013; Joseph, 2006). The Making of Spanish for Colonization

US Latinx people are most often identified as speakers of Spanish. But what is meant by Spanish? And what have been the constructions of what we know today as Spanish? We draw on the early history of the Spanish language to remind our readers that despite the many material effects that ‘named languages’ have had in our lives, and their usefulness for identity purposes, they are sociopolitical constructions that have been instrumental in colonization and nation-building (Bauman & Briggs, 2003; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007) and that continue to be used today in the same processes. By the ‘making of Spanish’ we refer to how its representation was discursively constructed as a single and autonomous

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs

21

entity and how this portrayal was then used to perform the political function of colonization. Although today we think of the language of the conquistadores as ‘Spanish,’ it is important to remember the high degree of multilingualism and the great linguistic heterogeneity in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the encounter. The language practices in the peninsula included local Hispano-Romances, a continuum of Arabic-influenced local Romances known as Mozarabic, the speech of those speaking local Romances in contact with Celts, with Southern Gauls and with Basques (López García, 1985; Tuten, 2003). It was not until 1492, as the Moorish Kingdom of Granada surrendered to the Reyes Católicos Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, that Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramática de la Lengua Castellana. Nebrija understood that a single Spanish language, ‘la lengua castellana,’ was needed for conquest and empire, and in his dedication to Queen Isabella he stated: ‘Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio’ (for more on the history of the construction of Castilian Spanish, see Del Valle, 2013; García, 2007; García & Otheguy, 2015). It was this constructed ‘Castilian’ that was then promoted to evangelize and castellanizar/hispanicize Indigenous Americans (Briceño Perozo, 1987). As the linguistic/evangelization work of missionaries advanced, missionaries started standardizing what were called lenguas generales indígenas, to be used in catechisms. Named as Nahuatl, Quechua, Chibcha and Guarani, these ‘lenguas’ corresponded to the great empires that the conquistadores encountered, and they were written down as the missionaries heard them. These lenguas generales also contributed to making invisible the heterogeneous ways of speaking of Indigenous Americans throughout the Spanish Empire (Moreno-Fernández, 2007). In 1713, the Real Academic Española (RAE) was founded on the instructions of Philip VI, the fi rst Bourbon ruler of Spain, to enthrone Castilian as the norm that ‘limpia, fija y da esplandor’ throughout a highly multilingual empire on both sides of the Atlantic. When in 1782 Charles III ordered that only ‘Castilian’ be used in evangelization efforts in the Spanish Empire, there were only 8000 Spaniards and more than two million Indigenous Americans (García, 1999). It is this highly multilingual people that then constituted the Latin America that we know today. At the beginning of the 19th century, 89% of the population of what was the Spanish Empire was Indigenous (Cifuentes & Ross, 1993). Millions of enslaved people were brought from the western coast of Africa, 2 million alone to Cuba, where slavery perdured until 1886. And yet, it was mostly Spanish speaking white criollos (born in America, of parents born in Spain) who led independence movements between 1810 and 1820s and came into power. When in 1847 Andrés Bello published his Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos, he defended only the language ‘uniforme y auténtica de la gente educada’ (cited in García & Otheguy, 2015: 642). By

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1898, when Spain lost its last colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, only 17% of the entire Latin American population were monolingual speakers of Indigenous languages (García, 1999). In 100 years, Spanish had gone from being the minority language of the powerful white elite to being constructed as the only language of Latin American identity (for more on this history, see García et al., 2010). The Making of the Language of Colonized and Racialized US Latinxs

At the same time, throughout the 19th century, the Anglo-Protestant power to the North was consolidating its hegemony. Since the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Empire had been shrouded in what became known as La Leyenda Negra, which constructed the Spanish Empire as cruel and degenerate (Ibañez, 2019). The belief in US Manifest Destiny, said to be given by God, to expand what were said to be its ‘special virtues’ – a racial, cultural-religious and linguistic superiority that included being white, having Protestant values and speaking English – took hold in the 19th century United States (Greenberg, 2017). It was this ideology that justified the murder and removal of Native Americans as their territories were occupied and annexed. And it was also this ideology of racial and linguistic superiority that justified the US war with Mexico which resulted in the annexation of much of Mexico’s territory in 1848, and of the US war with Spain which resulted in the gain of the colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico. As a result of the Mexican American War in 1848, the United States annexed all or parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah, and small sections of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming (Menchaca, 1999). The US military conquest was followed by a colonizing project in which a process of racialization, linked to language and brought about through a race-based language education policy, played an important part. The language of those described as ‘Mexicans,’ as we will see, was represented as a ‘mixed jargon.’ This discursive construction of the language of Mexicans was then used to perform the political function of colonization, segregation and exclusion. The racial prejudice toward Mexicans1 was evidenced immediately after the military conquest. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina said in 1848: We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race – the free white race. To incorporate Mexicans would be the very fi rst instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indian, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. (Weber, 1973: 135, emphasis added)

The idea of impurity and mixture was associated not only with a Mexican American race, but also with their language. In 1902, a

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs

23

congressional delegation conducted hearings to assess whether New Mexico and other territories should be admitted as a state (for more on the politics of Spanish and English in territorial New Mexico, see Fernández-Gibert, 2013). When H.S. Wooster, a Justice of the Peace, gave his testimony, he explained that ‘they speak the Spanish language, or try to; but I understand that it is not pure Castilian; it is a sort of jargon of their own’ (cited in Nieto-Phillips, 2004: 88, emphasis added). A process of separating the Spanish language of white Europeans from that of Mexicans became essential to the process of racialization that hierarchized them as inferior and segregated them. As J. Del Valle and García (2013: 256) say: ‘Language became the defi ning factor and all Spanish speakers, whether they looked white or not, became the object of exclusion.’ The espacio for the language practices of Mexican Americans considered ‘Indian,’ ‘mixed,’ ‘non-white’ and said to speak a Spanish ‘jargon’ was shut tight. English was made the sole official language of school instruction in California by 1855, in Texas by 1858 and in New Mexico by 1921 (Hernández-Chávez, 1995). Mexican American students were segregated in English-only classrooms with substandard educational resources and practices. Mexican American Spanish was said to be very distant from the ‘Spanish’ that had been taught since 1816 at Harvard for what was called ‘polite accomplishment,’ which included the literature of Spain, but not of Latin America. Spanish language education was only introduced into high schools as a result of the exclusion of German, the language of the enemy, during World War I. Aurelio Espinosa, the first editor of the journal of the newly founded American Association of Teachers of Spanish, Hispania, established what was to be the Spanish language norm taught in US high schools – that of ‘the educated people of Old and New Castile’ (for more on this history, see García, 1993). By the mid-20th century, schools in the Northeast, and particularly in New York City, were also experiencing an influx of Spanish speakers, this time from the US colony of Puerto Rico. The imposition of English as the language of instruction in 1903 in the island had been a failure and was reversed in 1948 (Negrón-Muntaner, 1997; Pousada, 1996). When these Spanish speakers, who had been granted US citizenship through the Jones Act in 1917, started arriving in New York City, the schools did not make any accommodations. Puerto Ricans were seen as mixed-race people speaking a language that was not that of ‘educated people of Old and New Castile.’ Schools continued to teach in English only, as if Puerto Rican children did not exist, relegating them to schools and classrooms in which to ‘remediate’ their language (Del Valle, 1998). The attempt to annihilate the language and histories of Latinx people was carried out through a race-based language education policy meant to maintain the existing socioeconomic order of white Anglo supremacy in

24

Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

jobs, education and housing (González, 1990; San Miguel, 1999). Policies against ‘Spanish’ did not grant those said to be ‘Hispanics’ full access to what was considered the language of culture, education and Anglo-Saxon values – ‘English.’ And raciolinguistic ideologies prevented white listening subjects (Flores & Rosa, 2015) from hearing the English of Latinx people as appropriate. In school, the education of these Latinx US citizens was focused on remediating Latinx English, which had been constructed with Anglo-monolingual norms and which by defi nition would always be out of their reach. The result of these race-based language education policies for US Latinx bilinguals resulted in much educational failure. As of 1960, roughly 80% of Mexican Americans were American born (Sung, 2017), and yet only 13% of adults had a high school diploma and only 6% attended college (García & Sung, 2018). As of 1966, 87% of all Puerto Ricans adults 25 years of age and older had dropped out without graduating from high school, and the dropout rate for Puerto Rican students in the eighth grade was 53% (García, 2011). As Latinx students and their communities became increasingly bilingual, they were better able to advocate for their rights, which included language, but also employment, housing and voting rights. When the civil rights movement gained strength in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mexican American and Puerto Rican communities engaged in their own movimientos, moving some of the guardrails and muros that had kept them confi ned to a limiting educational and socioeconomic space (García & Sung, 2018; San Miguel & Valencia, 1998; Sung, 2018). Mexican American and Puerto Rican communities started to assert a political consciousness that recognized their histories as a colonized people who had been minoritized through processes of racialization and linguistic oppression (Ortiz, 2018). Reclaiming their own Spanish language in bilingual education efforts became an important instrument to crack the muros that had kept them segregated in substandard classrooms and schools with poor English-only instruction (Donato & Hanson, 2012; Macías, 1985). In the 1960s, Cubans fleeing the Castro regime started arriving in the south of Florida. Welcomed as refugees from what was said to be ‘Communism,’ they also clamored for bilingual education. Their purpose, however, was to guarantee their children’s education in Spanish for their eventual return to Cuba. Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans had different purposes in supporting bilingual education, but their bilingual education ‘experiments’ paved the way for what became the institutionalization of bilingual education policy in the United States. The Bilingual Education Act was passed by Congress in 1968. Despite the growth of bilingual education programs throughout the country in the 1970s, the program became politicized with every reauthorization of the Bilingual Education Act (García & Sung, 2018). From efforts by Latinx communities to educate their children bilingually and leveraging the communities’ knowledge

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs 25

systems, poems, stories, songs and dreams, bilingual education became politically redefi ned as ‘transitional’ and available only for a limited time for ‘Limited English speakers.’ ‘Away Re-makings’ of US Latinx Language: Sociopolitical Camouflaging

After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the Latinx community’s enactment of bilingual education came under increased attack (Otheguy, 1982). The arrival of many more Latinx immigrants hailing from different countries, after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, meant that the diversity, and thus the language and racial heterogeneity, of the Latinx community was more visible. Many were long-standing citizens, but others had recently arrived. Some were speakers of American Indigenous languages. Their histories, national origins, race, cultural practices, religion and socioeconomic status were very different. US Latinx communities now also exhibited an array of language practices that started disrupting the notion of Spanish as taught in US schools. By the time the new century rolled around, the die had been cast. The goal of institutionalized bilingual education policy became even more narrowly focused on teaching English to the growing population of immigrants and recent arrivals. When No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002, the education goal was made explicitly clear – the acquisition of English for ‘English language learners’ (García & Kleifgen, 2018). From the ashes of the bilingual education tragedy emerged support for a ‘model’ of bilingual education now called ‘dual language’ or ‘two-way immersion,’ which was said to teach English to ‘English language learners’ in ways that would not segregate Latinx students, and that would at the same time educate them alongside English speakers who would then learn Spanish (Lindholm-Leary, 2001). Latinx language was discursively constructed as ‘dual languages,’ moving bilingual education programs further from the bilingual practices of the Latinx community in a process that we call ‘away re-makings.’ By ‘away re-makings’ we point not only to the remaking of ‘Spanish’ once more away from the Latinx community that uses it, but also to how this process of distancing is now hidden, promoted as being of benefit to the Latinx community. Bilingualism is recognized, but it is accompanied by what Povinelli (2011) has called ‘camouflage.’ Povinelli explains that camouflage has become a tool of liberal governmentality to quell social movements – in our case, the struggles over employment, housing and self-determination that had accompanied the early bilingual education movimiento of Latinx communities. Camouflaged as a type of bilingual education, the intent of ‘dual language’ programs was to hide their sociopolitical purpose of redefi ning bilingual education and language away from the Latinx community. The bilingual Latinx communities’ ways of doing language were not validated.

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Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

Judged against what schools constructed as ‘Spanish’ and ‘English,’ the Latinx community’s Spanish was perceived only as a ‘home language,’ spoken poorly with interference from English or Indigenous languages, whereas English was simply perceived as the Latinx community’s ‘second language.’ By proposing that these two ‘dual languages,’ especially in forms now called ‘academic,’ were not in any way what Latinx communities ‘had,’ racialized bilingual Latinx language and communities were now re-made as not falling within the initial design of the bilingual education program. ‘Dual language’ programs were conceived as having a double purpose – to teach English to ‘English language learners,’ and to teach Spanish to white ‘Spanish language learners.’ For Spanish to be considered a possible resource for Anglomonolingual students, Spanish could not be associated with those enregistered (Agha, 2005) as poor Brown and Black people and undocumented non-citizens. The teaching of Spanish once more became focused on what Mena and García (2020) have called a ‘Spanish from nowhere,’ distanced from the Spanish spoken in US Latinx communities. Many two-way ‘dual language’ programs became tools of gentrification, as white English speakers took the place of Latinx students who were pushed out of their communities (see Chapters 2 and 3, this volume). And these constructions of language according to the norms of white monolingual speakers have meant that these ‘dual language’ programs have often engaged in what may be considered anti-Blackness (Flores, 2016; Malsbary, 2014). Across the nation there are very few African American students in two-way dual language classrooms (Valdés, 1997a). The emphasis of these ‘dual language’ programs in the acquisition of two separate languages has also meant that they have paid scant attention to racism and the subjugation of Afro-Latinx people and Indigenous people both in Latin America and in the United States (Chávez-Moreno, 2019). As more high school and college bilingual Latinx students took a subject named ‘Spanish,’ Guadalupe Valdés rightly advocated that Spanish for these bilingual Latinx students was not a foreign language and could not be taught as such (Valdés et al., 1977). But what later became the teaching of ‘Spanish as heritage language’ was sometimes turned into a program to identify and eradicate the many features of what was considered the ‘incorrect’ Spanish of bilingual Latinx students (Lynch, 2014). That is, the space for Latinx bilinguals that Valdés initially imagined was also co-opted, camouflaging its role of re-making language away from the Latinx community. The desires of many white US parents in the 21st century for a ‘pure’ Spanish has been part of a global neoliberal design. In an effort to consolidate power over the growing Spanish speaking market in the Americas and especially in the United States – a market that represented more than three times the consumer power of the rest of the Spanish speaking world

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs 27

(Carreira, 2002) – the government of Spain gave lip service to recognizing the many different ways of speaking Spanish. Spanish became projected as ‘global,’ ‘fashionable’ and ‘chic’ (García, 2008). However, it was ‘Castilian’ that continued to be the norm promoted by the Instituto Cervantes, established by the government of Spain in 1991 to promote the teaching of Spanish all over the world. The Instituto’s Aula Virtual clarifies that the model of language used is ‘el español central peninsular’ (cited in García & Mason, 2009: 166). This, of course, still refers to ‘Castilian,’ now appropriately named as being limited only to the central region of Spain. The reasons given by the Instituto Cervantes for this norm selection were the ‘importancia demográfica’ of central peninsular Spanish, and its domination over ‘manifestaciones culturales.’ We know, however, that Spanish speakers whose speech demonstrates features associated with Castilian make up a very small proportion of the Spanish speaking world. And we also know that the ‘manifestaciones culturales’ produced in Latin America and US Latinx communities have been many. What is being camouflaged here? Hidden is the power dimension of the language of white Europeans with a long history of colonizing and dominating the spaces of Others, now with a different economic imperative. As in many ‘dual language’ programs in PK-12 and ‘Spanish as heritage language programs’ in high schools and universities, there has been a remaking of language away from the bilingual Latinx community. Valdés (2015) has called attention to how this has been carried out through the increased ‘curricularization of language.’ The language of the Latinx communities has been put into strictures in schools, as programs supposed to educate them camouflage the continued exclusion of Latinx students from educational success. Looking ‘into’ Latinx Students Doing Language, as Others Look ‘Away’

Latinx student bilingualism is seldom understood in schools, with many educators looking away from their actual language practices. We present here the case of a Latina mother doing language at home, and the educators’ representations of the family’s languaging. We then consider the academic scholarship that has contributed to the making of Latinx language and their bilingualism as outside of the bounds of what is considered ‘right’ and ‘appropriate.’ We show the irrelevance of traditional academic scholarship to the lives and practices of this Latinx mother and her families. In so doing, we focus on the continuing processes of looking away from Latinx languaging and suggest the reasons why this process persists. This case is not representative of the language practices of all Latinx families, with some speaking what is considered Spanish or English exclusively. But we describe it here because the case of bilingual practices in Latinx homes is often not recognized and is least understood.

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Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

Recently we witnessed a Latina mother, born in the United States of Cuban-born parents, speaking on the phone to her son’s principal about his progress. Because one of the children was interrupting, the mother turned to the child and spoke in Spanish. The principal immediately asked, ‘Remind me, is X an English Language Learner?’ The Latina mother, flustered and surprised by the question, responded fi rst, ‘Of course he isn’t. His father is American.’ She then realized what she had said, and added: ‘Wait, I’m American too.’ When she hung up, she was angry that an educator in charge of a school in which there were many Latinx children would have such misunderstandings of bilingualism. It was as if being bilingual meant you were not American, always limited. She also struggled with the complexities of identities. Indeed, her husband was white and had grown up in a monolingual English-speaking home. But she was as American as her husband, despite identifying strongly as Latina, and having grown up in a bilingual home. And her son was also American, despite his Latinx identity and the bilingualism of the home, which both parents nurtured. Despite the longstanding presence of bilinguals in the United States, bilingualism is celebrated only if it is considered additive, learned sequentially by white bodies in school. The more natural bilingualism of US Latinx students (‘circumstantial bilinguals,’ as Valdés and Figueroa described them in 1994), developed through community socialization, continues to be denigrated. These misconstructions continue to uphold an existing socioeconomic order of white/English/monolingual supremacy. The formulations of bilingualism that were introduced into US education in the late 1960s and early 1970s owe much to the work of Canadian scholars, especially those at McGill University (Lambert & Tucker, 1972). But the conceptualizations of these early Canadian scholars had to do with accommodating the bilingualism of two white settler communities in Canada – the Anglophone and the Francophone (Haque, 2012). Excluded from the paradigm of additive bilingualism and immersion education that Canadian scholars developed in the 1960s were Indigenous peoples. In the United States, scholars of bilingualism imported these constructions of bilingualism and ‘models’ of immersion education without questioning their relevance for racialized Latinx bilinguals and without addressing the concept of power. The most influential scholar of bilingualism and bilingual education, Jim Cummins, appealed to psycholinguistic concepts that, although demonstrating the interdependence of languages (Cummins, 1979), reinforced the idea of a fi rst language (L1) and a second language (L2). Although Cummins’ work eventually recognized the dimension of power in thinking about bilingualism and bilingual children (Cummins, 2000), his concepts of Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and of Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (Cummins, 1979) are still often used to show how bilingual Latinx students ‘have’ BICS, but not CALP,

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs

29

rendering them deficient. Without an analysis that includes power, this distinction has now been elaborated into the concept of academic language that is hailed as the panacea for academic and economic success (Cummins, 2014; Snow & Uccelli, 2009). The efforts to define the features of academic language have occupied many scholars in the last two decades (see, for example, Schleppegrell, 2004, 2012; Snow & Uccelli, 2009; Uccelli et al., 2015, among others), based on the speech habits and literacy practices of cultural elites and some aspects of written language, without naming it thus. The imposed strictures around ‘academic language’ disregards and looks away from the full language architecture upon which racialized bilingual Latinx students perform their lives (Flores, 2019). Latinx bilingualism is a lot more complex and dynamic than the concept of additive bilingualism that reflects a process by which language majority children acquire a ‘second language,’ usually sequentially (García, 2009a). In the bilingual home of the mother in the case presented above, it is difficult to identify when anyone is using one named language or another. The father learned Spanish in high school and uses it flexibly to talk to his children who are six and three years old. The mother acquired Spanish, but also English, in her bilingual home. The babysitter uses mostly Spanish. The father’s parents speak English only; the mother’s parents, Cuban-born and having come to New York as children, are bilingual. The school-aged child is in an English-only program, and his friends speak mostly English. When the two children play with each other, the three-year-old uses what we would call Spanish more than English, whereas the six-year-old uses what we would call English more than Spanish. The six-year-old is learning to read in English in school, but he also reads books in Spanish that his parents and abuelos have read to him. Often, he reads those Spanishlanguage books out loud to his sister, but then laughs and narrates them in English. When the children play ‘Zingo’ with different adults, the words are sometimes read from the print in English, but other times said in Spanish following the pictures. In short, one cannot say which is the ‘home language’ of this family. What one can say is that in this home the family performs their bilingualism all the time. It is this home bilingualism that schools do not recognize and where instruction ought to start. Of course, as we have said, not every Latinx family languages in this way. Some Latinx families see themselves as monolingual speakers of Spanish or monolingual speakers of English. Some insist that at home only Spanish be spoken, or only an Indigenous language, or even only English. There are Latinx families that are more Spanish speaking, such as those living along the Mexico-US border. Latinx communities are diverse not only in history and context of settlement, national origin, race, cultural practices, religion and socioeconomic status, but also linguistically. But regardless of locality, race, speaker generation, socioeconomic status or ideological convictions, Latinx families’ language goes beyond what schools call ‘English’ or ‘Spanish.’ Even when parents speak Spanish at

30

Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

home, children often reply in English; and when parents insist that only Spanish be spoken at home, television, radio and social media, besides friends and neighbors, bring English into the mix. In Latinx families that are said to be ‘English speaking,’ there are relatives who speak Spanish. There is a continuum of bilingual practices in all Latinx families, regardless of experiences and ideologies, that needs to be recognized. This complex and dynamic language of Latinx families has been made more evident than ever at the time of COVID-19 and remote teaching. In Latinx homes during the pandemic, parents sit with children and negotiate screen-based instruction given in English, often with language practices that go well beyond what we might call English. Latinx parents have always understood that to educar their children they must use all their multimodal bilingual practices, as they engage in play, singing, telling stories, sharing sueños, communicating meaningfully. But now, with remote learning during a pandemic, the process of educar bilingually, long considered ‘invalid’ school learning, has, at least temporarily, become essential. The bilingualism of Latinx families does not simply consist of the addition of an L1 to an L2, for it would be difficult to say what this would be for parents or children. In the example of the Latinx family given above, if an L1 is determined by which language was learned first, perhaps one can say that the mother’s L1 is Spanish, spoken first at home. When the mother is in Cuba or Puerto Rico, where the rest of the extended family lives, the mother is perceived as being English speaking, but when she is at home in the United States, she is described as being Spanish speaking. She herself would have a difficult time saying which is the language with which she identifies. And depending on the context, and the interlocutors, she might have different answers as to which language she speaks best. In short, among bilinguals, the construct of an L1 or a mother tongue or a native language, concepts on which the whole field of ‘second language acquisition’ has been built, is impossible to defi ne. Latinx bilingual people engage in translanguaging (García & Li, 2014; Li, 2011, 2018). Translanguaging for us posits that bilinguals draw from a unitary repertoire, a single network of meanings, rather than from dual and separate language systems of an L1 and an L2. As with all children and youth, Latinx bilinguals acquire new linguistic features as they do language, incorporating these features into a network of expanded signs and meanings that is different from that of monolingual English speakers or Spanish speakers. Looking ‘into’ Latinx bilingual practices, instead of looking ‘away’ from them, re-makes the narratives and representations of Latinx students, as we perceive their full potential. Translanguaging: Looking ‘into’ Latinx Languaging

Translanguaging theory engages with language and bilingualism not as simple boxes of L1s and L2s, as one named language or another, as

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31

oral/written/signed language and other modes, but as an emergent network of meaning that is constructed as speakers and signers assemble and orchestrate different features and resources to do language. The degree to which speakers are successful in developing this emergent network is a product of the affordances and opportunities they have in society, as well as in schools, to use their entire repertoire. We use the word ‘emergent’ as in the understanding of ‘emergence’ in the work of the Chilean biologist, Francisco Varela. We have used it before to talk about emergent bilinguals (García, 2009b). Emergence refers to the interrelationships and interdependence of psychological, biological, physical, social, cultural and language phenomena which emerge as a network (Varela et al., 1991) and is used to participate in life. Language consists of an emergent network of meanings, and it is not only made up of what is conceived as ‘the linguistic.’ It is also part of the social, cultural, political, economic and racial cogwheels that enable the network to move or to change the speed or direction of the transmitted motion, or that can slow the network down to a halt. We argue that translanguaging keeps the cogwheels in motion, whereas considering language as two separate L1 and L2 entities brings the cogwheels to a halt. The trans- in translanguaging is NOT simply about going across named languages, as some educators have misinterpreted it to be. It rejects the ‘language contact’ constructs that have resulted in scholars simply describing the linguistic ‘interferences’ of bilinguals (Weinreich, 1953). And it discards the concept of ‘incomplete acquisition’ with which some scholars have described the Spanish of Latinx bilinguals (see, for example, Montrul, 2008). Instead, it builds on the pioneering studies of Latina scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Guadalupe Valdés (see, for example, 1997b) and Ana Celia Zentella (1996), to affirm the complex bilingualism of Latinx communities in relationship to their political economies. Translanguaging also pushes back against the concept of codeswitching, which even when conceived as rule-governed by well-meaning scholars (MacSwan, 2017; Poplack, 1980) reinforces the idea of the named languages that US Latinxs are said to switch across. Otheguy et al. (2019) have described how in Latinx homes and communities these so-called rules are violated all the time, pointing then to practices that go beyond linguistic fronteras. Translanguaging is about going beyond the traditional understandings of named language as discrete entities that have been reified by countries, schools and prescriptive grammar books (García & Li, 2014; Li, 2011, 2018; Otheguy et al., 2015, 2019). As Otheguy et al. (2015: 281) have said: ‘Translanguaging is the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defi ned boundaries of named languages.’ Angel Lin (2019) points to the trans-semiotizing aspects of translanguaging, as the verbal is intertwined with many other semiotic resources

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Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

(e.g. visuals, gestures, bodily movement) that mutually elaborate each other. Translanguaging, Lin (2019) points out, is a whole-body sensemaking process. As many other scholars have pointed out, translanguaging includes the sights, the sounds, the gestures, the objects and instruments, and how these are deployed (Blackledge & Creese, 2014; Fu et al., 2019; Hua et al., 2019; Li, 2018; Lin, 2019; Moore et al., 2020; Sherris & Adami, 2019). For Latinx bilinguals, translanguaging is going beyond the named languages that have been assigned to them – Spanish and English. As we have seen, these have been discursively constructed with norms that exclude the linguistic heterogeneity of all speakers, and that render US Latinxs as deficient in either ‘made’ language. Translanguaging asks us to look into Latinx bilingual languaging (Becker, 1995; Maturana & Varela, 1984). It engages with Latinx people’s languaging as the basis for an alternative and more just conception of language and bilingualism, pushing back on the existing socioeconomic order of white supremacy, whether an Anglo one or one constructed as only ‘Hispanic.’ Translanguaging, as Flores (2014) has said, is a political act, and it works against the raciolinguistic ideologies that have racialized US Latinxs through language (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017). When Latinx bilinguals interact with each other, in homes and communities, they often use more or less their entire linguistic repertoire, without being bound by what society considers to be English or Spanish. In the monolingual classrooms and the ‘dual language’ education classrooms in the United States today, racialized Latinx bilinguals are often restricted to using half or less of their linguistic repertoire, and only draw from a white-European-centric knowledge system. By expecting Latinx students to behave linguistically as if they were monolinguals, always comparing their linguistic performances to those of white monolingual English speaking or Spanish speaking students, Latinx bilinguals are unjustly assessed, and enregistered as having ‘incomplete’ acquisition and ‘lacking’ language. The chapters included in this book show how critical educators are opening up translanguaging spaces in actual classrooms with different groups of Latinx students studying in various contexts, transforming, as we will see, ‘dual language’ classrooms into true ‘dual language bilingual’ classrooms (Sánchez et al., 2018). In those spaces, all Latinx students, including those who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing or who have been labeled as having a disability, are given the freedom to act with all their resources, as they pry the threads and release the notches of the stories that have made them into incapacitated and inappropriate language users. Cioè-Peña and Linares remind us in Chapter 11 that unless the students’ language practices are validated, children will never understand that their mothers, families and community are important sources of learning. With remote teaching and learning during the time of

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs

33

COVID-19, the school space and the home space have become more integrated. Forced to enter bilingual homes through computer screens, many teachers are now witnessing the value of translanguaging, as they depend on Latinx bilingual parents and caregivers to truly collaborate in the education of the children (Kleyn, 2020). This means that many teachers are, for the first time, understanding and validating the role that translanguaging has in the education of bilingual students, transforming at the same time how Latinx children and youth view their own parents and understand their lives. Translanguaging Tejidos/Weaves Desde Adentro

It was Li Wei (2011) who fi rst described how translanguaging creates a social space for the multilingual user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity into one coordinated and meaningful performance. (Li, 2011: 1223, emphasis added)

We view the opening up of translanguaging spaces in education not only as a political act. It is also a way of caring for the Latinx communities by validating their own knowledges and practices and leveraging them in their education. Translanguaging provides a space where uncomfortable conversations about language, race, gender, sexuality, deafness, dis/ability, nation and citizenship can be enacted and new tejidos weaved. As many of the chapters in this book advance, making space for translanguaging in instruction requires a teacher with what García et al. (2017) call a ‘translanguaging stance.’ This refers to a deep belief in the generative effects of languaging as an emergent network that is constituted juntos/ together, including Latinx students’ histories, ethnographies and all knowledge systems. As Herrera and España describe in Chapter 9, the three Ts – translanguaging, textos and temas – have to work juntos. It is not enough simply to open up a translanguaging space where students can use their full repertoire. Translanguaging has to be used with textos that explore critical temas generated through Latinxs’ own epistemologies. This juntos use is what opens up spaces to view other visions in a Latinx tejido. The chapters in this book do not simply contain a list of pedagogical translanguaging strategies; rather, they show how teachers open up spaces to look into Latinx bilingual students’ lives and realities as they language with their entire network of meanings. But in combining the critical aspects of translanguaging with what the authors call humanizing ones, the translanguaging here is more than simply a look ‘into’; it is a production ‘desde adentro.’ Latinx students are presented here in their full human dignity. The mature scholars who have authored the chapters are not simply being critical of the social and educational practices to which

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Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

Latinxs have been subjected. They are also producing, sin miedo, a different knowledge from that generated by educational authorities and scholars who have not viewed Latinx students desde adentro. As Latinx students are viewed desde adentro, through what we all perceive when their translanguaging is leveraged, a ‘critical consciousness’ is developed (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019: Ch. 2) which disrupts traditional knowledge about language and bilingualism and reconfigures power. Tejiendo the Bilingual into the Dual Language Desde Adentro

Many of the chapters in this book question the wisdom of ‘dual language’ programs as presently constituted. Sánchez et  al. (2018) have described how translanguaging can transform ‘dual language’ classrooms into true dual language bilingual classrooms. It is possible to open up translanguaging spaces within language-based instructional spaces to ensure that Latinx bilingual children are observed using their entire repertoire and assessed appropriately (translanguaging documentation space), to support and scaffold instruction for individual Latinx children to expand their Zone of Proximal Development when appropriate (translanguaging rings, that is, as a scaffold space), and especially to transform the students’ ideologies about the nature of their language and bilingualism and value their own practices for their sociopolitical value and potential to transform their lives (translanguaging transformation space). Many of the chapters in the book focus precisely on how translanguaging transforms the ‘dual language’ classroom so as to release the tight ‘puntos’ of the two linguistic solid telas that have been separated into two separate entities, benefitting mostly the white English-speaking students in these programs. As we said before, the chapters in Part 2 (Heiman, Cervantes-Soon & Hurie and Poza & Stites) discuss how translanguaging enabled the difficult discussion of the power of white English-speaking students over the Latinx students in dual language classrooms. But most importantly, translanguaging makes possible the dialogue about the relationship of the dual language program to the gentrification of neighborhoods that were previously communities of color. The chapters in Part 3 (Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7) also demonstrate how translanguaging tejidos bring together all the network of signs and meanings that traditional dual language structures disrupt. Instead of offering affordances for learning in solely the language designated for instruction in one room, at one time, with one teacher, the instructional translanguaging spaces opened up by teachers in these cases offer Latinx students all the language and semiotic resources available, and encourage them to leverage them with pride. Translanguaging in ‘dual language’ programs turns programs that originally turned ‘away’ from the Latinx bilingual community into true

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs 35

‘dual language bilingual’ programs (Sánchez et al., 2018). Whether programs are labeled as ‘two-way’ or ‘one-way,’ translanguaging enables a view desde adentro of the entire continuum of bilingual practices of student communities. Rather than keeping the community’s translanguaging at bay, the dual language bilingual classrooms portrayed in Parts 2 and 3 brings it in as part of the community’s cultural wealth (Yosso, 2006). Translanguaging enables the muros and fronteras that schools have erected around language to come down. Tejiendo with translanguaging enables teachers not only to view desde adentro, but also to produce knowledge desde adentro, where the linguistic and conceptual virtuosity of Latinx bilingual students is witnessed and leveraged. Lest we be misunderstood, we believe strongly that bilingual education is essential for Latinx bilingual students because it offers the only opportunity to develop positive bilingual and biliterate performances. In the case of Deaf bilingual Latinxs in Chapter 10, for example, GárateEstes, Lawyer and García-Fernández argue that for Deaf bilingual Latinx students, a space must be carved for the teaching of a Signed Language, for without that space, Deaf Latinx children would be deprived of an accessible language which is key to their cognitive development and important for their community. In the same way, translanguaging in bilingual education for hearing students does not dismiss the importance of developing Latinx students’ performances in what is seen as Spanish and English. Translanguaging, however, enables Latinx students’ own language and literacy constructions desde adentro, and not simply those imposed from the outside as external standards, which always excludes their own practices and minoritizes them. Instructional spaces where Latinx children and youth are sometimes asked to produce oral and written products in English or Spanish or Signed Language are important. But in the process of educating Latinx bilingual students, Latinx children need to be encouraged to put to work their entire network of meanings, making them conscious not only of their language practices, but also of their histories, the political economies and racialization processes that have looked away from their practices and lives. Translanguaging as a scaffold in the education of emergent bilinguals (the translanguaging rings in Sánchez et al., 2018) is seldom questioned by educators and scholars. However, it has been the transformative potential of translanguaging that has been met with resistance. In this book we witness how a group of young mature scholars, teachers and students have transformed ‘dual language’ education policies that have been handed down in ways that are detrimental to Latinx communities. Working desde adentro, they have weaved a different tejido that tells a different story not only about dual language education, but about much more. We insist that only when translanguaging promotes re-makings and transformations, is it worth pursuing.

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Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

Translanguaging Otros Tejidos

As minoritized and Latinx scholars have started exploring translanguaging for its potential in the education of racialized bilinguals, some scholars have raised alarms about claims of its transformative potential (Block, 2018; Jaspers, 2018). Some say it has become a popular term, little understood as anything more than heteroglossic practices (Jaspers, 2015, 2018, 2019). Canagarajah (2019: 3) has warned that it has become a ‘a fashionable academic idea’ and that its popularity is producing what Jaspers (2018) calls a ‘discursive drift’ of any political consciousness intended in its original conceptualizations (Leung & Valdés, 2019). We agree that many educators and scholars do not understand translanguaging as anything more than either the use of an ‘L1’ or the fluidity of language practices. And, as Flores (2013) has warned, viewing translanguaging as simple fluid language practices means that it can be easily incorporated into neoliberal processes. But as we have argued in this chapter, opening up translanguaging spaces in education can resist the processes of colonization and racialization to which US Latinx students have been subjected because it re-makes their language and opens up spaces to weave another tejido. Raciolinguistic ideologies have been sanctioned in the United States for too long, with language constructed as standardized entities based on language practices of white monolinguals and away from the practices of bilingual Latinx populations. One of the functions of schools has always been that of ideological normalization (Popkewitz, 2006). Curricula, learning standards, pedagogy and assessments ensure that teachers believe that ‘standard academic English,’ associated with white middle-class students, is most important for educational success, inadvertently creating Latinx failure. Disrupting these raciolinguistic ideologies and enabling Latinx students to language their whole body-sense into being can be transformative in itself. Through their own language practices, Latinx young people resist the racial and linguistic oppression that they have endured. We disagree with Block (2018) and Jaspers (2019) that some of our translanguaging work has obscured the material dimensions of inequality by focusing on language. For US Latinx people, language, race and inequality have been mutually constituted and have produced the inequities that persist. By calling attention to the translanguaging of Latinx students, and the ways in which it could be leveraged in classrooms, the authors of the book are precisely resisting the processes of stratification that the co-construction of language and race has produced for Latinx students. Besides, as Latinx editors and authors, we are claiming our right to produce other knowledges and other narratives with new tejidos. We base our knowledge and scholarship of the translanguaging of bilingual Latinxs not on the values of scholars external to the community, but on our existing knowledge and cultural systems desde adentro.

The Making of the Language of US Latinxs 37

We, of course agree that translanguaging in education does not by itself hold the potential to transform the unequal relations of power and structural racism that exist in US society. But unlike Jürgen Jaspers (2019), we argue that to educate racialized US Latinx students, translanguaging is indeed a moral imperative and must be anti-racist. As Li Wei has said, ‘Translanguaging transforms lives, not just classroom learning of facts and figures’ (personal communication to García, July 2019). The criticality of translanguaging in opening up spaces for racialized and minoritized Latinxs is recognized by García and Li (2014) when they say: [A]s new configurations of language and education are generated, old understandings and structures are released, thus transforming not only subjectivities, but also cognitive and social structures. In so doing, orders of discourses shift and the voices of Others come to the forefront, relating then translanguaging to criticality, critical pedagogy, social justice and the linguistic human rights agenda. (García & Li, 2014: 3, emphasis added)

It is true that translanguaging is not new, and that these complex language practices have always characterized multilingual speakers, especially those in low-income countries and those in the global South. The translanguaging view we hold, along with the authors of these chapters, has to do with the intent of denaturalizing the dominance of named normed languages and their hierarchies, of dismantling what Audre Lorde (1979) called ‘the master’s house’ with our own tools, as we turn our linguistic, cultural and knowledge differences into strengths. The Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 2002) has situated US Latinxs in what she has called ‘borderlands,’ a ‘tierra entre medio,’ a ‘nepantla’. Anzaldúa says: Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement – an uncomfortable even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in Nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of ‘home.’ (Anzaldúa, 2002: 1)

What is important then is for scholars and teachers to shake Latinx students sin miedo out of the comfort of that home, so that we become critically conscious of the precarious nature of the spaces in which Latinx students have been confined in US classrooms. By taking up translanguaging, Latinx students are invited to take up their own ‘locus of enunciation’ (Mignolo, 2000), as the scholars in this book have done. As Mignolo says: ‘An other tongue’ is the necessary condition for ‘an other thinking’ and for the possibility of moving beyond the defense of national languages and national ideologies – both of which have been operating in complicity with imperial powers and imperial conflicts. (Mignolo, 2000: 249)

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Part 1: Latinx Children and Youth, Translanguaging and Transformation

We see translanguaging as a form of what Mignolo (2009) has called ‘epistemic disobedience,’ a way to revoke the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000) to which Latinx people have been subjected. By coloniality of power, Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist, refers to the legacies of colonialism that legitimize European knowledge and cultural systems exclusively. Quijano calls attention to three forms of coloniality of power: (1) systems of hierarchies based on racial categories; (2) systems of knowledge based on European knowledge production; and (3) cultural systems based on Eurocentric ideas of modernity, such as the rational and the scientific. White Europeans, white North Americans and white Latin Americans have been given the authority to ‘make’ language and impose these discursive constructions on US Latinxs. Not only have US Latinxs been unable to engage in their own knowledge production about their language, but the use of constructed language(s) to establish racial hierarchies has then created a racial division of labor that has had profound consequences in their economies. Translanguaging is a way of opening up spaces for weaving otros tejidos and other lives. Conclusion

In this chapter we have reviewed the history of Latinx people in the United States to understand how language and race have operated in the process of minoritization to which they have been subjected. Looking into translanguaging theory from the perspective of Latinx children and youth enables us to understand why translanguaging in education has to be understood as much more than the simple use of an ‘L1’ or fluid language practices. Latinx children and youth embody translanguaging spaces, a result of their lives ‘entre mundos’ – physical geographical ones, as well as social, political, cultural, linguistic, emotional, cognitive and spiritual. Translanguaging spaces in education take the Latino students’ entire selves into account, rather than only the part that corresponds to a white Euro-centric Anglo ideario encoded in English only, or in Spanish only. Like all educative processes, the transformations may be subtle, but releasing Latinx language, histories, imaginations, may indeed create the actions that are needed to understand the new world order that Latinx bilingual children are constructing every day in classrooms. The translanguaging spaces in education may still be small, but they are pushing fronteras, expanding the spaces where Latinx children and youth and their teachers are weaving other tejidos. As Rosa (2019) has said, it is important to open up the present for Latinx children and youth. By bringing down the fronteras y muros sin miedo in which many Latinx students are kept today, even in programs that are supposed to be ‘for them,’ the teachers and students in this book are producing knowledge

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desde adentro. Through their translanguaging-tejiendo acts, teachers and students are poking holes and opening up spaces in the stories of incapacidad held in the solid tela or separate telas of the education to which Latinx students have been subjected. Translanguaging teje otro tejido which shows the holes in the historical constructions of Latinx language and school language. At the same time the holes of the tejido permit us to truly look in, desde adentro, perceiving Latinx students con capacidad e inteligencia as they engage in a just education. Note (1) Our use here of Mexicans and Mexican Americans reflects the historical context. However, we acknowledge that the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest is highly complex, resulting in different identity labels beyond these two.

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2 ‘Well Good Para Quién?’: Disrupting Two-Way Bilingual Education Gentrification and Reclaiming Space through a Critical Translanguaging Pedagogy Dan Heiman, Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon and Andrew H. Hurie

Introduction No todos estamos en Plainview para aprender español, ese es mi idioma, ese es el idioma de Karina, right. Pero lo estamos compartiendo con todos, right, ese es nuestro idioma. Qué yeah, like Larry lo puede usar that’s cool, pero esa es mi voz and I’m gonna use it for what’s right, y hoy que gente como Larry o Carly saben mi idioma …. This is our language, I grew up with this language, Karina grew up with this language, Javier grew up with this language, like we grew, this is my language, and now I’m sharing it with you. So now you also have to stand up with me, and like fight for what’s right. (Transcription of classroom talk, 13 April 2016)

We begin with the words of Michelle,1 a 5th grade teacher in a gentrifying two-way bilingual education (TWBE) school in Central Texas originally serving a balance of native English and Spanish speaking students as state policy stipulates, as an entry point into our conceptualization of a critical translanguaging pedagogy (CTLP) that is crucial in times of rapid TWBE expansion (Arias & Fee, 2018) and gentrification (Chaparro, 2017; Heiman & Murakami, 2019; Valdez et  al., 2016). A CTLP explicitly addresses: (1) the call for social justice and equity (Howard et al., 2018); (2) the development of critical consciousness in order to expand/enhance 47

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TWBE’s traditional three goals of increased academic achievement, bilingual development and sociocultural competence (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019); (3) the dearth of empirical studies that suture critical pedagogy and translanguaging (Hamman, 2018; Poza, 2017); and (4) the recent transformative limits that have been leveled against translanguaging pedagogies (Jaspers, 2018). We posit that in doing so, a CTLP centers marginalized voices to transgress linguistic and pedagogical boundaries that contain teachers’ and students’ linguistic expression, identities and ways of knowing. We also argue that a CTLP is of essence in TWBE programs where the hegemony of standardized English and monoglossic ideas tend to privilege the already privileged. In sharing her critical knowledge with emancipatory authority (Giroux, 1997), Michelle used dynamic language practices as the voice of critical consciousness around who the TWBE program in a gentrifying Plainview was designed to serve, while also urging white native English speakers ‘learning Spanish’ to engage in solidarity by ‘fight[ing] for what’s right.’ In this chapter we conceptualize Michelle’s praxis in the context of a thematic unit around the ‘generative theme’ (Freire, 2005) of gentrification as the enactment of a CTLP that actively works to disrupt dominant intellectual knowledge and works toward a hopeful and socially just TWBE imaginary ‘through’ dynamic language practices (García & Li, 2014). Michelle’s teaching in the context of this gentrification unit offered a unified challenge to the oppressive regulation of language practices in TWBE spaces (Martínez et al., 2015; Palmer et al., 2014) and the oppressive control of classroom knowledge, which we argue is crucial in ensuring that translanguaging pedagogies go beyond promoting flexible language practices for neoliberal aims (Flores, 2013a) and foment transformative processes (García & Leiva, 2014) and the development of critical consciousness (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019) in times of TWBE gentrification. Our TWBE Vision: Reclaiming Space in Times of Gentrification and Historical Amnesia

Before diving into Michelle’s CTLP, it is important to contextualize TWBE. The rebranding of Bilingual Education in the guise of TWBE (Katnelson & Bernstein, 2017), more commonly known as Dual Language, has contributed to an explosive growth and popularity of these programs (Arias & Fee, 2018). At the same time, the lure of TWBE’s three traditional goals of high academic achievement, bilingualism/biliteracy and sociocultural competence (Howard et al., 2018) for the dominant English speaking population has a dangerous potential to exploit Latinx linguistic and cultural practices for neoliberal aims (Cervantes-Soon, 2018; Morales & Maravilla, 2019). This whitening (Flores & García, 2017) and gentrification of TWBE (Heiman & Murakami, 2019; Valdez et al., 2016; Chapter

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3, this volume) provides staging grounds for historical amnesia that erases the experiences of Latinx communities (Flores, 2016; Martínez, 2017). We are deeply troubled by these processes in TWBE, and emphasize the urgency of historicizing Bilingual Education to foment ‘an increased awareness about the children and families with whom they [dominant white population] go to school’ (Morales & Maravilla, 2019: 151). Critical scholars in the field, in response to these same troubling processes and most importantly as a way to expand, humanize and radicalize TWBE in times of gentrification, have proposed a fourth foundational goal around the development of critical consciousness for all stakeholders in TWBE (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019). They specify four elements of critical consciousness that can take root through humanizing pedagogies that offer generative potential to radicalize the other goals of TWBE: historicizing, interrogating power, critical listening and experiencing discomfort (Palmer et  al., 2019). We conceptualize these four elements in this way: •

•

•

•

Historicizing TWBE entails acknowledging the linguistic terrorism and cultural invasion against Spanish speaking communities, divesting them of and shaming them for their language, even as we experience a boom in dual language programs where Spanish is positioned as a useful tool for the market (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Delavan et al., 2017; Petrovic, 2005). In historicizing TWBE we reclaim Latinx students as the main beneficiaries and advocate for socially just TWBE programs that can only be sustained with and through Latinx communities. Interrogating power in TWBE means that we question whose histories, voices, languaging practices and communities are prioritized in these programs, by actively engaging marginalized communities in creative ways to bring their unique knowledges as valid sources of knowledge in the curriculum and language learning, and requiring students from the dominant group to interrogate their privilege, as Michelle encouraged them to do in the opening quote. Critical listening in TWBE involves paying close attention to the histories and voices that historically have been oppressed in a society driven by white supremacy by creating alternative spaces where the dominant English speaking populations are asked to take note of these histories and voices, as opposed to taking advantage of them for their own benefit (Morales & Maravilla, 2019). Experiencing discomfort, particularly by the dominant group, means de-centering whiteness, English and niceness by acknowledging the current paradox of TWBE: we covet your language (Spanish) while at the same time we deem your bodies are disposable (CervantesSoon, 2014; Love, 2019), and by recognizing that niceness is not enough when engaging with communities that are under attack (DiAngelo, 2018).

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In this chapter we document Michelle’s CTLP, which sutures the activation of these elements and the use of dynamic linguistic features as a way to reclaim space for her Latinx students and families in a gentrifying school in Central Texas. Through this case we address Poza’s (2017) call to bring together critical pedagogies and translanguaging as a way to combat a translanguaging fetish that oftentimes lacks criticality and may contribute to even more inequities in TWBE (Hamman, 2018; see also Chapter 3, this volume). Translanguaging in TWBE

The dynamic use of linguistic features is a norm in multilingual communities (García & Li, 2014) which, when seen from the outside, can be understood as a selective deployment of features from across named languages (García & Kleyn, 2016). Beginning with this understanding, scholarship in TWBE has emphasized a disjuncture between program models based on strict language separation and the ways in which bilingual students language in and outside of schools (e.g. Gort & Pontier, 2013; Palmer & Martínez, 2013). Additional research demonstrates how both bilingual students and teachers in DLBE classrooms often flout these language policies of separation (e.g. Martín-Beltrán, 2010; Martínez, 2013; Palmer et al., 2014). Arguing for the intentional integration of translanguaging into TWBE, this critical work has sought to disrupt a paradigm of strict language separation. At the same time, scholars have raised the issue of protecting minoritized languages (Gort & Sembiante, 2015; Hamman, 2018). In TWBE classrooms on the US mainland, this usually entails remaining vigilant against the hegemony of English. Jaspers (2018) argues that this tension between encouraging students to engage their entire linguistic repertoires on the one hand, and maintaining a protected space for minoritized languages on the other, demonstrates a limitation to the transformative potential of translanguaging. According to this argument, translanguaging pedagogies may become an oppressive rather than a liberatory approach to education. We return to this tension in a later section in our theoretical framework, for it is especially pertinent to the polyphonic spaces that are TWBE classrooms. In a seemingly opposite critique, other scholars have issued calls to bring critical pedagogies to the fore in discussions of translanguaging, as the latter increasingly appears in academic literature, at times in contradictory ways. For example, Poza (2017) argues that translanguaging must connect with critical pedagogy so that the theory maintains its edginess and transformative aims. Several recent studies have sought to document critical uses of translanguaging. García-Mateus and Palmer (2017) detail students’ development of ‘critical language awareness’ through a process drama approach that opened up space for minoritized students to engage in flexible

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language practices and in ‘critical’ conversations around larger societal issues. Similarly, Hamman’s (2018) ‘call for criticality’ focuses on student dialogue about what it means to be bilingual and how this can impact one’s language use and identity. García and Leiva (2014) recount the practices of Camila, a high school language arts teacher who centered social justice and equity for marginalized Latinx students by selecting curricular materials and addressing societal issues that were directly impacting her students. Camila’s combination of translanguaging and critical pedagogy thus sought to disrupt dominant intellectual knowledge (including language), and also to open up a respectful space that went beyond discourses of immigrants’ supposed ‘illegality and criminality.’ Finally, Sánchez et al. (2018) have proposed an alternative policy to language separation in TWBE programs that is more consistent with the meaning of bilingualism through a translanguaging lens and that seeks to take back the social justice goals of bilingual translanguaging transformation spaces to generate new bilingual subjectivities and critical consciousness. Building from this work, we discuss various affinities between translanguaging and critical pedagogies in the following section, and then detail our use of anticolonial theories that undergird our formulation of CTLP. Theoretical Framework

Translanguaging as elaborated by Ofelia García and colleagues (e.g. García & Li, 2014) draws inspiration from the work of Paulo Freire and other critical pedagogues, and also deepens this work by focusing on the interrelations of language theories and educational equity. In formulating our understanding of CTLP, we fi nd it helpful to detail various points of accord between these scholarly traditions, recognizing that neither can be subsumed within the other. First, both translanguaging and critical pedagogy advocate a dialectical understanding of teachers, students and authority (e.g. Freire, 2005; García & Sylvan, 2011; Li, 2014). Importantly, this dialectical view of school-based roles does not decry all forms of authority. Giroux’s (1997) description of an ‘emancipatory view of authority’ is helpful here, since it is the legitimating concept that frames schools as potential sites of democratic world-making, and teachers as potentially transformative intellectuals. Teachers’ critical knowledge is thus shared with students in ways that contribute to these goals. Second, both translanguaging and critical pedagogy have advanced versions of counter-narratives that question and resist dominative explanations of the world, including minoritized students’ languaging (e.g. Martínez, 2013; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Somerville & Faltis, 2019). Here and throughout the chapter we use ‘dominative’ to emphasize tendencies toward domination rather than some perpetual dominant state. By signaling the processual practices of domination, we hope to point to their potential/ necessary undoing. Finally, the role of historicizing language and power

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is crucial in transformative theories of translanguaging and in critical pedagogies alike (e.g. Flores, 2013b; Freire, 2005; García & Kleyn, 2016; García & Li, 2014). We now put into conversation several additional tenets of critical pedagogy and translanguaging theory, and then describe our use of anticolonial theories that inform our notion of CTLP. For Freire (2005), naming is a fundamental condition of human existence: ‘To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming’ (Freire, 2005: 88, italics in original). Dialogue then, as Freire famously asserts, becomes a central means through which people collectively engage in naming, reading and transforming the word and the world. Nevertheless, Freire’s (2005) description of naming and dialogue foregrounds an analysis of power and domination: Dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming—between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must fi rst reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression. (Freire, 2005: 88)

Thus, naming in critical pedagogical traditions revolves around a dialectical denunciation of dehumanizing conditions, and annunciation of new visions for life and society (Freire, 1985). Translanguaging has raised important implications for this naming by refusing deficit notions of bilingual students’ language use and by positing bilingual persons’ unified linguistic repertoires, thus clarifying some of the linkages among language use, identity formation and coming to voice. We propose that anticolonial theories can complement the transformative potential of both translanguaging and critical pedagogy, by denouncing multiple facets of oppression from a world system perspective, and by foregrounding the naming of people historically talked about but not necessarily listened to in critical pedagogical traditions. Drawing from Calderón (2014), Cervantes-Soon (2018) describes anticolonial approaches to education as: those that make visible the coloniality of power masked as modernity with all of its systems of racist and heteropatriarchal oppression and the colonial blindness prevalent among most educators, which perpetuates Eurocentrism and settler colonialism as the dominant ideological frameworks of U.S education. (Cervantes-Soon, 2018: 865–866)

Our understanding of ‘critical’ thus foregrounds a denunciation of these multiple facets of oppression rooted in white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, global capitalism and settler colonialism. These phenomena include and transcend language and discourse. Certain articulations of translanguaging primarily focus on the oppressive regulation of language practices,

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while much of critical pedagogy has tended toward the critique and transformation of official knowledge. When the ‘critical’ in critical pedagogy is sustained through an anticolonial orientation, it presents a unified challenge to the oppressive regulation of language practices and the oppressive control of classroom knowledge. Acknowledging the linkages between language practices and knowledge production thus resists a colonizing partitioning of the two. Therefore, translanguaging is not and cannot be just about fluid language practices (a formulation that is too easily incorporated into neoliberal processes; Flores, 2013a), because its critique of colonial/contemporary language policy extends to many additional facets of life, the exploration and transformation of which guides the purposes of critical pedagogy. Our conversation between translanguaging, critical pedagogy and anticolonial theories thus offers implications for Jaspers’ (2018) concern that translanguaging’s promotion of dynamic language practices unwittingly disparages the purist demands of some language-minoritized communities, thereby converting the theory and related pedagogies into oppressive forces. This criticism elides a robust reflection on power and oppression by too easily conflating dominative (read Euro-Western centric) language purism with minoritized communities’ attempts to sustain their languaging amid the centuries-long assaults of cultural invasion and racial capitalism. Here, the work of anticolonial scholars is helpful, again. Jaspers (2018) references the legacy of European language purism and echoes Mignolo’s (2012) emphasis on the importance of recognizing the situatedness of our theories. Following this, in our discussion of translanguaging, we do not advocate that all language-minoritized communities embrace translanguaging in a sort of global design. We acknowledge certain incommensurabilities among different struggles for justice (Tuck & Yang, 2018), including projects related to minoritized language education. For example, tribal sovereignty is a unique and foundational principle of many language revitalization projects among Native peoples in the United States (McCarty & Lee, 2014). Similarly, an anticolonial orientation engages with the complicated status of ‘Spanish’ as both a colonizing and a subordinated language (Anzaldúa, 2007; Cervantes-Soon, 2018). Thus, the advocacy of ‘Spanish’ in US bilingual education is a different project from Indigenous language revitalization, albeit one that must account for its historical complicity in attempted Indigenous erasure and settler colonial logics (Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). At the same time, we insist that these struggles are not simply linguistic, and cannot be reduced as such. Moreover, minoritized language struggles in the United States, regardless of their disparate visions of justice, must contend with the hegemony of English, as well as with additional and overlapping forms of oppression. In terms of translanguaging pedagogical designs, various scholars have reiterated the importance of both named language allocation and

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designated translanguaging spaces (e.g. Hamman, 2018; Sánchez et al., 2018). These models explicitly answer the demands of languageminoritized communities for language sustenance. In addition, García and Kleyn (2016) and García and Li (2014) have differentiated between the products of learning endeavors and the processes of learning. The former can often be understood as reflecting the linguistic features of a single named language, while the latter emphasizes a dynamic meaningmaking that explicitly encourages students to engage their entire linguistic repertoire. Importantly, this ‘doing bilingualism’ in ‘LOTE,’ ‘English’ or translanguaging spaces, entails the integration of new features into one’s linguistic repertoire (Sánchez et al., 2018). This description of integrating linguistic features not only supports (rather than forecloses) students’ participation in different speech communities, but it also parallels our understanding of critical pedagogy, and we suggest that a CTLP be incorporated in the translanguaging for transformation spaces that Sánchez and colleagues propose so that students’ criticality expands beyond linguistic analyses. Guided by an anticolonial orientation, we propose that CTLP endeavor to disrupt multiple oppressions both in and outside classrooms through an expansion, and not an imposition, of officially sanctioned discourses. That is, teachers do not repeat a banking pedagogy but rather share their critical knowledge with emancipatory authority (Giroux, 1997) so as to expand the discursive space in classrooms in order to encourage the conditions for dialogue and conversation (De Lissovoy et al., 2015; Freire, 2005). This is decidedly not a call for an expansion complicit in cultural invasion, coloniality and settler colonialism, but rather an acknowledgement of the limitations of Western schooling and a hopeful call for educators to work toward the transformation of those conditions. The ‘trans’ in a CTLP then serves as the point of departure for discourse and the reconfiguration of power and knowledge production in the classroom. This may involve transgressing named language boundaries by legitimizing the authentic ways of speaking of the subaltern, transgressing the dominant voices by centering new or subaltern ones, and transgressing taken-for-granted notions of truth or hegemonic ideas through processes of renaming or disruption. We draw inspiration from Michelle’s praxis which, along with the students’ learning, illustrates these aspects of a CTLP and constitutes the focus of the remainder of this chapter. Context and Description of the Study

Dan carried out a year-long critical ethnography (Madison, 2012; Palmer & Caldas, 2015) at Plainview Elementary in 2015–2016. Located in Austin, TX, Plainview’s neighborhood and TWBE program had

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experienced rapid gentrification since the inception of the program in 2010, which was the original impetus for the critical ethnography. He documented how key stakeholders were experiencing and responding to these gentrification processes as Plainview became a ‘magnet’ for middleclass white families (Heiman & Murakami, 2019). Michelle’s 5th grade classroom proved to be a space of critical hope amid these gentrification processes impacting Plainview and Michelle’s students. Michelle’s critical pedagogy of ‘Spanish, love, content, not in that order’ (Heiman & Yanes, 2018) emerged as a focal point of the study at a time when critical scholars were proposing a fourth goal of TWBE around the development of critical consciousness (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019). Michelle, ‘Salvadoreña en mi corazón, pero canadiense en espíritu’ (her family fled El Salvador as refugees when Michelle was three), described her role at Plainview: And my job at Plainview is to be a dual language teacher, the Spanish [she was hired the year before to teach Spanish language arts and science] version. So here you go, this is what I do. And I also think that it empowers my culture, and I also think it empowers my language. It empowers my culture. It empowers the parents that speak my language. So, it’s a tool of empowerment to oftentimes people who have been pushed out of Plainview … So it’s always Spanish fi rst. All our newsletters, all our emails. Everything. And so that’s why I got hired at Plainview and that’s what I’m gonna do. (Transcription of interview, 27 April 2016)

Before we analyze Michelle’s implementation of a curricular unit around gentrification, it is important to understand the student composition of Michelle’s 5th grade TWBE classroom. This information is displayed in Table 2.1. It is important then to notice that working-class, middle-class and upper-middle class students are present in Michelle’s classroom and their experiences with gentrification vary. Also, the Latinx students in this class show the diversity of the community. Although the majority are working class, there are also some who are middle class and even uppermiddle class. The analysis that we conduct below focuses on Michelle’s implementation of a curricular unit around the generative theme of gentrification (Heiman, 2021). Key ‘resources’ in the unit were the voices of community members from the school and in the city: a middle-class white parent who talked with students about the appreciation of real estate prices in her neighborhood due to gentrification; a working-class Latinx parent who had been pushed out of the neighborhood; a Latinx activist who worked with an interfaith group on issues of equity and social justice; and a Latinx school board member with intimate lived knowledge of the city’s systematic displacement of Black and Brown communities. Michelle’s centering of ‘Spanish’ was grounded in solidarity and ‘love’ with those Latinx

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Table 2.1 Students’ in Michelle’s class Student name

Identifying information

Social class

Ofelia

Uruguayan/American

Upper middle class

Nate

Uruguayan/American

Upper middle class

María

Mexican-American

Middle class

Tyrone

Trinidadian/American

Working class

Lydia

Mexican/American

Upper middle class

Lorena

white Jewish/American

Middle class

Zuleima

Colombian/Korean

Middle class

Anita

white American

Upper middle class

Shawn

white American

Middle class

Holly

white American

Middle class

Tatiana

white American

Upper middle class

Alina

Colombian/American

Middle class

Leo

Mexicano-Americano

Working class

*Bradley

Mexican-American

Working class

*Carly

white American

Middle class

*Javier

Mexican-American

Working class

*Karina

Mexicana-Americana

Working class

*Katy

Mexican-American

Working class

*Larry

white American

Middle class

*Marisa

Mexican-American

Working class

*Néstor

Mexican-American

Working class

*Sara

white American

Middle class

Note: The first set of names is presented in the order in which they appear in the narrative below. Students that Michelle mentions in the opening vignette and/or are mentioned in dialogues, but do not speak in the chapter, are designated with an asterisk. These names appear in alphabetical order. We use (/) (Uruguayan/American) to describe US-born students who identify with that ancestry. We use (-) (Mexican-American) to describe US-born students with two Mexican parents. Javier is the only student who was born in Mexico.

families and students who had been ‘pushed out of Plainview.’ However, as will become evident, what she referred to as ‘Spanish’ was more precisely the authentic languaging practices of the Latinx community which involved translanguaging. This chapter provides a re-examination and reflection on the data by the three of us that reveals and names Michelle’s stance: an explicit CTLP that challenges dominative ideologies, narratives and the inequalities that have emerged in the field of TWBE. We specifically examine Days 5 and 6 of the gentrification unit in the following section, and provide Table 2.2 to guide the reader through the following fi ndings.

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Table 2.2 Days 5 and 6 of the gentrification unit Day

Visitor/curricular artifact

Key events (in order)

5 (Findings #1 and #2)

Mónica Zárate (parent)

Ms Zárate’s testimonio, unpacking of testimonio by students, Dan’s interview with two students, students’ dialogue about affordable housing and one particular gentrifying neighborhood that was now a bar district, 2 blog posts from students

6 (Finding #3)

Article ‘Here today, there tomorrow’ (Proctor, 2005)

Discussion about transformation of Plainview community and school, discussion around equity in middle/high schools in district, students’ reflections on purpose of TWBE programs, TWBE at Plainview

Findings Transgressing official knowledges: Testimonio as a platform to interrogate gentrification

A crucial facet of the gentrification curriculum was the integration of parents’ voices from her classroom, as Michelle’s intimate and caring relationships with them was an extension of her CTLP. Marisa’s (student) mother, Mónica Zárate, whose family had recently been displaced from the neighborhood and school district, volunteered to talk with students about how this change had impacted her family. We provide an excerpt of her testimonio – her critical retrospective reflection about her lived experience (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012) with gentrification: Para poder llegar, porque yo sé en la carretera va a estar feo, no sé qué me pueden encontrar en el camino, un accidente que tarde una hora de retraso ¿qué sé yo? Y trato yo de dar por los lugares más cortitos para llegar más rápido. Ellas saben, y Marisa les puede decir, como soy yo. “Marisa apúrenle ya es tarde” y vámonos y esto y el otro y ya vengo para la otra para ir peinando a uno peinando la otra. Y siempre yo no me cuido yo. Y mi esposo me ha dicho tú siempre preocupas por ellas, y tú siempre andas desarreglada, toda greñuda. Pero no tengo tiempo para mí, cuando voy que me hagan mis uñas o a la carrera, siempre voy a la carrera porque mi vida es así, a la carrera. (Transcription of classroom talk, 9 April 2016)

Mónica then recounted a recent harrowing commute that forced her to put her youngest daughter in kindergarten at her feet as she drove (Mónica was late for work and did this to make room for her three other daughters in their pick-up truck), at which point she broke down and started crying. Michelle recalled the testimonio two weeks later during a presentation about the gentrification unit at a local Bilingual Education conference: La mamá de Marisa, la señora Zárate, llegó y eso fue uno de los momentos que me impactó más, porque se paró, se acuerdan [pointing to students in attendance], se paró y empezó a llorar. Sin nadie, nadie le

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preguntó nada, nada le hizo ningún comentario, pero sabía de lo que se iba a tratar, y empezó a llorar. Porque sabía que su comunidad estaba cambiando, sabía el esfuerzo que tenía que hacer con sus hijos y eso fue un impacto más grande que quizás Pedro o Natalia [school board member and community organizer who participated in the unit] porque es una voz que pertenece a mi comunidad. (Transcription, 23 April 2016)

Michelle, who wanted to make sure Ms Taylor (monolingual English language arts and social studies teacher who co-taught with Michelle and who sometimes facilitated conversations during the gentrification unit in English) could participate in the conversation, asked students to clarify key parts of Mónica’s testimonio by instructing them to relay where she had lived before being displaced. These unstructured dialogical exchanges in which different students participated were the norm during Dan’s yearlong study in Michelle’s classroom: Ofelia: Michelle: Ofelia: Michelle: Ms Taylor: Ofelia:

En apartamentos Well, dile a Ms Taylor In apartments like really close Full sentence, amiga; she has no idea Just the answer to the question So Mónica’s family lived in apartments close by, cuz all her daughters went to Plainview, so she kinda wants to follow that Michelle: Yeah Nate: So she was living a really good life there but then these new land owners came in and they made the rent really high. They made a bunch of stuff cost a lot of money, like a lot of unnecessary things. So they had to move out to Manor, and now they own a trailer and they have a spot, like a trailer park I think it is, yeah so that’s where they live. Ms Taylor: I did get it pretty good, I mean I’m trying to learn to translate and I was following that fairly well, how are you fi nding Manor? Mónica: I don’t know nothin’ about Manor Ms Taylor: Yeah Mónica: I don’t know nobody over there, just my neighbors. And I don’t know over there. I don’t know where the school at, so, práctica, I’m new over there. Ms Taylor: Very new Mónica: I’m been there by a year already, but I’m new (Transcription of classroom talk, 9 April 2016)

As was the norm in Michelle’s classroom, they unpacked the conversation after Mónica left: Michelle: Let’s debrief … ¿Qué dijo Mónica que les causó un impacto? Nate, ¿qué dijo Mónica? Nate: Estaba hablando sobre qué está pasando en su vida; como necesitaba, como la renta en su apartamento era muy caro, so, necesitaba moverse a Manor.

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Michelle: María: Michelle: Nate:

Why did she start crying? It was really hard for her What was hard? Es muy difícil como todo los días necesita mirar sobre sus niñas y necesita ser mucho para Michelle: Tyrone? Tyrone: I think the reason she was crying was because it is really hard to move home with a house that you lived in for a long time Michelle: 17 años? 19 años? Nate: 17 (Transcription of classroom talk, 9 April 2016)

This example illustrates the transgression of the named languages that characterized the dual language program, as well as any rules of language separation. But within and beyond that, what was important were the voices that were centered in the classroom as the sources of knowledge for defining and historicizing gentrification. Michelle interrogated power by privileging the authentic voice of a mother who not only had been displaced through the process of gentrification in the community, but was also a woman and member of a community who has been historically marginalized, and whose ways of communicating were not typical in a classroom setting. For example, Mónica, the mother, not only told her story in Spanish (despite the fact that there was a monolingual English speaking teacher in the audience), but she also shared her intimate emotions and expressed her sadness through her tears. While Michelle then asked a student to summarize in English Monica’s testimonio for Ms Taylor, she decentered herself and the other teacher present by positioning them and herself as learners and listeners as well. By creating a platform for Mónica to tell her story in her own terms, and by positioning her as a legitimate source of knowledge, Michelle transgressed the Western, patriarchal, monolingual ways of knowing that are typically privileged in schools. Mónica’s testimonio was a poignant example of how students engaged in critical listening, which is one of the essential elements in the development of critical consciousness (Palmer et al., 2019). Michelle deliberately invited Mónica to share her testimonio as a way to historicize the Plainview community and reveal how gentrification processes impacted families ‘que pertenecen a mi comunidad.’ The impact of Monica’s testimonio on students’ learning was evident in their specific references to her visit when Dan interviewed them in groups of three at the end of the school year, as noted below by another two students, Lydia and Lorena: [D]uring our gentrification unit she brought in parents, teachers, and people who told us about their own life stories and I think it helped because it was real and we heard and felt how they felt, and we really experienced it … [like] the stories of like how Marisa’s mom, how she worked so hard on getting each girl to school and working so hard. (Lydia) (Transcription of interview, 23 May 2016)

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I agree with Lydia that it was like real I guess, and it just made me sad because it’s like everybody’s losing their homes and not getting enough money, well not everybody is. But a lot of people are losing their homes and not getting enough money, and they have to do things they probably wouldn’t want to do cuz they don’t have any other choice, and I think it’s really sad. And when I grow up I defi nitely want to do something about that. (Lorena) (Transcription of interview, 23 May 2016) ‘¡Oh, esa es la pregunta del año! Dilo otra vez!’: Entanglement and discomfort around the generative theme of gentrification

In her CTLP, Michelle engaged students in a dialogue that centered students’ dynamic languaging as well as their own ideas and observations. In other words, in contrast to most classroom discourse where teachers are at the center asking questions and expecting student responses that will be evaluated as right or wrong, or which establish the language in which they should be answered, Michelle allowed students to transgress these discursive roles and linguistic boundaries by allowing them to be the ones who asked questions and interrogated the validity of assumptions. This gave freedom to their expression and fostered the disruption of positionings and taken-for-granted concepts as well as the detached intellectualism that often pervades schooling. Ultimately, it provided opportunities for students to personalize and humanize their learning. As they continued to make sense of Ms Zárate’s testimonio and a visit from a local activist who talked with them that same day about how gentrification was impacting affordable housing units in the city, students shared their doubts: Zuleima: Do you think it would be different if the apartments around here weren’t owned by landlords, they were owned by the government? Many: Yes Anita: The only thing is that, I’m not really, well I have two things; one is that I’m not really sure what the difference is between gentrification and like just developing a city, and the other thing is that, I don’t think people are willing to give up money to help people because they’re so selfish. (Transcription of classroom talk, 9 April 2016)

Michelle took up Anita’s question: Michelle:

Para contestarte la pregunta a Anita de lo que escuché de nuestras tres personas, gentrification es cuando la gente no puede pagar, se va, y development es cuando hay un plan para traer servicios a la comunidad. So, desarrollar Miller [planned mixed-use community near Plainview where several middle-class students lived] es traer servicio a la comunidad, pero gentrification es cuando Rooney Street [a low-income neighborhood that became a bar scene in the gentrification process of the last decade] se hace bares y las familias que viven en casas tienen que …

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Ms Taylor

Have we talked about Rooney, I mean we talked about that some. Ten [interrupting]: years ago you would not have walked down Rooney street, nope! It was dangerous over there, and now that it’s high dollar, that’s gentrification. Anita: That just sounds like it’s making it better, that’s the only thing. You’re saying ten years ago you couldn’t go there, and now you’re saying it’s fi ne. Michelle: Making it better for who? Making it better for who? Ms Taylor: There were people that lived there. That’s where their homes were that they couldn’t stay; there was high crime but that was still their home. Shawn: So is gentrification good or bad? Michelle: Oh, esa es la pregunta del año! Dilo otra vez! Shawn: Is gentrification good or bad? Anita: Good for some people, bad for some people. Michelle: Well, good para quién? Anita: Good for those who can afford it and are not having [lots of talking] Holly: Good for the Californians! Nate: Oh my god this is so! Tatiana: I don’t get gentrification! Michelle: You do get it! Alright ese va a ser nuestro blog hoy! Alguien puede recordar a Tatiana ¿qué es gentrification? ¿Cuál es la defi nición que vimos? Lorena: Upgrading a house to middle-class standards Michelle: Upgrading a house to middle-class tastes Tatiana: That’s not bad! Anita: But it could be bad for Alina: It could be good to some people and bad to some people. It depends from where you see it [many are talking]. It depends from what perspective you have. Tatiana: Exactly Anita (Transcription of classroom talk, 9 April 2016)

In this dialogue, we see students struggling with the defi nition of gentrification as a positive or negative thing. Even in her interrupted attempt to explain the difference between gentrification and development, Michelle allows students to take the direction of the conversation and to feel the discomfort as part of the learning process. As Michelle allows students to wrestle with these ideas, Anita is able to point out that Ms Taylor is characterizing a low-income community as dangerous and thus making gentrification sound like a good thing. By centering the question of not just whether gentrification is good or bad, but for whom, Michelle allows students to disrupt commonsense ideas of what it may mean to upgrade a community through rich dynamic practices, which is what we argue is at the heart of Michelle’s CTLP. Ultimately, some students come to realize that gentrification can be good or bad depending on who is benefiting or being hurt and whose perspective is assumed.

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It should be noted, however, that the students who dominate this conversation are all English speaking non-Latinx. However, Michelle’s CTLP requires her to disrupt the hegemony of these students in the classroom discourse, not by coercing others to speak, but by being the voice that her low-income Latinx students may not want to express at that moment. Simultaneously, she expands the classroom discourse to include other voices and to foster critical listening through a blog assignment that allows students to express themselves in ways that are most authentic to them. We include two blog posts to reveal students’ development of critical consciousness around the ‘generative theme’ (Freire, 2005) of gentrification. This blog serves as a space that provides greater freedom of expression. We first share Ofelia’s blog, an upper-middle class Uruguayan/American student who lives in the mixed-use community mentioned above: Muchas personas sufren de gentrificacion y algunas no. En mi opinion hay dos lados. El lado que esta sufriendo piensan que es muy malo, y los que no quizas piensan que es malo y algunos piensan que es bueno. En mis años de Plainview desde kinder e mirado estudiantes viniendo y llendo cada ano. Puede ser bueno porque estan haciendo mas casas que son de buena qualidad y estan construiendo mas cosas que necisitamos por ejemplo un HEB [a chain supermarket]. Gentrificacion es un tema muy difficil de dicir que es malo o bueno. Gentrificacion a cambiado muchas vidas pero yo estuviera viviendo en algun otro lugar sin gentrificacion. Las cosas buenas son que hay mas HEB y central market. Las cosas malas son que muchas personas no saben donde vivir y van afuera de Austin y estamos perdiendo diversidad en Austin. (Ofelia’s blog post, 9 April 2016)

We also share Leo’s blog post. Leo describes himself as a working-class ‘mexicano-americano’ whose family was displaced due to gentrification: I think that gentrification is bad because if people are raising the rent for houses or apartments you are losing money because the rent. Another reason why its bad is because some people’s annual salary isn’t too high so they need to move from house to house. I think that gentrification is discriminating because they might be working really hard and being good citizens, but still can’t afford to live in their neighborhood. That’s all i can think of. (Leo’s blog post, 9 April 2016)

In these blog posts, students were given freedom to write through the language of their choice. The posts display instances of critical consciousness around the ‘generative theme,’ and reveal that Michelle’s CTLP challenged students to interrogate power, albeit with varying degrees of criticality. Ofelia, who at one point during the gentrification unit was impressed with the ‘pretty’ aesthetic changes popping up in the Plainview neighborhood and who was not being directly impacted by gentrification, described both ‘cosas buenas’ and ‘cosas malas’ due to demographic changes. Leo, who was relatively quiet during class discussions throughout data collection, was able to voice his perspective and named gentrification as ‘bad’ as a

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member of a marginalized community who had been directly impacted by the ‘generative theme.’ ‘I was hired for them! I wasn’t hired for you!’: Interrogating power in a gentrifying Plainview

Day 6 of the gentrification unit began with Michelle prompting students by asking ‘Por qué dices que Austin is changing y está haciendo upper class middle class?’ As students were talking about how houses were becoming more expensive, Holly focused on the immediate Plainview neighborhood: ‘Like the apartments just over by Kelly’s [local snowcone place], they just kicked out a bunch of people and now some people can’t afford those apartments anymore.’ As a way to historicize Plainview and the surrounding community, Michelle integrated the 2005 article ‘Here today, there tomorrow’ (Proctor, 2005), which discussed a Plainview reality that was drastically different from the current one that has a much sought after TWBE school with a lottery system and tours for interested families. In the article from 2005, the Plainview principal, who in the current Plainview reality was leading extra tours due to the ‘magnet’ that the school had become (Heiman & Murakami, 2019), was heading up neighborhood block walks in apartment complexes where rents were $450 a month. This statistic was a source of astonishment for students, as many blurted out ‘wow,’ and Anita remarked, ‘I know there’s 330 square feet now for $1900.’ Michelle provided more context about Plainview in 2005, ‘pero es la razón por lo cual muchas personas venían a Plainview antes, $450 a month no es nada; $100 for your first month no es nada. Hoy ya no puedes encontrar un apartamento de 600 square feet que cueste $500.’ The Plainview reality of 2005 continued to surprise students, as they had been the fi rst group of students when the district piloted the TWBE program at four schools in 2010–2011. Michelle shared how the school was about to close in 2007 due to under-enrollment, but that the principal’s visionary initiative to ‘teach Spanish’ in 2010 served to attract back the neighborhood families who had refused to enroll their children at Plainview because of the high rates of low-income Latinx bilingual students. This was the ‘magnet’ that coalesced with skyrocketing rents to fuel a ‘dual gentrification process’ that pushed out Latinx families and pushed in the dominant group (Heiman & Murakami, 2019). After the juxtapositioning of Plainview realities from past and present, Michelle transitioned into a conversation around equity in admission processes at middle and high school magnet programs. This was of great interest to students because they were moving on to middle school the following year. There were three different magnet schools that required essays and a letter of recommendation in order to be accepted [Farmer, Kendrick and Barbara Johnson; only Farmer had a dual language bilingual program]. Michelle actually required that all students write three

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essays to these magnet schools, even though they were not required to apply to them. But it turned out that out of a class of 29, 12 of them would be attending the three different magnet schools. The working-class Latinx students would be attending Plainview’s feeder school, Langley, where there were also conversations about adding a dual language track. Michelle presented statistics that revealed that while 60% of students in the district were Latinx, they made up only 25% of the population in the magnet schools. Students were astonished and responded with ‘oh my gosh’ and ‘wow,’ which then led into a conversation around who actually applied to the magnet schools. First, Michelle provided context about the previous schools in which she taught and the essay process in which she engaged her students: Michelle: Yo hice que todos en quinto grado hicieran sus tres essays para aplicar. Yo lo he hecho en Garland, lo hice en Solano cuando era maestra allí. Porque sabía que los Latinos en estas magnet schools no existían. Yo hice que todos (ustedes) hicieran sus essays, pero los que actually hicieron sus essays para írselo a dar a Farmer, a Kendrick, a Barbara Johnson, fueron como doce. Shawn: Like 12 of them Michelle: So let’s hear from you. Leo, tú hiciste essay, yeah. Javier tú hiciste tu essay, ¿por qué no? Nestor, tú hiciste tus tres essays pero no aplicaste. Karina hizo tres essays pero no aplicó. Tatiana: They didn’t send them to the school? Michelle: Yeah! Pero todo mundo en esta clase hizo sus tres essays y solamente 12 aplicaron. … Yo los he ayudado a todos a hacer sus essays, pero yo sé que no va a haber nadie moreno o hispano low-income de esta clase que va a ir a Farmer, a Kendrick. Hay una Latina, dos Latinas que van a ir; Nate, son tres Latinos que van a ir. Pero ninguno de esos tres son low-income. (Transcription of classroom talk, 11 April 2016)

Nate, a middle-class Uruguayan/American who would be attending Farmer the following year, then emphasized how it was a really ‘diverse’ school that had ‘a lot of poor people and a lot of rich people.’ He was also quick to point out that it also had a dual language program, which sparked discussions of TWBE privilege, especially drawing reactions from Anita, a white upper-middle class student. As the students interact, Michelle intervenes to make them reflect on the purpose and effects of TWBE: Nate:

Y tiene DL, so así que muchos, como los padres de personas hispanas Anita: That’s not true! Nate: Yes it is! Anita: DL is mostly for the people who were, like me, where my parents are not Zuleima: That’s true!

‘Well Good Para Quién?’

Anita: Zuleima: Anita: Michelle:

Many: Michelle:

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Totally fluent in Spanish, and my dad like can’t really speak Spanish other than like medical stuff It usually is. And he sent me there because he wanted me to learn Spanish. It’s not for the people who speak Spanish at home. No! Estás equivocada! In order for the district to hire a bilingual teacher there has to be a minimum number of bilingual students, so if you took that test on the computer. Do you remember taking that test on the computer?2 Yes! Just recently, that reading test, so if you took that test on the computer you are officially a bilingual student. I was hired for them! I wasn’t hired for you! Ms Taylor was hired for you [this surprises some]. And so bilingual teachers serve bilingual students. I am hired to teach those students who took those tests. Dual Language as a program is hired to teach Spanish to families who speak Spanish and teach Spanish cultures to families who have Spanish cultures so that they don’t lose their Spanish. But that doesn’t seem to be the reason why people are sending You’re right! No es la razón por la cual vienen a Plainview hoy. Like los padres de Anita, los padres de Sara, no mandaron a Sara y a Anita a Plainview por tener una maestra como Leonard o Carpenter. No, te mandaron a la escuela para eso, te mandaron a la escuela para que aprendieras español. Pero la realidad es que yo no estoy aquí para enseñarles a ustedes español. Yo estoy aquí para mantener el español de Bradley, para mantener el español de Karina, de Katy, de Leo, para que al mismo tiempo ellos aprendan inglés … Fue por eso que Plainview se pudo mantener abierto. Porque Sara vino, porque Shawn vino, porque Anita vino. Entonces estas familias mantuvieron a Plainview abierta, pero la realidad es que Cantú, Santos, Olague [Latinx bilingual teachers] y yo estamos aquí para los latinos. Obviously enseñamos a todos, obviously! Olague no dice, ‘Sorry, you’re not a Spanish speaker you can’t come in my class.’ Yo nunca he dicho eso, pero todos sabemos por qué estamos aquí. (Transcription of classroom talk, 11 April 2016)

In this discussion, Michelle interrogates the concept of gentrification further to help students understand their own position in the process. In previous discussions, the students had been talking about ‘rich people’ and ‘poor people’ without situating themselves in that range, and some, like the blog example from Ofelia, lament the loss of ‘diversity’ through the gentrification process without considering why diversity is important and who benefits from it and how. Michelle unpacks their privilege by naming students’ social class as well as her own critical commitments as a teacher. For example, Michelle does not continue in English, and in so

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doing encourages Anita to grapple ‘in Spanish’ with a critical interrogation of what it means for a white, upper-middle class student to ‘learn Spanish.’ In doing so, Michelle transgresses the inappropriateness of naming privilege and power in her very classroom. While a student may identify as ‘Latinx,’ Michelle points to their class privilege, which forces students to interrogate their world, their own identities and their benevolent notions of ‘diversity.’ Her CTLP brings these concepts to the personal realm by historicizing these worlds and identities through dynamic language practices. As she does so, Michelle engages students in the reflection of ‘good para quién’ by examining their own role and social positioning. Conclusion

We have provided an illustration of CTLP through which a teacher aims to resist the white supremacy that tends to shape education contexts, including bilingual education classrooms, and particularly those following a two-way approach. That is, her pedagogy seeks to assert the voices of the Latinx students and their families and counter the dominance of white, English speaking, monolingual and affluent students and teachers. As can be noted, Michelle consistently translanguages throughout her teachings, even when she is claiming to speak Spanish. That is, she embodies and legitimizes the authentic language practices of bilingual Latinxs. She also deliberately explains why she does this, reminding students that they are sharing their language, but that this is the language of their community. Given the socioeconomic diversity in her classroom, in which her Latinx students range from working class to middle and upper class, Michelle’s CTLP aims to transgress not only linguistic boundaries, but also the ways of knowing and being that get privileged in schools by naming and transgressing hegemonic knowledge. While this may not be enough to immediately disrupt dominative discourse patterns in the classroom, it gives the teacher the responsibility to decenter the hegemony of white English speakers, not by pushing silent students into speaking, but by helping dominative students confront their own privilege and flawed common sense. Furthermore, a CTLP positions teachers to critically recognize messages within the power relations of the classroom, which may be expressed not only through words, or a standardized named language, but also through silences, body language and other semiotic processes. Such critical recognizing can better inform teachers’ practice. For example, in the case of Michelle, she created an alternative space where the voices of non-dominative students can begin to emerge in more authentic ways. In conclusion, Michelle’s CTLP offers important nuance around conceptualizations of the Latinx community in a TWBE program by providing a platform for students to problematize issues of social class and language where these issues become personal, their everydayness becomes explicit, and possibilities for transformation emerge.

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Even though students’ problematizing during these lessons was around the intersection of social class and language, Michelle’s integration of a CTLP reveals that this problematizing could be extended into issues of race and ethnicity. We propose that anticolonial theories can complement the transformative potential of both translanguaging and critical pedagogy, by denouncing multiple facets of oppression from a world system perspective, and by foregrounding the naming of people historically talked about but not necessarily listened to in critical pedagogical traditions. A CTLP centers the speaker and their denunciation of oppression in their own terms. That is, a CTLP does not view language in isolation away from the speaker nor from the structures of power that encompass one’s world, but rather as part of identities and social positionings. Therefore, such pedagogy centers not only the language practices but also the identities and intersectionalities of those historically marginalized or oppressed, and recognizes the privilege of the dominant group, regardless of the languages being used. In centering the languaging, identities, narratives and experiences of the historically marginalized, connections are made to the larger society, and concepts are named in their terms and put forward for exploration and reflection by everyone. The end goal is to transgress not only dominant language practices and dichotomies but also the centeredness of traditionally dominant identities and common sense about what is considered knowledge and truth, who can produce it, who can name it and who can access it. Notes (1) All names in the chapter are pseudonyms except Michelle. (2) When students enroll in a TWBE school they take a Spanish and English test (usually on the computer), to help teachers (and forms) identify them as English language learners (ELLs) or non-ELL students. Most of the students that were in Michelle’s classroom did this assessment as incoming kindergarteners.

References Anzaldúa, G. (2007) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (4th edn). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. (Original work published in 1987.) Arias, M.B. and Fee, M. (eds) (2018) Profi les of Dual Language Education in the 21st Century. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Calderón, D. (2014) Anticolonial methodologies in education: Embodying land and indigeneity in Chicana feminisms. Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies 6 (2), 81–96. doi:10.18085/llas.6.2.96wkl5357125j70x Cervantes-Soon, C.G. (2014) A critical look at dual language immersion in the new Latin@ diaspora. Bilingual Research Journal 37 (1), 64–82. doi:10.1080/15235882.2 014.893267 Cervantes-Soon, C.G. (2018) Using a Xicana feminist framework in bilingual teacher preparation: Toward an anticolonial path. The Urban Review 50 (5), 857–888. Cervantes-Soon, C., Dorner, L., Palmer, D., Heiman, D., Schwerdtfeger, R. and Choi, J. (2017) Combating inequalities in two-way language immersion programs: Toward

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critical consciousness in bilingual education spaces. Review of Research in Education 41, 403–427. doi:10.3102/0091732X17690120 Chaparro, S. (2017) Language and the gentrifying city: An ethnographic study of a twoway immersion program in an urban public school. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Delavan, M.G., Valdez, V.E. and Freire, J.A. (2017) Language as whose resource? When global economics usurp the local equity potentials of dual language education. International Multilingual Research Journal 11 (2), 86–100. doi:10.1080/19313152. 2016.1204890 Delgado Bernal, D., Burciaga, R. and Flores, C. (2012) Chicana/Latina testimonios: Mapping the methodological, pedagogical, and political. Equity and Excellence in Education 45 (3), 363–372. doi:10.1080/10665684.2012.698149 De Lissovoy, N., Means, A.J. and Saltman, K.J. (2015) Toward a Common School Movement. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. DiAngelo, R. (2018) White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Flores, N. (2013a) The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: A cautionary tale. TESOL Quarterly 47 (3), 500–520. doi:10.1002/tesq.114 Flores, N. (2013b) Silencing the subaltern: Nation-state/colonial governmentality and bilingual education in the United States. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 10 (4), 263–287. doi:10.1080/15427587.2013.846210 Flores, N. (2016) A tale of two visions: Hegemonic whiteness and bilingual education. Educational Policy 30 (1), 13–38. doi:10.1177/0895904815616482 Flores, N. and García, O. (2017) A critical review of bilingual education in the United States: From basements and pride to boutiques and profit. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 37, 14–29. doi:10.1017/S0267190517000162 Freire, P. (1985) The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (2005) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, trans.). New York: Continuum International. (Original work published in 1970.) García, O. and Kleyn, T. (eds) (2016) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. New York: Routledge. García, O. and Leiva, C. (2014) Theorizing and enacting translanguaging for social justice. In A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy (pp. 199–216). Dordrecht: Springer. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O. and Sylvan, C.E. (2011) Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal 95 (3), 385–400. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01208.x García-Mateus, S. and Palmer, D. (2017) Translanguaging pedagogies for positive identities in two-way bilingual education. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 16 (4), 245–255. doi:10.1080/15348458.2017.1329016 Giroux, H.A. (1997) Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gort, M. and Pontier, R.W. (2013) Exploring bilingual pedagogies in dual language preschool classrooms. Language and Education 27 (3), 223–245. doi:10.1080/09500782. 2012.697468 Gort, M. and Sembiante, S.F. (2015) Navigating hybridized learning spaces through translanguaging pedagogy: Dual language preschool teachers’ languaging practices in support of emergent bilingual children’s performance of academic discourse. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (1), 7–25. doi:10.1080/19313152.2014.981775 Hamman, L. (2018) Translanguaging and positioning in two-way dual language classrooms: A case for criticality. Language and Education 32 (1), 21–42. doi:10.1080/09 500782.2017.1384006

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Heiman, D. (2021) ‘So is gentrification good or bad?’: One teacher’s implementation of the fourth goal in her TWBE classroom. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 52 (1), 73–81. doi:10.1111/aeq.12362 Heiman, D. and Murakami, E. (2019) ‘It was like a magnet to bring people in’: School administrators’ responses to the gentrification of a two-way bilingual education (TWBE) program in central Texas. Journal of School Leadership 29 (6), 454–472. doi:10.1177/1052684619864702 Heiman, D. and Yanes, M. (2018) Centering the fourth pillar in times of TWBE gentrification: ‘Spanish, love, content, not in that order’. International Multilingual Research Journal 12 (3), 173–187. doi:10.1080/19313152.2018.1474064 Howard, E., Lindholm-Leary, K., Rogers, D., Olague, N., Medina, J., Kennedy, D., Sugarman, H. and Christian, D. (2018) Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education (3rd edn). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Jaspers, J. (2018) The transformative limits of translanguaging. Language & Communication 58, 1–10. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2017.12.001 Katnelson, N. and Bernstein, K.A. (2017) Rebranding bilingualism: The shifting discourses of language education policy in California’s 2016 election. Linguistics & Education 40 (1), 11–26. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2017.05.002 Li, W. (2014) Who’s teaching whom? Co-learning in multilingual classrooms. In S. May (ed.) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual Education (pp. 167–190). New York: Routledge. Love, B.L. (2019) We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Madison, D.S. (2012) Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Martin-Beltrán, M. (2010) The two-way language bridge: Co-constructing bilingual language learning opportunities. The Modern Language Journal 94 (2), 254–277. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2010.01020.x Martínez, R.A. (2013) Reading the world in Spanglish: Hybrid language practices and ideological contestation in a sixth-grade English language arts classroom. Linguistics and Education 24 (3), 276–288. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2013.03.007 Martínez, R.A. (2017) Dual language education and the erasure of Chicanx, Latinx, and indigenous Mexican children: A call to re-imagine (and imagine beyond) bilingualism. Texas Education Review 5 (1), 81–92. Martínez, R.A., Hikida, M. and Durán, L. (2015) Unpacking ideologies of linguistic purism: How dual language teachers make sense of everyday translanguaging. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (1), 26–42. doi:10.1080/19313152.2014.977712 McCarty, T. and Lee, T. (2014) Critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy and Indigenous education sovereignty. Harvard Educational Review 84 (1), 101–124. Mignolo, W. (2012) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 2000.) Morales, P.Z. and Maravilla, J.V. (2019) The problems and possibilities of interest convergence in a dual language school. Theory Into Practice 58 (2), 145–153. doi:10.108 0/00405841.2019.1569377 Palmer, D. and Caldas, B. (2015) Critical ethnography. In K. King (eds) Research Methods in Language and Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd edn). Cham: Springer. Palmer, D. and Martínez, R.A. (2013) Teacher agency in bilingual spaces: A fresh look at preparing teachers to educate Latina/o bilingual children. Review of Research in Education 37 (1), 269–297. doi:10.3102/0091732X12463556 Palmer, D.K., Martínez, R.A., Mateus, S.G. and Henderson, K. (2014) Reframing the debate on language separation: Toward a vision for translanguaging pedagogies in the dual language classroom. The Modern Language Journal 98 (3), 757–772. doi:10.1111/ modl.12121

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Palmer, D., Cervantes-Soon, C.G., Dorner, L. and Heiman, D. (2019) Bilingualism, biliteracy, biculturalism, and critical consciousness for all: Proposing a fourth fundamental goal for two-way dual language education. Theory Into Practice 58 (2), 121–133. Petrovic, J.E. (2005) The conservative restoration and neoliberal defenses of bilingual education. Language Policy 4 (4), 395–416. Poza, L.E. (2017) Translanguaging: Defi nitions, implications, and further needs in burgeoning inquiry. Berkeley Review of Education 6 (2), 101–128. doi:10.5070/B86110060 Proctor, R. (2005) Here today, there tomorrow. The Austin Chronicle, 11 March. See https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2005-03-11/262204/. Sánchez, M.T., García, O. and Solorza, C. (2018) Reframing language allocation in dual language bilingual education. Bilingual Research Journal 41 (1), 37–51. doi:10.1080/ 15235882.2017.1405098 Solórzano, D.G. and Yosso, T.J. (2002) Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry 8 (1), 23–44. doi:10.1177/107780040200800103 Somerville, J. and Faltis, C. (2019) Dual languaging as strategy and translanguaging as tactic in two-way dual language programs. Theory Into Practice 58 (2), 164–175. doi:10.1080/00405841.2019.1569380 Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (eds) (2018) Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education. New York: Routledge. Urrieta Jr., L. and Calderón, D. (2019) Critical Latinx indigeneities: Unpacking indigeneity from within and outside of Latinized entanglements. Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal 13 (2), 145–174. Valdez, V.E., Freire, J.A. and Delavan, M.G. (2016) The gentrification of dual language education. Urban Review 48 (4), 601–627.

3 ‘They Are Going to Forget about Us’: Translanguaging and Student Agency in a Gentrifying Neighborhood Luis E. Poza1 and Aaron Stites

All the moral and political values of a given society along with its structures of power and domination, as well as its corresponding mechanisms of oppression are contained in the smallest cells of social organization (the couple, the family, the neighborhood, the school, the office, the factory, etc.) Boal & Epstein, 1990: 36

Introduction

‘They’re going to forget about us,’ interjects Ayán, 2 as the class watches a video commercial prepared by the city government about the surrounding neighborhood. As the video’s faceless narrator segues from storefront to storefront and one white young professional after another raving about the nearby shopping and dining, Ayán articulates what many of her peers are thinking: gentrification is erasing the Latinx characteristics, histories and people from this urban neighborhood in the southwestern United States. Under any circumstances, a class of 8th graders could be expected to feel somewhat powerless before large societal events, but for a group of mainly poor and working-class Latinx students not far removed from the 2016 US presidential election and in the midst of dramatic changes to the visual and demographic landscape surrounding them, Ayán’s feelings of resentment and resignation seem even more poignant. Such upheavals (the displacement of poor families of color amid reurbanization campaigns) and oppression (such as the racialization, vilification and maltreatment of immigrants and people of color under both the presidential administration and the perceived wave of affluent white newcomers to the neighborhood) have reasonably fueled discussion about the shortcomings of translanguaging scholarship and pedagogies to 71

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achieve any real transformation, articulated as a change in material inequalities and systemic oppression (Block, 2018; Jaspers, 2018). Moreover, the growing prevalence and popularity of the term risks dilution, or discursive drift, of any political consciousness intended in original conceptualizations (Jaspers, 2018; Leung & Valdés, 2019; Poza, 2017), as has been noted to occur in other asset pedagogies that take studentcentered and social justice orientations to the curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 2014). To be sure, the unit of study described in this chapter did not halt gentrification nor bring any immediate relief to the students and their families from the racism, nativism or economic anxiety that they were experiencing. What it did achieve, and what translanguaging can facilitate more broadly, we argue, is a classroom that rejects and subverts the hegemonic ideologies and power relations of society, in turn creating a microcosm for equitable, democratic and emancipatory social relations. While Boal and Epstein (1990) posit that the dynamics of the broader society infuse the cellular components of that society, this work offers the hopeful perspective that the inverse can also be true: a classroom full of students and educators who have experienced dialogic, liberatory relationships of learning could infuse the other cells of social order that they inhabit in ways that honor and affirm human dignity (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014; Espinoza et al., 2020). With these aims in mind, this work adopted a Social Design Experiment methodology (Gutiérrez, 2016; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) to explore the following research questions: (1) How are affordances for students’ translanguaging part of a community-engaged and student-centered thematic unit? (2) How do students take up these affordances to cultivate their academic skills and engage as historical actors (Gutiérrez et al., 2019)? These research questions accompanied pedagogical questions about how to make a unit on Westward Expansion relevant to students, how to center their voices and choices within the unit, and how to have them synthesize across multiple perspectives within and about historical and current events. The intersections of these research and pedagogical questions drew us to our methodological choices and to theoretical frameworks of translanguaging (García & Li, 2014), problem-posing education (Freire, 1974) and sociocritical literacies (Gutiérrez, 2008) that we elucidate further after providing context for the study. Welcome to Hilltop

This chapter reports on experiences and fi ndings from a larger study consisting of one year of ethnographic and participant-observation in a PK-8 dual immersion bilingual program in a community we call Hilltop.

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The period of focus is a six-week unit in two 8th grade social studies classrooms comprised of district-mandated coverage of Westward Expansion in US history and extensions/enhancements that the teacher, Mr Stites, incorporated in response to students’ stated connections between settler colonialism under Manifest Destiny and the current patterns of gentrification. The connection, perhaps hyperbolic to some, must be taken with the historical and contemporary contexts of Hilltop in mind. Hilltop, like all land in the United States, was previously territory of sovereign Indigenous Peoples, a history now mostly evident in the names of streets and city parks (a fact not lost on Ayán and her peers). By the early 19th century, Hilltop’s various tribes had been massacred and displaced by fur traders, gold prospectors and farmers. Hilltop later became an enclave of immigrants from Southern Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, providing cheap labor for railroads, smelters, lumber mills and agriculture. Presaging current immigrant struggles, a passage from the official historical archive of the local Italian lodge notes that ‘Instead of riches, they found more poverty and discrimination … Few of them spoke English … and were viewed as threats to the women of the city. Thus, Italians were not openly welcomed and their language and customs added to their predicament’ (Mancinelli, 2013: 11). By the mid-20th century, Hilltop and its surrounding city became a hub of cultural and political life within the Chicano3 movement and one of the major centers of Aztlán (the mythical Chicanx homeland) in the popular imagination, producing high-profile artists, activists and scholars who spoke to the oppression and marginalization of Latinxs in the United States (NPR, 2011). Civil rights victories of the 1960s and 1970s, including a major school desegregation victory in the courts, however, gave way to white flight and disinvestment that befell many US inner cities and Hilltop gained a reputation as a dangerous and poor community within a heavily segregated city. By the early 2000s, shifts toward urbanization and strategic campaigns of urban revitalization (Butler & Robson, 2003) spurred an influx of (predominantly white) managerial and professional middle-class residents. Because of its proximity to Downtown and its relative affordability given decades of disinvestment, Hilltop has been a prime site of gentrification, with property values skyrocketing, working-class residents of color being displaced mainly by whites with higher incomes and educational attainment (Governing, n.d.; Svaldi, 2016), and new housing developments such as luxury duplexes and large apartment complexes dramatically reshaping the landscape formerly marked by distinctive architecture on single-family homes. Correspondingly, gentrification was a frequent and divisive issue arising in social forums, political discussions, art and journalism, including various community meetings and protests in Hilltop.

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Aragón Dual Language

Aragón School has served the Hilltop community since 1931 and has been slower to reflect the demographic changes than its surrounding community. Using official designations, Aragón’s student body is 95% Hispanic, 88% Low-Income (based on Free/Reduced-price Lunch qualification status) and 72% English Learner (EL)-classified,4 although the incipient change is evident in the pre-school, kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms where these numbers nearly invert, and this is somewhat by design. Aragón adopted a dual language model less than a decade prior to this study in the hope that it would attract the neighborhood’s affluent newcomers and stem the declining enrollments brought on by the neighborhood’s demographic changes (for this same process taking place in Texas, see Chapter 2, this volume). Previously, Aragón offered only Englishmedium instruction until a consent decree with the Office of Civil Rights for the whole school district compelled transitional bilingual education for EL-classified students (Aragón was recognized as one of the district’s high-achieving schools for serving emergent bilinguals during this time). Moreover, at the time of this study, the dual language model was itself in flux, shifting from a 90-10 model (with the bulk of instruction in K-1 being in the named language in which students tested best, most often English), to a 50-50 model, hoping to increase rigor and achievement in Spanish. Social studies was designated as an English-only instructional time for 8th grade, with allowances for home-language support for Newcomer students at early stages of English language development. Participants The students

The two 8th grade classrooms on which this study focuses consisted of 47 students combined at the study’s outset (although both classes would go down to 23 students each midway through the year, and then one more student would leave the school in the Spring). Almost all of them qualified for Free and Reduced Lunch, and all were Latinx. A handful were EL classified (three newcomers, and two who had remained in the label for their whole time at Aragón), but nearly two-thirds had been EL classified at some point in their schooling careers. All the students in the class were bilingual through heritage and sustained bilingual instruction, although many used Spanish minimally and only when required. While almost all of them had lived in Hilltop when they started school in early elementary, only a few remained local, as their families had relocated to remote suburbs where the cost of living was lower. Of those still in the community, several had moved in with other relatives (some of whom owned their homes) as rents in the area increased.

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The teacher

I (Aaron) taught social studies to the 7th and 8th grade students at Aragón. When Luis presented goals related to his study of gentrification to our school staff, I identified an opportunity to collaborate with him based on the Westward Expansion Unit covered in the 8th grade social studies curriculum. I am a Caucasian cis-male with class privilege relative to most students and was in my fi fth year of teaching at Aragón during Luis’ research. Teaching was not my initial calling after college as I had various careers before entering the teaching profession, including two and a half years of educational work in Latin America. This work led me to pursue a career in education culminating in a teaching certificate and concurrent Master’s degree. My teaching philosophy is centered on student engagement and student voice. Social studies is ripe with opportunities to manifest both. I believe issues of race, power, privilege and justice should be analyzed and discussed in a classroom setting that encourages students to voice their opinions and speak to their experiences. Further, I believe students must be able to have authentic control in their own educational context and my teaching cannot reflect traditional teaching paradigms. Grounded in this philosophy was my idea to link the expansion of the United States in the 1800s to the changing neighborhood, apparent to students at Aragón on a daily basis. This adaptation to the unit was created in the previous year to Luis beginning his study. Student engagement was high and student voice and choice were present. The unit was enhanced with the presence of Luis and his ideas for students further exploring gentrification and connecting this exploration to an important time in US history.

The academic

I (Luis) fi rst engaged with Aragón when the previous principal approached me as a thought partner around the issue of gentrification and declining enrollments. Despite the retirement of this principal, the incoming interim administrators both favored the partnership and a broader inquiry agenda around equity, integration and strengthening the bilingual program, particularly Spanish instruction. I engaged with Aaron at his invitation, given that he had linked a unit on Westward Expansion to contemporary gentrification the year before, and hoped to expand upon those beginnings. My position was established early on for students as that of participant observer, meaning that while I was actively involved in supporting Aaron’s teaching, I was also engaging students in ethnographic interviews as they completed their work and collecting audio, video and fieldnote data as the unit unfolded. Having worked as an elementary school teacher and studied classrooms as a researcher previously and with well-developed translingual competencies, I was at ease around students

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and readily approachable, but my position of authority was clear and likely shaped students’ willingness to share information with me. Moreover, between age and my own positionality as a light-skinned Latinx cis-male with class privilege relative to most of the students, there was surely an inevitable distance that I sought to bridge through sincerity, empathy and respect, but only the students themselves could say how much trust was ultimately bestowed. Theoretical Framework and Relevant Literature

As noted earlier, our theoretical framework revolves around different conceptualizations of student-centered pedagogies, particularly the pedagogical frameworks that follow from translanguaging perspectives (García, 2009) on bilingualism and language use. These conceptual foundations taken together provide an outline of our values as educators that informed the planning and implementation of this unit, and that nurture the transformative potential of these pedagogical approaches. Student-centered pedagogies

We approached the unit with a commission to foreground students’ experiences and questions. In so doing, we heeded the words of John Dewey, who argued that ‘An educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs … of the given individual to be educated’ (Dewey, 2011: 82), and incorporated Vygotsky’s (1987) sociocultural perspectives on learning which argue that students’ academic (‘scientific’) and vernacular (‘spontaneous’) knowledge are interdependent, and that development of academic concepts is best facilitated by an expert other, gradually supporting students to expand their skills and knowledge. Moreover, we complemented this theory of learning with elements of pedagogical philosophy that direct the aim of education toward a more cohesive and democratic society (Dewey, 2011). Of course, we acknowledge that democratic processes are incompatible with situations of systematic and institutionalized oppression, and thus incorporated different models of critical pedagogy that not only seek to change society, as Dewey proffers, but to do so specifically by recognizing and subverting unjust power relations. Here, Freire’s (1974) notion of critical consciousness is especially helpful, whereby learners are treated as subjects rather than objects in a dialogical and empowering educational journey, with an awareness of themselves as agents and historical actors in their circumstances. In this spirit, we specifically drew upon Gutiérrez’s concept of sociocritical literacies and the collective Third Space (2008). Gutiérrez, discussing a residential pre-collegiate program for migrant students in California, similarly relies on sociocultural and ecological perspectives on learning

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(Engeström, 2001) to call attention to the historicized systems of activity in which students’ linguistic and literacy practices are embedded and produced. She offers that the institute’s approach fostered awareness of academic genres and discourses while highlighting students’ capacity as historical actors for themselves, describing the collective Third Space as a liminal and physical space in which ‘students begin to reconceive of who they are and what they might be able to accomplish academically and beyond’ and which is ‘characterized by the ideals and practices of a shared humanity, a profound obligation to others, boundary crossing, and intercultural exchange in which difference is celebrated without being romanticized’ (Gutiérrez, 2008: 148–149). The translanguaging pedagogies evident in this unit of instruction create not only the opportunities for students to demonstrate their academic dexterities, but also their relational and agentive capabilities as they compiled and synthesized information to arrive at complex and unromanticized understandings of both gentrification and Westward Expansion. Translanguaging pedagogies

Translanguaging pedagogies highlight the specific role of language in reifying or subverting the hierarchies that place immigrant, Latinx and/or emergent bilingual students in positions of vulnerability and marginalization. Translanguaging as a theory of language and bilingualism rejects notions of language as structure with component parts and posits that speakers strategically assemble fluid repertoires of linguistic and communicative resources for meaning-making (García & Li, 2014; Vogel & García, 2017). With specific regard to pedagogy, this implies recognition of how beliefs about language and language learning that have privileged white, elite, orthographic norms for language standardization reinforce deficit perspectives about the communicative practices of marginalized peoples, including the insistence on language separation and parallel monolingual paradigms of proficiency in bilingual programs. Subsequently, translanguaging pedagogies invite opportunities for students to incorporate the full breadth of their bilingual repertoires, including features considered ‘vernacular’ despite their obvious value in academic settings, in their negotiated constructions of knowledge and identity. With specific regard to the transformative capabilities of translanguaging as an ontological and pedagogical frame, García and Li contend: [A]s new configurations of language and education are generated, old understandings and structures are released, thus transforming not only subjectivities, but also cognitive and social structures. In so doing, orders of discourses shift and the voices of Others come to the forefront, relating then translanguaging to criticality, critical pedagogy, social justice and the linguistic human rights agenda. (García & Li, 2014: 3)

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Thus, translanguaging pedagogies emerge directly from the kinds of critical student-centered frameworks of education that support the classroom as a transformative space. Several works have undertaken a systematic review of the term translanguaging and its connections to pedagogy (Leung & Valdés, 2019; Lewis et al., 2012; Poza, 2017). Lewis et al. offer valuable insights into how a term that began with reference to bilingual pedagogies in Wales gained international prominence, and Poza examines the possible dilution of sociopolitical consciousness as the term gained popularity between 2009 and 2014, akin to Jaspers’ (2018) more recent warning of discursive drift. However, given the rapid diff usion of the concept in the last decade, the review by Leung and Valdés is most instructive. Leung and Valdés situate translanguaging scholarship within the broader field(s) and history(ies) of additional language teaching. They note its particular relevance to conditions of ‘language struggle between a dominant language and minoritized language’ (Leung & Valdés, 2019: 357, italics in original), highlighting that while translanguaging research covers a vast range of educational, social and professional settings in myriad international contexts, the bulk of the burgeoning scholarship regards Spanish-English bilingual programming in the United States, with its concomitant power struggles between English and Spanish (an already racialized and denigrated language in US society) and between notions of proper Spanish linked to the practices of educated elites in Spain and Latin America. They conclude that translanguaging scholarship would benefit from greater attention to the specific local and programmatic contexts of language learning and instruction, the linguistic repertoires that students and teachers bring to bear in pedagogical interaction, the specific ways in which translanguaging is planned for and deployed in reference to established learning goals and official benchmarks, and the developmental learning trajectories that students experience. With this in mind, and recognizing that this work features a unit with deliberate planning for translanguaging, we focus here on works that examine intentional translanguaging within curriculum rather than the many more that report on organic and often unsanctioned translanguaging that occurs interactionally in classrooms. Synthesis of research describing translanguaging pedagogies identifies numerous common practices and the subsequent opportunities they expand – allowances for and encouragement of teacher and peer translation, bilingual recasting, use of features said to be from different named languages in speech and in writing, strategic grouping of students, and praising metalinguistic speech – that tap into students’ cultural funds of knowledge and allow experimentation with novel language forms en route to academic discourses and identity representations. These occur in diverse instructional contexts and activities from early elementary to secondary, including use of bilingual poetry (García-Mateus & Palmer, 2017), translingual identity texts about students’ transnational

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experiences (Martínez-Álvarez & Ghiso, 2017), and teachers’ deliberate use of and invitations for translanguaging in speech to affi rm students’ languaging practices (Palmer et al., 2014; Sayer, 2013). Likewise, translingual literacy assignments have been characterized as humanizing pedagogical elements that support students’ engagement with and composition of complex texts (Fránquiz et al., 2019; Pacheco et al., 2019; Velasco & García, 2014), nourishing rich discussions of grade-level literature (Ebe & Chapman-Santiago, 2016; Woodley & Brown, 2016; Worthy et al., 2013), dense historical texts (Collins & Cioè-Peña, 2016) and scientific content (Espinosa et al., 2016; Poza, 2018). Works exploring multimodal translanguaging (text, oral language and audiovisual media) speak to the affordances created for students to develop academic skills such as arguing with evidence and accessing complex content while also engaging with social justice debates relevant to their lives (García & Leiva, 2013; Seltzer et al., 2016). Usefully, García and Sylvan (2011) observe and share the core principles from the International High Schools in New York that can encompass this wide array of practices, resources and curriculum arrangements: collaboration among students and among instructional staff, awareness and affi rmation of students’ cultural and linguistic diversity, and integration of language and content instruction through plenty of experiential learning. Across these works, it is evident that translanguaging serves to empower students with marginalized social identities by affirming their communicative skills and the ecological factors that have shaped their repertoires, while also supporting students’ learning of target linguistic and literacy practices with transformative aims. Methods

Given that the larger partnership of which this unit was a part aimed to be both exploratory and action-oriented to help address questions and challenges stemming from gentrification, the project demanded a dialogic relationship with the participants at the school as we engaged in the investigation. This led to social design experiment (SDE) frameworks and their foundation in Cultural Historical Activity Theory as an overarching methodology. SDEs adapt principles of design-based research to the theoretical orientations of Cultural Historical Activity Theory. Design-based research seeks to study learning in authentic contexts, incorporating participants as co-investigators whose experiences and curiosities fuel inquiry, and thoroughly describe learning processes in a constant back-and-forth between theory and observation (Brown, 1992; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). Gutiérrez and Vossoughi (2010) build upon this foundation by adding attention to the cultural and historical factors influencing activity systems. Thus, they offer SDE as ‘oriented toward transformative ends through mutual relations of exchange … this interventionist research

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maintains that change in the individual involves change in the social situation itself’ (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010: 101). To this end, interventions resulting from observed needs and emerging questions resist pathologizing groups or individuals for perceived skill deficits and are instead framed as re-mediations of the entire ecology of learning, thus departing from design research which often operates within the constraints of existing institutions (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). SDEs privilege ethnography to understand the histories, experiences, values, contradictions and emic understandings within activity systems (Gutiérrez, 2016). As such, ethnographic observation, including audio- and video-recordings as well as extensive fieldnotes, was used to gain insight into the rhythms of life within the school and community, particularly with regard to this pair of focal 8th grade classrooms. From January through March 2017, we worked closely to gather students’ questions and prior knowledge, to amass materials to facilitate their analysis of primary and secondary sources, and to structure out-of-school opportunities for students to examine the impacts of gentrification upon a range of community stakeholders including one another and their families. Aaron began by extracting the key learning objectives of the districtmandated social studies curriculum related to Westward Expansion and securing relevant primary and secondary sources for students to examine the changes in land use and ownership, the patterns of colonization and occupation and the killing and forcible removal of Indigenous Peoples from their lands from various perspectives. Aaron not only linked the themes of conquest, displacement and white supremacy of that era to current sociopolitical conditions, but also invited students to lead the inquiry when they themselves analogized the process to gentrification. As part of their inquiry, students consulted primary sources such as the text of a speech to Congress by Andrew Jackson; an interview by Sitting Bull; and journal entries or biographical sketches from pioneers, Mexicano ranchers, missionaries, gold prospectors, and Chinese immigrants working in agriculture or the railroads (see Figure 3.1 for a portion of the graphic organizer for this activity). They coupled these primary sources with the study of maps showing how land ownership and use changed over time, as well as how the Indigenous population was decimated. In parallel, students investigated gentrification in small groups equipped with Chromebooks, digital audiorecorders and the video-recording capabilities of their phones or handheld video cameras that they could borrow from the classroom. They consulted news articles and social media and carried out interviews with parents, community members, city and school district officials, construction workers and their peers, including sharing their own stories of displacement and housing insecurity. Much of the work took place in the classroom, but students also took walks around the community with recording equipment during class time and in their own free time after

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Figure 3.1 Portion of graphic organizer for student activity learning experiences of various groups involved in Westward Expansion

school. Figure 3.2, for example, captures two students interviewing neighborhood residents about their experiences in the neighborhood and how gentrification has impacted their lives, a pedagogical arrangement that allowed for the centering of students’ questions and the perspectives of community members within the unit of study. We observed and recorded the classroom as the unit unfolded and collected students’ notes, pictures, writing and culminating projects as artifacts for analysis. Transcripts of recorded interactions along with collected artifacts were analyzed thematically using the overarching research questions for a priori codes. We remind the reader that these questions were: (1) How are affordances for students’ translanguaging part of a community-engaged and student-centered thematic unit? and (2) How do students take up these affordances to cultivate their academic skills and engage as historical actors (Gutiérrez et al., 2019)?

Figure 3.2 Students interviewing neighborhood residents about gentrification

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Thus, we specifically sought instances of students’ translanguaging in speech or writing, and expressions of agency in students’ described experiences or recommended actions in response to gentrification. In the Findings section that follows, we present some examples of the pedagogical arrangements that afforded translanguaging opportunities and students’ subsequent work. Findings and Discussion

Crucial goals of the unit were not only for students to learn key names and facts about Westward Expansion as per the district curriculum, but also to synthesize across various (sometimes divergent) perspectives and make inferences from primary and secondary sources, meaning that their translanguaging abilities were instrumental in gathering viewpoints from diverse stakeholders and communicating their fi ndings to various audiences. This also meant moving beyond facile comparisons equating gentrification and settler colonialism or blanket ascriptions of blame. Underlying their learning were guiding questions about how different stakeholders were experiencing gentrification and what feelings they had about the process, as well as how contemporary gentrification was similar to and different from Westward Expansion and settler colonialism in the past. With respect to our first inquiry question, students were encouraged and provided affordances throughout the unit to leverage their full bilingual repertoires. Aaron employed a number of the strategies associated with translanguaging pedagogies, including extensive opportunities for collaborative work on discussion and literacy-based tasks with express allowances for translingual communication, provision of the internet and online translators as a multilingual/multimodal resource, opportunities for multilingual research, and multilingual reading and responses (Hesson et al., 2014). To provide specific examples, informational materials, task instructions and graphic organizers (including the exemplar from Figure 3.1 above) were provided in both English and Spanish, students were given access to online translation (Google Translate) at their will and, in many cases, students had the option of submitting assignments in the language of their choice. In effect, students’ conversations were not policed to ensure adherence to any English-only mandate. Although the school’s 50-50 model demanded that social studies be taught monolingually in English, Aaron incorporated Spanish into some of his whole-group instruction and into much of his small-group conversations whenever Newcomer students were involved. Students were praised for their bilingual dexterity as they relied on translanguaging to gain information across print and in-person sources. Students also engaged with visual media and musical artworks throughout the unit, leveraging and adding to the semiotic resources in their translanguaging repertoires. For example, students examined the painting American Progress (Gast, 1872), which depicts a robed, white,

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blonde woman (‘Progress’) hovering above a frontier landscape as trains and stagecoaches traverse from right to left under her emanating light while Indigenous peoples flee in the left margin of the canvas still in shadow. They compared this work to the video installation Destinies Manifest (Jota Leaños, 2017), which places the scene in American Progress within a prolonged video chronology that begins with Indigenous iconography (visual and aural), segueing to a modern dystopia featuring militarized border walls, depleted and contaminated landscapes of highways and skyscrapers, and plutocrats alongside the Ku Klux Klan, before being shattered back by stampeding bison to Indigenous song and darkness to close. Students wrote about and discussed the competing visions at play in such depictions of Westward Expansion. Similarly, with respect to contemporary gentrification, the commercial described in our introduction was paired with a spoken word poem and accompanying video by a local artist lamenting the closure of the community’s VFW5 hall. The poet bemoans the changing character of the neighborhood with poignant verses, conjuring a multi-ethnic enclave marked by both struggle and fraternity, and proclaims the indelibility of the liminal space occupied by the VFW hall, ‘These memories are bricks/that no hungry tractor’s mouth/will ever be able to consume’ (LeFebre, 2015). In turn, students took up these affordances to leverage their translingual repertoires. Observations of students’ interactions and analysis of their work throughout this unit addressed our second inquiry question regarding students’ leveraging of translanguaging opportunities to grow academically and as agentive subjects. For instance, Aaron’s direct invitations to consult journalism and social media across named languages allowed students to investigate experiences of gentrification from diverse sources online. In Figure 3.3, for example, a group of students takes notes

Figure 3.3 Students collaboratively reviewing journalistic and social media accounts of gentrification

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about different groups’ experiences or perspectives with gentrification on a graphic organizer as they consult online social media, blogs and news articles in both English and Spanish. Another illustrative example comes from the exercise analyzing multiple perspectives about Westward Expansion. After reading about the various groups involved in Westward Expansion, students were asked to reflect on the legacy that various groups left behind (Figure 3.1 above). One newcomer recently arrived from Cuba noted on her exit slip: El mejor legado fue el que dejaron las Pioneras, ya gracias a lo que hicieron todas las mujeres ahora pueden votar … El peor legado fue el que dejaron los misioneros ya que llegando de Europa hizo causante de muchas muertes porque llevaron muchas enfermedades a los Nativos Americanos … [The best legacy was that left by Pioneer women, since thanks to what they did all women can now vote … The worst legacy was that left by the missionaries given that coming from Europe caused many deaths because they brought many diseases to the Native Americans …]

Her insights came as a result of having access to the primary sources from the different groups and the graphic organizer in Spanish alongside the ability to dialogue with peers without rigid monolingual expectations placed upon them. Figures 3.4 and 3.5, meanwhile, show how students’ language choices for assignments demonstrate their sophisticated ability to language across fluid contexts. For example, the slide from a student presentation captured in Figure 3.4 shows how students are aware that to interview people in the community they cannot do so in English only, as they add questions in

Figure 3.4 Screen capture of bilingual interview protocol from Google Slides presentation from student group project

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Figure 3.5 Screen capture of Google Slides presentation weighing benefits and drawbacks of gentrification mentioned by community members in Spanish during community interviews

Spanish. The slide in Figure 3.5, meanwhile, shows how a group that had some newcomers adjusted to the group’s language needs by using Spanish to summarize the advantages and disadvantages of gentrification. Likewise, in Figure 3.6, we see how students engaged in multimodal translanguaging, drawing on features ascribed to Spanish and English as well as memes and GIFs to spur debate about the justifiability of Westward Expansion. A particularly salient and comprehensive example of how students took up the affordances for translanguaging to agentively evaluate gentrification returns us to the opening of this chapter when students viewed the promotional video for the new amenities in the changing neighborhood juxtaposed with the aforementioned poem and video about the shuttered

Figure 3.6 Student responses in Padlet including Spanish, English, memes and GIFs in response to prompt about whether or not US government was justified in expanding Westward

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VFW Hall. In the ensuing discussion comparing the vision of the two videos, the students demonstrated their remarkable capability for synthesis across perspectives gleaned from their research and community study and acknowledgement of their own cultural dynamism. In the following transcript6 of one small group’s discussion (transcription conventions adapted from Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998), we analyze the exchange between several students as they begin with conversation about the videos and gentrification broadly. In the exchange we can appreciate not only the dynamic bilingualism at play in their debate, but also their synthesis across interviews and readings that they have consulted in their research. The prompt for the students’ discussion is a question posed by Aaron, ‘According to the two videos, what’s special about Hilltop?’ The participants in this discussion are: Bianca, a reserved US-born MexicanAmerican girl with robust bilingual competencies in her linguistic repertoire; Amelia, also a US-born Mexican-American girl with highly developed English and Spanish features in her linguistic repertoire and who alternately deployed her bilingual repertoire to disrupt class or to make some of the more insightful comments in class discussions; Santos, a US-born Mexican-American student with highly developed bilingual competencies in his repertoire and a Gifted And Talented classification; and Ezequiel, a Mexican-American boy whose family had been direly pressured by gentrification and whose hostility to neighborhood newcomers shone through. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Amelia (A):

It’s special to all the Caucasians and all that because it has the stadium(.) the food(.) [the bars Ezequiel (E): [I see a lotta white people A: Yeah(.) There’s like no Hispanic people= Bianca (B): =But it has everything there Restaurants, parks, the river= E: =But it’s all the white people’s culture It’s all the things they like The shops (.) the restaurants= B: =Whatever I get ice cream at [XX] all the time (.) A: You know that building’s not there anymore? They already built apartments [on that corner B: [Yeah Santos (S): That’s messed up Wouldn’t it be better for them to build a memorial instead of apartments? Isn’t that better? B: A la mejor lo pueden convertir en un museo de lo que fue antes.

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23 A: 24 25 26 27 28 S: 29 30 31

E:

32 33 34 35 A: 36 B: 37 38 39

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[Maybe they can convert it to a museum of what it was before] Pues se me hace que sí(.) podemos tener las casas nuevas y viejas porque es una buena condición Creo que sí es una buena combinación [I think we can have the new homes and the old ones because it’s a good condition. I think it’s a good combination.] Ayudan mucho la ecología Usan paneles solares Son más ecológicas= [They help the ecology. They use solar panels. They’re more ecological.] =I remember there was a lotta Mexicans and not that many white people There was white people but not that many That affects me because we are a beautiful culture(.) Porque nos quitan un poco la cultura, ¿qué no? [They take away our culture a little bit, no?] Pero tiene muchas maneras en que enseña(.) Es bueno para que todos los estudiantes para que aprendan a ser como(.) más involucrados [But it teaches in a lot of ways. It’s good for students to learn to be more involved.]

In this discussion, not only do the students language dynamically across what is said to be English and Spanish (e.g. Lines 22 and 35), but also synthesize across their own diverse perspectives and those of the many sources they have consulted in their research. What begins as a lament about the neighborhood’s demographic change (Lines 1–6) is redirected when Bianca points to the desirability of the neighborhood and some of its new amenities, including the new ice cream parlor that she frequents (Lines 7 and 13). Indeed, these new businesses and the increased safety of the neighborhood were frequently mentioned by community members as positive changes of the last few years. When Amelia heightens the evocation of loss by noting that the VFW featured in the poetry video has already been demolished and replaced by apartments since the video’s posting, Santos and Bianca both offer some options for memorializing and commemorating the neighborhood’s history. Santos, by noting that the new homes use solar panels (another feature mentioned by community members in interviews), aligns with Amelia’s point that there may be some benefits to having new and old buildings intermixed (Lines 23–30). As Ezequiel insists on the loss of the Latinx culture of the community and the

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hurt this invokes, Bianca in turn notes the opportunity for students to become more civically engaged. Conclusion

This discussion offers a valuable microcosm for our broader argument. Translanguaging pedagogies did not shift the power relations in society that were driving gentrification and the patterns of disinvestment that preceded it, nor did they alter the discourses about immigrants and Latinx peoples in the United States on any societal level. However, they provided contexts in which students could grapple with the points of tension in the overly facile critiques of both gentrification and Westward Expansion with which they entered the unit. Hearing from diverse stakeholders, students learned that some Latinx families were in fact benefiting greatly from the changes if they owned their homes and enjoyed the increased amenities and safety of the community, and that some white families were being equally harmed by the rising cost of living and congestion, muddying the race–class correspondence that many presumed. As they prepared slideshows, essays, animations and oral presentations to share with their peers, with students and faculty in the school and with the school district personnel who had served as interview participants, the students also came to see themselves as capable representatives of their families and community in advocating for more equitable approaches to community development that could foster integration without as much displacement and hardship for poor and working-class families. In short, translanguaging pedagogies in this unit created the kind of collective Third Space that Freire (1974) and Gutiérrez (2008) encourage – a space in which dialogue, empathy and humanistic principles catalyze learning, interrogate social power relations, and position students as capable academics and citizens of a democratic society. Notes (1) Luis would like to acknowledge the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation for the funding and mentorship that made possible the research on which this chapter reports. (2) All names of individuals and places are pseudonyms. (3) We use the terms Chicano and Aztlán in deference to the movement of the 1960s and 1970s that organized for civil rights of Latinxs in the region and the nation, recognizing that at present the term has fallen out of favor given its exclusion of female and non-binary gender identities as well as the many other nationalities and ethnicities that comprised the Latinx civil rights struggle (NPR, 2011). (4) We use the terms English language learners, English learners and EL when specifi cally recognizing the bureaucratic label placed upon students. We use the term emergent bilinguals (García et al., 2008) at all other times to refer to students developing English in school and with a primary or heritage language with a racialized and marginalized history in US schooling.

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(5) VFW stands for Veterans of Foreign Wars, a service organization for US veterans. (6) Transcription conventions adapted from Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998). No pause between turns (interruptions) is signaled by ‘ = ’. Overlapping speech is signaled by ‘[’. Pauses are denoted by ‘(.)’. Language in closed brackets is the authors’ translation. Statements in features ascribed to the named language of Spanish are not italicized despite convention to accentuate our view of the singular communicative repertoire associated with translanguaging frameworks.

References Block, D. (2018) The political economy of language education research (or lack thereof): Nancy Fraser and the case of translanguaging. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 15 (4), 237–257. doi:10.1080/15427587.2018.1466300 Boal, A. and Epstein, S. (1990) The cop in the head: Three hypotheses. The Drama Review 34 (3), 35–42. Brown, A.L. (1992) Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. Journal of the Learning Sciences 2 (2), 141–178. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls0202_2 Butler, T. and Robson, G. (2003) Negotiating their way in: The middle classes, gentrification and the deployment of capital in a globalising metropolis. Urban Studies 40 (9), 1791–1809. doi:10.1080/0042098032000106609 Collins, B.A. and Cioè-Peña, M. (2016) Declaring freedom: Translanguaging in the social studies classroom to understand complex texts. In O. García and T. Kleyn (eds) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments (pp. 118–139). New York: Routledge. Design-Based Research Collective (2003) Design-based research: An emerging paradigm for educational inquiry. Educational Researcher 32 (1), 5–8. doi:10.3102/ 0013189X032001005 Dewey, J. (2011) Democracy and Education. Digireads.com. (Original work published in 1916.) Ebe, A.E. and Chapman-Santiago, C. (2016) Student voices shining through: Exploring translanguaging as a literary device. In O. García and T. Kleyn (eds) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments (pp. 57–82). New York: Routledge. Engeström, Y. (2001) Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work 14, 133–156. Espinosa, C.M., Herrera, L.Y. and Montoya Gaudreau, C. (2016) Reclaiming bilingualism: Translanguaging in a science class. In O. García and T. Kleyn (eds) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments (pp. 160–177). New York: Routledge. Espinoza, M.L. and Vossoughi, S. (2014) Perceiving learning anew: Social interaction, dignity, and educational rights. Harvard Educational Review 84 (3), 285–313. Espinoza, M.L., Vossoughi, S., Rose, M. and Poza, L.E. (2020) Matters of participation: Notes on the study of dignity and learning. Mind, Culture, and Activity 27 (4), 325– 347. doi:10.1080/10749039.2020.1779304 Fránquiz, M.E., Leija, M.G. and Salinas, C.S. (2019) Challenging damaging ideologies: Are dual language education practices addressing learners’ linguistic rights? Theory Into Practice 58 (2), 134–144. doi:10.1080/00405841.2019.1569379 Freire, P. (1974) Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. and Leiva, C. (2013) Theorizing and enacting translanguaging for social justice. In A. Creese and A. Blackledge (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy (pp. 199–216). Dordrecht: Springer.

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Garcia, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O. and Sylvan, C.E. (2011) Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal 95 (3), 385–400. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01208.x García, O., Kleifgen, J.A. and Falchi, L. (2008) From English Language Learners to Emergent Bilinguals: Equity Matters. Research Review No. 1. New York: Campaign for Educational Equity, Teachers College, Columbia University. García-Mateus, S. and Palmer, D. (2017) Translanguaging pedagogies for positive identities in two-way dual language bilingual education. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 16 (4), 245–255. doi:10.1080/15348458.2017.1329016 Gast, J. (1872) American Progress. Oil on canvas. Library of Congress Control no. 975.075.47. Los Angeles, CA: Museum of the American West. Governing (n.d.) Denver Gentrification Maps and Data. See http://www.governing.com/ gov-data/denver-gentrification-maps-demographic-data.html. Gutiérrez, K.D. (2008) Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly 43 (2), 148–164. doi:10.1598/RRQ.43.2.3 Gutiérrez, K.D. (2016) 2011 AERA presidential address: Designing resilient ecologies: Social design experiments and a new social imagination. Educational Researcher 45 (3), 187–196. doi:10.3102/0013189X16645430 Gutiérrez, K.D. and Jurow, A.S. (2016) Social design experiments: Toward equity by design. Journal of the Learning Sciences 25 (4), 565–598. doi:10.1080/10508406.201 6.1204548 Gutiérrez, K. and Vossoughi, S. (2010) ‘Lifting off the ground to return anew’: Documenting and designing for equity and transformation through social design experiments. Journal of Teacher Education 61 (1–2), 100–117. doi:10.1177/ 0022487109347877 Gutiérrez, K.D., Becker, B.L., Espinoza, M.L., Cortes, K.L., Cortez, A., Lizárraga, J.R., Rivero, E., Villegas, K. and Yin, P. (2019) Youth as historical actors in the production of possible futures. Mind, culture, and activity 26 (4), 291–308. doi: 10.1080/ 10749039.2019.1652327 Hesson, S., Seltzer, K. and Woodley, H.H. (2014) Translanguaging in Curriculum and Instruction: A CUNY-NYSIEB Guide for Educators. New York: CUNY-NYSIEB. See https://www.cuny-nysieb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/TranslanguagingGuide-Curr-Inst-Final-December-2014.pdf. Hutchby, I. and Wooffitt, R. (1998) Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jaspers, J. (2018) The transformative limits of translanguaging. Language & Communication 58, 1–10. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2017.12.001 Jota Leaños, J. (2017) Destinies Manifest. Video installation. Denver Art Museum. Vimeo. See https://vimeo.com/204731983. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014) Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: Aka the remix. Harvard Educational Review 84 (1), 74–84. LeFebre, R. (2015) Requiem for the VFW. YouTube, 23 February. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_kkvOe3a4Q. Leung, C. and Valdés, G. (2019) Translanguaging and the transdisciplinary framework for language teaching in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal 103 (2), 348–370. doi:10.1111/modl.12568 Lewis, G., Jones, B. and Baker, C. (2012) Translanguaging: Origins and development from school to street and beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation 18 (7), 641– 654. doi:10.1080/13803611.2012.718488 Mancinelli, R.F. (2013) The History of the Potenza Lodge: The Societa Nativi di Potenza, Basilicata. Denver, CO: Historical Archive of the Potenza Lodge.

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Martínez-Álvarez, P. and Ghiso, M.P. (2017) On languaging and communities: Latino/a emergent bilinguals’ expansive learning and critical inquiries into global childhoods. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 20 (6), 667–687. NPR (2011) Chicano movement’s Denver roots run deep. Talk of the Nation, 30 June. Transcript. See https://www.npr.org/2011/06/30/137529484/the-chicano-movementsdenver-roots-run-deep. Pacheco, M.B., Daniel, S.M., Pray, L.C. and Jiménez, R.T. (2019) Translingual practice, strategic participation, and meaning-making. Journal of Literacy Research 51 (1), 75–99. doi:10.1177/1086296X18820642 Palmer, D.K., Martínez, R.A., Mateus, S.G. and Henderson, K. (2014) Reframing the debate on language separation: Toward a vision for translanguaging pedagogies in the dual language classroom. The Modern Language Journal 98 (3), 757–772. doi: 10.1111/modl.12121 Poza, L.E. (2017) Translanguaging: Defi nitions, implications, and further needs in burgeoning inquiry. Berkeley Review of Education 6 (2), 101–128. See https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k26h2tp. Poza, L.E. (2018) The language of ciencia: Translanguaging and learning in a bilingual science classroom. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 21 (1), 1–19. doi:10.1080/13670050.2015.1125849 Sayer, P. (2013) Translanguaging, TexMex, and bilingual pedagogy: Emergent bilinguals learning through the vernacular. TESOL Quarterly 47 (1), 63–88. doi:10.1002/tesq.53 Seltzer, K., Collins, B.A. and Angeles, K.M. (2016) Navigating turbulent waters: Translanguaging to support academic and socioemotional well-being. In O. García and T. Kleyn (eds) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments (pp. 140–159). New York: Routledge. Svaldi, A. (2016) Denver seeks gentrification without displacing residents. Denver Post, 18 May. See https://www.denverpost.com/2016/05/18/denver-seeks-gentrificationwithout-displacing-residents/. Velasco, P. and García, O. (2014) Translanguaging and the writing of bilingual learners. Bilingual Research Journal 37 (1), 6–23. doi:10.1080/15235882.2014.893270 Vogel, S. and García, O. (2017) Translanguaging. In G. Noblit and L. Moll (eds) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1987) The development of scientific concepts in childhood. In R.W. Rieber and A.S. Carton (eds) The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky (pp. 167–242). New York: Plenum Press. (Original work published in 1934.) Woodley, H.H. and Brown, A. (2016) Balancing windows and mirrors: Translanguaging in a linguistically diverse classroom. In T. Kleyn and O. García (eds) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments (pp. 83–99). New York: Routledge. Worthy, J., Durán, L., Hikida, M., Pruitt, A. and Peterson, K. (2013) Spaces for dynamic bilingualism in read-aloud discussions: Developing and strengthening bilingual and academic skills. Bilingual Research Journal 36 (3), 311–328. doi:10.1080/15235882.2 013.845622

4 Prefiguring Translingual Possibilities: The Transformative Potential of Translanguaging for Dual Language Bilingual Education Ramón Antonio Martínez, Victoria Melgarejo Vieyra, Neida Basheer Ahmad and Jessica Lee Stovall

Introduction

In most K-12 schools in the United States, monoglossic instruction is the norm. Teachers expect students to read, write, listen and speak in a single language at a time without engaging in so-called language mixing, and teachers themselves typically aim to deliver instruction – or at least profess to deliver instruction – in one language at a time. This is the norm in US schools because monoglossic and purist ideologies predominate in US society more generally (García, 2009). Despite the profound and pervasive influence of these dominant ideologies and instructional norms, however, bilingual Latina/o/x1 students (and some of their teachers) often disrupt linguistic boundaries by combining English and Spanish in their everyday classroom interactions. We argue that these everyday instances of translanguaging constitute prefigurative spaces – sites where bilingual Latina/o/x students and their teachers foreshadow forms of interaction and instruction that might be envisioned as part of a more translingual approach to schooling and society. In this chapter, we articulate a vision for how translanguaging can transform dual language education in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic data from elementary and middle school classrooms, we 95

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highlight both the possibilities and the constraints that obtain with respect to translanguaging pedagogies in US schools. We share examples of bilingual Latina/o/x children and their teachers translanguaging spontaneously within monoglossic instructional settings, including English immersion and dual language classrooms. Such examples, we argue, prefigure fundamentally different kinds of speaking and learning even within the practical constraints of monoglossic schooling, offering a glimpse of the transformative potential of translanguaging for dual language education. Monoglossic Language Ideologies in Dual Language Education

Despite long histories of bi/multilingualism in the lands that now make up the United States, people in this settler colonial state are generally socialized to believe that languages are bounded entities, that the normal and/or ideal path toward bi/multilingualism involves learning one language fi rst, and then adding any additional languages after that (i.e. sequential bi/multilingualism), that languages should be kept separate in speech and writing, and that this kind of language separation is a sign of fluency or proficiency. These ideologies – or what Silverstein (1996) called ideologies of monoglot standard – are pervasive in the United States, as they are in most contemporary nation-states. In particular, the purist notion that bilingual speakers should not mix languages has become a taken-for-granted ‘fact’ about language for many monolingual and bi/ multilingual speakers alike. Schools are key sites for the circulation, naturalization and reproduction of these monoglossic ideologies of linguistic purism (Lippi-Green, 1997; Martínez, 2013), processes that are often facilitated by the widespread emphasis on monolingual, English-only instruction and transitional forms of bilingual instruction. However, even in the kinds of bilingual education settings that are called dual language in the United States, where proficiency in two languages is the stated goal, monoglossic and purist ideologies still tend to predominate (Martínez, 2013, 2017; Martínez et al., 2015, 2019a). These ideologies get inscribed in home language surveys, professional development literature for teachers, promotional literature for parents, research literature on dual language education, and curricula designed for dual language instructional contexts, and they end up getting enacted in official and unofficial policies and practices of language separation (Martínez, 2017). Ironically, then, while dual language education might seem to represent an ideal scenario for promoting bilingualism and biliteracy, the monoglossic and purist ideologies undergirding most dual language programs often lead to the marginalization of bilingual Latina/o/x students and their everyday forms of bilingualism. Language separation policies in dual language education tend to designate different times, activities,

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settings and teachers for each language (Martínez, 2017). Students are taught to compartmentalize and separate their two languages in ways that lead toward what Fitts (2006) calls dual monolingualism or what Heller (1999) calls parallel monolingualism. Ultimately, the version of bilingualism that ends up getting privileged and reproduced in many dual language programs resembles elite forms of sequential bilingualism rather than the forms of simultaneous bilingualism in which many working-class bi/multilingual Latina/o/x students engage. This amounts to letting monolingual English speakers and sequential bilinguals tell the rest of us what it means to be bilingual and what counts as bilingual competence (Martínez, 2017). This rigid emphasis on language separation ultimately serves to constrain the everyday translanguaging that is common among many bi/multilingual and emergent bi/multilingual Latina/o/x students, marginalizing these students in ways that both reflect and constitute larger structures and processes of domination and oppression. Translanguaging in Monoglossic Instructional Spaces

Despite the pervasiveness of monoglossic ideologies of linguistic purism and their attendant restrictive language policies and instructional norms, bilingual Latina/o/x students continue to engage in dynamic and spontaneous forms of translanguaging within monoglossic instructional spaces, including both monolingual and bilingual classrooms (Martínez, 2010, 2013, 2017; Martínez et al., 2019b). Moreover, teachers who work with bilingual Latina/o/x students in these classrooms also sometimes engage in translanguaging (Martínez, 2013; Martínez et  al., 2015). In what follows, we share examples of translanguaging from two different monoglossic school settings – an English-only middle school classroom and a Spanish-English dual language elementary school classroom. These everyday instances of translanguaging, which take place within – and despite – the constraints of monoglossic instruction, are important precisely because they emerge within monoglossic settings. By showing us what is possible even within the constraints of monoglossic spaces, they provide glimpses of what might be possible absent such constraints, pointing toward a vision of what dual language education might become. A Brief Conceptual (and Methodological) Note

Before sharing examples of students’ everyday translanguaging, we would like to briefly clarify how our conceptualization of translanguaging informs our analysis of speech data, including our selection of the transcription conventions that we use in this chapter. As Flores notes in the Foreword to this volume, and as Sánchez and García explain in the Introduction, a translanguaging perspective goes beyond monoglossic perspectives that frame bilingualism in terms of language alternation.

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Rather than characterizing bilingual speakers as sometimes codeswitching (i.e. alternating between two distinct languages or codes), a translanguaging lens begins with the premise that bilingual speakers draw on a single linguistic repertoire to communicate, and that they sometimes do so flexibly in ways that disrupt socially (and normatively) constructed linguistic boundaries. We share this perspective. However, this definition of translanguaging necessarily includes language practices that monoglossically oriented scholars would classify as ‘language alternation’ or ‘code-switching’ or ‘code-mixing.’ When a bilingual speaker produces an utterance that is normatively perceived to be in English, but then includes a single word that is normatively perceived to be in Spanish, this utterance is an example of translanguaging – or what we might call a ‘translingual utterance’ – because it reflects the speaker’s disregard for socially constructed linguistic boundaries. In this case, the disruption of normative linguistic boundaries is reflected at the lexical level – in the use of a single word that is normatively constructed as belonging to a different language, but is not necessarily perceived or used as such by the speaker. From a monoglossic perspective, this language practice would be referred to as an example of intra-sentential code-switching (i.e. language alternation within the sentence or phrase boundary) or, more specifically, as a single lexical switch. While we do not privilege this terminology, we attend to the lexical and syntactic details of speech in order to identify and highlight instances of translanguaging. Similarly, if a bilingual speaker produces an utterance that is normatively perceived to be only in English, and then follows that with an utterance that is normatively perceived to be entirely in Spanish, this is also an example of translanguaging. So, too, is an example of a bilingual speaker using what is normatively perceived as Spanish in one setting or with one group of people and then speaking what is normatively perceived as English in another setting or with another group of people. The examples that we share below count as translanguaging regardless of whether they feature a bilingual speaker disrupting normatively constructed linguistic boundaries across interlocutors or settings, across separate utterances or within a single sentence or phrase. We focus on the micro-details of classroom interaction not to reify arbitrary linguistic boundaries, but rather because those micro-interactional details are precisely where the everyday disruption of such boundaries is most clearly reflected. This understanding of translanguaging has direct implications for our selection of transcription conventions. From our perspective, the role of the transcript is not to directly mirror speech (or a speaker’s internal cognitive state), but rather to help represent speech in a way that contributes to a particular argument. A central part of the argument that we are making in this chapter is that the students featured here often engaged in translanguaging – that they often drew flexibly on their full linguistic

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repertoires ‘without watchful adherence to the socially and politically defi ned boundaries of named languages’ (Otheguy et al., 2015: 283). In our view, one effective way to show that speakers are not adhering to these socially constructed boundaries is to highlight where these socially constructed boundaries are. We have thought a great deal about the political and conceptual dimensions of transcription, and we realize that ours is not necessarily the only or best way to represent translanguaging. Indeed, we acknowledge that there is no single correct way of transcribing translingual speech – no single set of transcription conventions that best comports with translanguaging theory. However, with respect to our own data, we feel that explicitly identifying socially constructed linguistic boundaries can help us better showcase how students are not adhering to these boundaries in their everyday speech. For this reason, we use bold italics to mark words and phrases that are typically perceived as belonging to Spanish. We do this not in order to reify Spanish and English as separate codes, but rather to highlight the precise points in each interaction where students disrupted the normatively perceived boundaries between these two socially constructed languages. In addition, we use [italicized brackets] to enclose material that is not part of the talk being transcribed. Translanguaging at an English-only Middle School

The fi rst set of examples that we wish to share comes from Eastside Middle School 2 in Los Angeles, California, where Ramón Martínez conducted a study of language and ideology during the 2007–2008 academic year. At the time, 98.8% of the students at Eastside Middle School were Latina/o/x (mostly of Mexican ancestry) and 100% of them qualified to receive free or reduced-price lunch. Martínez collected data in a 6th grade classroom that combined English language arts and social studies in a two-hour curricular block, occasionally shadowing students as they transitioned into an adjacent two-hour math/science curricular block. With the exception of one Filipina/Pilipina student, the students in this classroom were all of Latina/o/x ancestry. Five of the students were officially classified as ‘English Learners,’ 20 of them had recently been reclassified as ‘Reclassified Fluent English Proficient,’ and four of them had been classified as ‘Initially Fluent English Proficient.’ All 29 students displayed some degree of bi/multilingualism, as well as various other forms of linguistic competence and dexterity. It is worth emphasizing that the data from Eastside Middle School were collected roughly mid-way through California’s 18-year period of restrictive language policy – almost 10 years after the state’s voters effectively outlawed bilingual education with the passage of Proposition 227 (i.e. the ‘English for the Children’ initiative), and about eight years before they reinstated bilingual education with the passage of Proposition 58 (i.e.

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the ‘Non-English Languages Allowed in Public Education Act’). English immersion – or ‘English only’ – was the law of the land statewide throughout this period, which meant that bilingual instruction was only allowed by means of a complicated waiver process. As a result, Eastside Middle School, like most public schools statewide during the time that these data were collected, offered no bilingual classes. Students translanguaging at Eastside Middle School

Despite the official ‘English-only’ status of this classroom at Eastside Middle School, however, Martínez observed and documented various examples of these students’ dynamic bilingualism, including multiple examples of translanguaging. These bilingual Latina/o/x students disrupted the supposed linguistic boundaries between English and Spanish on a daily basis, and they did so in creative ways that often displayed some of the same language and literacy skills articulated in official statewide English language arts standards (Martínez, 2010, 2018). And even when the students’ instances of translanguaging did not necessarily reflect specific skills articulated in content area standards, these practices were nonetheless skillful reflections of the students’ overall sensemaking and everyday communication. As one example, consider the following interaction between two students, Caroline and Zulema, that took place during their two-hour math/ science block. The students were collaborating on a class project that required them to go online to search for materials to build fountains. One of the websites that they visited featured a photo gallery containing several pages of photos. As they sat side by side, facing their respective computer screens, they scrolled from one page to the next, sharing their reactions to the photos. At one point, Caroline found a photo of a fountain that she wanted to use for their project, and she pointed it out to Zulema. Notice how both students blurred the socially constructed boundaries between English and Spanish as they communicated: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08

Zulema: Caroline: Zulema: Caroline: Zulema: Caroline: Zulema: Caroline:

Page what? Um. Twenty-something, ¿no? Wait. This one? [pointing] ¿Como ésta? Sí, circle. ¿Cuál es? Como ésta, mira. [points] Como ésta. Ésta está bien bonita. Sí, pero ¿qué page? A ver, ¿qué page? [looking for page number] Twenty-one.

Although the transcribed excerpt above begins in English (Line 01) with Zulema asking Caroline to specify the page to which she is referring (presumably so that she can look at the photo on her own computer screen), it quickly becomes a more translingual interaction. Caroline hesitates in

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Line 02 before Zulema asks, in Line 03, if the page in question is ‘twentysomething.’ Notice, however, Zulema’s use of the question tag ‘¿no?’ at the end of Line 03. Instead of ending her utterance with a standardized English question tag (e.g. ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘right?’), Caroline uses what is arguably a Spanish syntactic feature. We say ‘arguably’ here because it could also be argued that this particular question tag has been fully incorporated into some of the varieties of English spoken by Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x people in this community. Because Zulema and many of her classmates often seamlessly combined features typically associated with Spanish and English in their speech in ways that made it difficult to distinguish between separate phonologies (Martínez, 2009), her pronunciation of the word ‘no’ in this utterance does not necessarily help determine whether to assign this question tag to English or Spanish. And this is precisely our point: Zulema’s question tag highlights the translingual nature of this interaction because it is phonologically ambiguous. In other words, it includes sounds that cannot necessarily be attributed to just ‘English’ or just ‘Spanish.’ Rather than arguing that it belongs to one language or the other, we suggest that it is more instructive to view it as reflective of the overall translanguaging in this interaction and in the broader speech patterns that Martínez observed among these students. We call attention to the ‘no?’ in the transcription simply to highlight it as a pivotal moment of translanguaging. Caroline’s response (Line 04) to Zulema’s translingual interrogative is arguably a more clear-cut case of what might normatively be considered ‘language mixing,’ in that she combines elements that are typically understood as belonging to English with elements that are typically understood as belonging to Spanish. Mid-way through her utterance in Line 04, she points to something on the page and asks ‘¿Como ésta?’ Notice that this is a slightly more elaborated version of the question that she poses in English earlier in that same line (‘This one?’). It is noteworthy that Zulema, who began this interaction in what is typically perceived as English (Line 01), responds to Caroline’s translingual utterance with a translingual utterance of her own (‘Sí, circle. ¿Cuál es?’). She confi rms that she is talking about the circular fountain to which Caroline is pointing, and she then asks which one it is (presumably meaning which page it is). Caroline’s response in Line 06 suggests that she may not have understood that Zulema was asking about the page number because she points to the photo and alludes to how pretty it is: ‘Como ésta, mira. Como ésta. Ésta está bien bonita.’ In Line 07, Zulema affirms that she knows which photo Caroline is describing, and she emphasizes that it is the page number that she wants to know (‘Sí, pero ¿qué page?’). This seems to clarify things for Caroline, who supplies the page number in Line 08 (‘A ver, ¿qué page? Twenty-one.’). While the transcript above contains two utterances that appear to be exclusively in English (Lines 01 and 02), and one that appears to be

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exclusively in Spanish (Line 06), it is worth emphasizing that the majority of the utterances in this interaction (Lines 03, 04, 05, 07 and 08) appear to be translingual. In other words, these lines all defy easy categorization as either English or Spanish utterances. Line 04, which starts in what is typically perceived as English and ends in what is typically perceived as Spanish, is an example of what some linguists call inter-sentential codeswitching – or mixing languages between or across sentences, while Lines 05, 07, 08 and, arguably, 03 are examples of what some linguists call intrasentential code-switching – or mixing within the sentence or phrase boundary. Again, while we do not wish to privilege this terminology, we do seek to draw attention to the role of individual words – or lexical items – in students’ everyday translanguaging. Because monoglossic assumptions about translanguaging posit that speakers engage in so-called ‘language mixing’ because of lexical gaps (i.e. when they do not know how to say a particular word in one of the languages), it is important to highlight that both Caroline and Zulema knew how to say all of these English words (circle, page, twenty-one) in Spanish. Some scholars have argued that intra-sentential examples of translanguaging such as these actually require a certain degree of bilingual proficiency and tend to be reflective of the speech of skilled simultaneous bilinguals (Poplack, 1988). In this regard, it is worth mentioning that both Caroline and Zulema were very skilled and ‘balanced’ simultaneous bilinguals who seemed to feel equally comfortable speaking in English, Spanish, or combining the two. Martínez has argued that their bilingualism is best reflected not in parallel instances of monolingual speech, but rather in moments of intra-sentential translanguaging such as these (Martínez, 2018), in which they move fluidly and flexibly between English and Spanish in real time, blurring the supposed boundaries between languages as they communicate with one another. Aside from student–student interactions, some of the examples of translanguaging that Ramón Martínez documented in this middle school classroom emerged within interactions between the students and their teacher, Ms Ramírez, who was also bilingual in English and Spanish, who self-identified as Chicana, and who lived in the community where the school was located. One day, for example, Ms Ramírez was using the overhead projector to project an image onto a screen at the front of the classroom. As she adjusted the projector, the size of the image fluctuated, becoming much smaller than the size of the screen. A student named María noticed this, and told Ms Ramírez, ‘Miss, make the pantalla bigger.’ This example of translanguaging, which includes what is normatively perceived as a single lexical switch, was characteristic of the way in which many students in this class interacted with Ms Ramírez. Although María was referring to the size of the image here (and not the size of the screen itself), her message seemed clear to Ms Ramírez, who immediately adjusted the projector to make the image larger. We argue that

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translanguaging served to facilitate communication within this very brief student–teacher interaction. A similar incident took place on a different day when a student named Teresita was helping Ms Ramírez collect and organize all of the students’ worksheets. At one point, Ms Ramírez approached Teresita, who was sorting the worksheets from each table into piles, and asked her, ‘Do we have a table four?’ (i.e. Do we have a pile for table four?), to which Teresita replied, ‘Well, yeah, pero están separados.’ Like María, Teresita engaged in what monoglossically oriented linguists call intra-sentential codeswitching, translanguaging within the phrase boundary. Given the specific position of authority that Ms Ramírez occupied vis-à-vis her students as their English Language Arts teacher, it is significant that both María and Teresita engaged in translanguaging when directly addressing her within this officially ‘English-only’ space. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the pervasiveness of monoglossic and purist ideologies both in schools and in society more generally, these 6th grade students sometimes articulated and embodied dominant language ideologies that framed their everyday translanguaging as deviant and/or deficient (Martínez, 2013). For example, they overwhelmingly attributed their translanguaging to a lack of proficiency in one or both languages even though Martínez documented substantial evidence to the contrary. However, as a reflection of the complex and overlapping contexts of ideological contestation in which they were being socialized, these same students also sometimes articulated and embodied counter-hegemonic language ideologies that framed their translanguaging as a form of cultural maintenance, as aesthetically preferable to monolingual speech and as a fundamentally normal way of communicating (Martínez, 2013). This classroom was a space of ideological contestation in which both dominant and counter-hegemonic ideologies got enacted, reproduced and contested (Martínez, 2013). By disrupting linguistic boundaries, these students were also disrupting and contesting the interactional norms prescribed by restrictive language policy, and thereby transforming a classroom that was meant to be monolingual and monoglossic into a more dynamic and translingual space. They were normalizing translanguaging through their everyday translanguaging. Ms Ramírez translanguaging at Eastside Middle School

It is important to emphasize that the students were not the only ones who disrupted linguistic boundaries in this ‘English-only’ classroom. Ms Ramírez herself seemed to play a pivotal role in transforming the room into a more translingual space. In particular, she often seemed to engage in translanguaging in ways that enabled her to communicate subtle nuances of meaning, one of the same conversational functions that Martínez (2010) documented in students’ translanguaging in this same

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classroom. For example, on the first day that Martínez visited her classroom, Ms Ramírez, upon introducing him to the students, asked him what he wanted to be called. When he assured her that Ramón was fi ne, she commented that ‘just’ calling him Ramón would be disrespectful. Instead, right there on the spot, she decided that it would be more appropriate for her and the students to address him as ‘Don Ramón.’ In Spanish, the word ‘Don’ is a title of respect that is used to address men, usually elders and/or people of high social rank. The custom is for the title to precede the man’s fi rst name. Similar to the title of the same name in Italian, ‘Don’ has no direct equivalent in American English. 3 Essentially, Ms Ramírez drew on her own broader linguistic repertoire and selected a title for Martínez that would communicate the respect that she felt he deserved. Because Ms Ramírez insisted that she and the students address Martínez using this title, from that day forward he became ‘Don Ramón.’ Martínez (2009) initially considered this to be more a reflection of how the teacher wanted the students to address him than of how the students themselves wanted to address him. And, of course, in a Bakhtinian/Vološinovian sense, the students were arguably echoing Ms Ramírez’s voice each time they addressed him using this title. Although it would be difficult to gauge exactly how much Ms Ramírez’s overall translanguaging influenced the students’ overall translanguaging, what seems certain is that her engagement in translanguaging to address Martínez had an observable impact on how the students addressed him. None of them objected or questioned her decision to address him using this title. For the most part, they simply went along with it. This is not to suggest, however, that the students lacked agency. On the contrary, even as they followed Ms Ramírez’s cues, some of them found creative ways to subvert this formal convention and assert their agency. For example, a few students occasionally used this formal title as an opportunity to engage in creative wordplay and joking. Some of them called him ‘Don Raymond’ or ‘Doan Ramone’ in an exaggerated mock gringo accent – or what Mason Carris (2011) calls ‘la voz gringa.’ Similarly, many of the students would often invoke the famous character ‘Don Ramón’ (played by the late Mexican actor Ramón Valdés) from the wellknown Mexican sitcom El Chavo del Ocho. They asked Martínez if he was familiar with this television character, and they often smiled and/or laughed knowingly when using this TV name to address him. This kind of subversive creativity and humor is consistent with Erickson’s (2004: 198) assertion that ‘the work of producing actual utterances leaves wiggle room – spaces for agency within the conduct of discourse in everyday life.’ The students used language flexibly and fluidly even when adopting norms and conventions imposed by their teacher. What does Ms Ramírez’s insistence on addressing Martínez as ‘Don Ramón’ reveal about her role in normalizing translanguaging and transforming her classroom into a more translingual space? Put simply, it seems

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that Ms Ramírez played a key role in modeling translanguaging for her students. By insisting that they call Martínez ‘Don Ramón’ and by using that title to address him herself, she was communicating to the students not only that it was important to address him respectfully, but also that it was possible, acceptable and sometimes even preferable to use words typically associated with Spanish to communicate subtle and important nuances of meaning. She was implicitly condoning the students’ flexible use of their full linguistic repertoires as meaning-making tools in the classroom. Her occasional translanguaging contributed to the normalization of this everyday language practice. Partly as a result of her own language practices, then, translanguaging became part of the local social ecology (Erickson, 2004) of this classroom. Ms Ramírez thus contributed to the production of a social space in which dynamic bilingualism was the norm. This normalization of translanguaging was transformative in the sense that it disrupted official classroom language norms in what was officially an ‘English-only’ instructional context. While Ms Ramírez, as a representative of the state, could have rigidly enforced the official ‘Englishonly’ instructional policy and discouraged the students from translanguaging, she instead communicated to the students that their everyday translanguaging was welcome in the classroom. It seems altogether likely that this might have impacted how the students perceived and experienced the space of the classroom, and that it might also have mediated the students’ own actions and efforts toward normalizing translanguaging in this space. Translanguaging at a Dual Language Elementary School

If restrictive language policy contexts such as the ‘English-only’ classroom at Eastside Middle School can be transformed into more translingual spaces, then we might reasonably imagine related possibilities in dual language contexts. The second set of examples that we wish to share comes from Central Bilingual School, a K-12 public school in central Los Angeles that offers dual language instruction to all students in either Spanish-English or Korean-English. Ramón Martínez has conducted a longitudinal study of language and ideology among students and teachers in the Spanish-English strand for the past several years. During the first year of this study, 78% of the school’s students were Latina/o/x (mostly of Mexican ancestry, but including students of Central American and mixed Mexican/Central American ancestry), 15% were Asian or Asian American (mostly of Korean ancestry, but including students of South Asian ancestry), and the remaining 7% included students of African American, East African and Filipino/Pilipinx4 ancestry. In contrast to most dual language programs, there were no white students from middle-class or wealthier families enrolled at the school. A total of 82% of the students at Central

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Bilingual School qualified to receive free or reduced-price lunch, and 75% of them were officially classified as ‘English learners.’ This was a dual language program that deliberately sought to center working-class students of color. The examples below come from the first year of this study in a multiage kindergarten/1st grade Spanish/English dual language classroom. One of the students in this class was of Sudanese ancestry, two were of Filipino/Pilipinx ancestry, and the remaining 17 students were of Latina/ o/x ancestry. Although all of the students in this class were children of immigrants, more than half of them were US-born. These students displayed a range of linguistic competencies across multiple named languages and other ways of speaking. Some were newcomers who spoke mostly Spanish, but most fell somewhere along the continua of Spanish-English bilingualism and biliteracy, and some spoke additional named languages, such as Arabic, Tagalog and Zapotec (an Indigenous Mexican language). Ms Birch, their teacher, was a white woman who was bilingual in Spanish and English, and who had majored in Spanish in college. She articulated a commitment to bilingual education and to providing excellent instruction to the students at Central Bilingual School. Students translanguaging at Central Bilingual School

In contrast to Eastside Middle School, Central Bilingual School explicitly promoted bilingualism and biliteracy as goals for all of its students. Despite this explicit focus on bilingualism, however, the dual language program at Central Bilingual School was similar to most dual language programs in that its underlying logic was monoglossic. Students were meant to read, write, listen and speak in one language at a time, and this policy of language separation was reflected in the designation of one language or the other for different content areas, particular times of the day and specific instructional activities. Nonetheless, Martínez observed and documented these students and their teacher translanguaging on a daily basis. As one example, consider the following interaction that took place as Ms Birch introduced a mini-lesson on insects during ‘English Class,’ a 30-minute instructional block specifically designated for English language development. All 20 of the students were seated on the rug in front of Ms Birch, who sat in a chair facing them. She posed this question to the class in English: ‘What do you call a special kind of animal that has six legs, two antennae and a segmented body?’ After about four seconds of silence had passed, a student named Joanna said, ‘Insect.’ Her classmate Javier then immediately commented, ‘I knew that, I knew that. Yo no más me hacía.’ Javier’s translingual comment above can be roughly translated as: ‘I knew that, I knew that. I was just pretending (not to know).’ In this case, ‘me hacía’ (from the reflexive verb hacerse) is a colloquial expression that

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means to feign, pretend or ‘act like.’ Whether or not Javier did, in fact, know the answer to Ms Birch’s question, his comment here might be interpreted as an attempt to save face and/or position himself as knowledgeable within this classroom community. The fact that he engaged in translanguaging in order to publicly claim to have known the correct answer seems especially significant because it contrasts with Ms Birch’s exclusive use of English during this particular instructional block, which was specifically designated as an ‘English’ instructional period. Javier’s flexible use of language within this prescriptive instructional context reflects broader speech patterns in this class, as students often disrupted linguistic boundaries without apparent regard for the officially prescribed language norms. A similar example of translanguaging comes from an interaction that took place later that same week during a 10-minute block called ‘Círculo de Comunidad’ at the end of the school day. As was customary, Ms Birch facilitated this activity in Spanish. She waited for all of the students to join her on the rug before inviting them to share ‘la parte del día que más les gustó’. After a few students had shared their favorite part of the day, Karla said, ‘Me gustó jugar afuera porque yo y Cindy, we were throwing a beanbag over the playground.’ This translingual utterance was similar to some of the intra-sentential examples from Eastside Middle School. Like the students at Eastside Middle School, Karla was also a very skilled and ‘balanced’ simultaneous bilingual. Born in Los Angeles, she was classified as ‘Initially Fluent English Proficient’ when she enrolled in kindergarten. As Martínez et al. (2017) have described, Karla defied easy categorization as either ‘English-dominant’ or ‘Spanish-dominant’ precisely because she moved so flexibly and fluidly across socially constructed linguistic boundaries in her everyday interactions. In both of the examples from Central Bilingual School, students engaged in translanguaging during instructional periods that Ms Birch had officially designated for the use of one language or the other. Javier translanguaged during a block of time when students were meant to speak in English, while Karla translanguaged during a block of time when students were meant to speak in Spanish. By disrupting linguistic boundaries and related interactional norms, they, like the students at Eastside Middle School, transformed a dual language classroom that was meant to reproduce parallel monolingualisms into a more dynamic translingual space. Ms Birch translanguaging at Central Bilingual School

The students at Central Bilingual School were not alone in disrupting the linguistic boundaries between English and Spanish. Ms Birch also drew fluidly and flexibly on her own linguistic repertoire in many of her interactions with the students. One such example comes from a day during ‘English Class’ when she was reviewing vocabulary related to homes and houses. Once she had fi nished reviewing the vocabulary, she asked the

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students to volunteer to share sentences in English describing the different rooms in a house. After Alicia shared a sentence in English, Ms Birch asked the class, ‘Can we give her a nice aplauso?’ Then three more students offered English sentences in sequence, and Ms Birch responded similarly after each of them shared (e.g. ‘Give her an aplauso’ or ‘Give him an aplauso’). Ms Birch’s translanguaging stood out in contrast to the ways in which dual language programs typically discourage so-called language mixing. Although we can only speculate here, we suspect that Ms Birch may have chosen to use the word ‘aplauso’ for emphasis. Like Ms Ramírez in the examples from Eastside Middle School, Ms Birch demonstrated to her students that it was acceptable – and sometimes even preferable – to draw flexibly and fluidly on one’s linguistic repertoire to communicate in her classroom. By disrupting linguistic boundaries in her own speech, she played an important role in allowing for the construction of a dynamic translingual space. In addition to engaging in her own forms of everyday translanguaging, Ms Birch also sometimes seemed to deliberately (and perhaps strategically) elicit translanguaging from her students in ways that facilitated teaching and learning. Consider, for example, the following fieldnote excerpt, in which Martínez describes a guided reading lesson that Ms Birch conducted with two Latino students (Javier and Joshua) and one Filipino/Pilipino student (Kevin), who was learning Spanish as an additional language: Javier joined Joshua and Kevin at the kidney-shaped table, where Ms Birch was beginning her guided reading lesson with them. She was asking Joshua and Kevin to make predictions about El Regalo de Osito Marcos, the leveled book that she held in her hands. After asking several predicting questions, she did a quick picture-walk through the book. She then did a separate picture-walk in English with Kevin. Next she passed out individual copies of the book to the three boys. She introduced key vocabulary (juguetes, tren, carritos) as they looked through the book together. As she introduced the vocabulary words in Spanish, she made a point of enlisting the help of Joshua and Javier to translate those words for Kevin. For example, she asked the two boys, ‘¿Cómo se dice en inglés juguetes?’ Joshua and Javier answered in unison: ‘Toys!’ Javier then immediately added: ‘Toys R’ Us!’ Ms Birch smiled, looked at Kevin, and then said, ‘Right, toys.’ After reviewing all three vocabulary items, she invited the boys to read the book on their own. As they did so, she read along individually with Joshua.

In the excerpt above, Ms Birch enlisted the help of two bilingual Latino students by explicitly asking them to translate the word ‘juguetes’ into English for their Filipino/Pilipino classmate Kevin. We argue that this was a skillful pedagogical move that provided an opportunity for Joshua and Javier to draw on their bilingual expertise, specifically their lexical knowledge. By soliciting their help, Ms Birch positioned these two Latino boys

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as knowledgeable and competent bilingual speakers. While she did not engage in translanguaging herself within the context of this particular guided reading lesson, Ms Birch was permitting – even encouraging – the use of English during a literacy instructional block that was officially intended to be only in Spanish. Although Ms Birch might not have conceptualized it as such at the time, we argue that this move was an example of skillful translanguaging pedagogies that afforded unique opportunities for learning and interaction. By inviting Joshua and Javier to draw on their bilingual repertoires during an instructional segment that was meant to proceed entirely in Spanish, Ms Birch facilitated Kevin’s learning of Spanish vocabulary while simultaneously positioning her Latino students as competent and establishing conditions in which they were able to reinforce their own translingual lexical knowledge. Prefiguring Translingual Possibilities for Dual Language Education

The examples of translanguaging that we shared above have two important things in common: (1) they all took place within instructional arrangements that were meant to be monoglossic (i.e. in which Spanish and English were understood to be separate and meant to be kept separate); and (2) they all showcase the creative and dynamic bilingualism in which bilingual Latina/o/x children and their teachers engaged despite these monoglossic constraints. As they talked, learned and made meaning as part of their everyday classroom interactions, these students and their teachers disrupted the supposed linguistic boundaries between English and Spanish, transforming officially monoglossic spaces into more flexible and dynamic learning contexts – into more translingual spaces. We do not mean to suggest that this transformation was complete in any kind of pure or absolute sense. Again, these classrooms are best understood as spaces of ideological contestation, in which ‘dominant and counter-hegemonic practices and ideologies co-existed in a state of dynamic tension and mutual contestation’ (Martínez, 2013: 286). Although the influence of monoglossic ideologies of linguistic purism was never absent, these students and teachers regularly and actively contested those dominant ideologies through their everyday translanguaging, and this active contestation was consequential in the sense that it served to routinize and normalize translanguaging. The classrooms described above are important because they represent prefigurative spaces – sites where bilingual Latina/o/x students and their teachers foreshadow forms of interaction and instruction that we might envision as part of a more translingual approach to schooling and society. Here we draw inspiration from the work of the late Paula Allman (1999), who argued that critical educators have an obligation to begin prefiguring – imagining and enacting – the kinds of radical teaching that they would

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hope to see in a radically transformed society. In the examples that we shared above, students and teachers prefigured fundamentally different kinds of speaking and learning even within the practical constraints of monoglossic schooling. They co-constructed learning ecologies in which students could draw flexibly and fluidly on their linguistic repertoires without being stigmatized or marginalized, and these translingual spaces seemed to facilitate learning, interaction and meaning-making. To be sure, such prefigurative spaces are necessarily contradictory given that they emerge within larger contexts of political tension, contradiction and contestation (Allman, 1999; Zavala & Golden, 2016). Nonetheless, we argue that they can serve as examples of what might be possible if we followed bi/multilingual students’ lead in disrupting linguistic boundaries and thinking more flexibly about language in schools and society. In particular, these examples prefigure possibilities for beginning to transform dual language education in the United States. In this sense, we see these prefigurative spaces as ‘pockets of hope’ (Horton & Freire, 1990) that point toward future possibilities for dual language education. Of course, we should be careful to qualify our claims, as we do not wish to exaggerate or romanticize the transformative potential of translanguaging (Jaspers, 2018). Indeed, although valuing and privileging bilingual Latina/o/x students’ everyday translanguaging in dual language education would be a huge step in the right direction, it alone would not fundamentally transform schooling for bilingual Latina/o/x students, precisely because schooling for these students is rooted in persistent structural inequalities and longer histories of exclusion, marginalization and oppression. However, we maintain that ‘transformative’ is an appropriate and necessary descriptor with respect to translanguaging (and especially in dual language education). If we insist on excessively narrow criteria for what counts as ‘transformative,’ we miss the transformative potential that is reflected in the everyday actions of students and their teachers, and we submit to an overly deterministic view of social structure and human agency. Moreover, we need to realize that larger structural inequalities and histories of exclusion, marginalization and oppression are directly and profoundly connected to what happens at the local level in classrooms. If we look across spatial and temporal scales, we can recognize the classroom as a key site for the reproduction and re-articulation of larger social patterns, but also as a potential site for the contestation of hegemonic ideologies and practices. More to the point, we cannot wait for all of society to be transformed before we begin transforming everyday classroom life. As Allman (1999) argued, we must begin now to imagine and prefigure what schooling might look like in the transformed society that we hope to create. We argue that these examples of everyday translanguaging provide a glimpse of what such schooling might look and sound like. Needless to say, the normalization of everyday translanguaging is not something that is unique to these two classrooms. On the contrary, bi/

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multilingual Latina/o/x students and their teachers are normalizing translanguaging in classrooms around the country. As Martínez et al. (2019b) have argued, bilingual Latina/o/x students ‘will continue to disrupt linguistic boundaries and thereby transform classroom space regardless – and sometimes in spite – of the policies and pedagogies that adults imagine, enact, and impose on their behalf’ (Martínez et al., 2019b: 195). That some teachers are beginning to follow students’ lead in this regard prompts us to perceive even greater possibilities for the transformation of schooling for bi/multilingual Latina/o/x students. Indeed, even in relatively restrictive language policy contexts, such as classrooms that are officially designated as monolingual or ‘English only,’ some teachers are disrupting linguistic boundaries and enacting dynamic and generative pedagogical practices that are transforming teaching and learning (Durán, 2017; Rowe, 2018; Zapata & Laman, 2016). Our point is that students and their teachers are already transforming monoglossic classrooms into more dynamic translingual spaces. They are already showing us glimpses of what is possible – glimpses of the world as it could be. We argue that these prefigurative spaces can directly inform theory, research and practice in ways that transform dual language education for bi/multilingual Latina/ o/x learners. Notes (1) We use ‘Latina/o/x’ to refer to people of Latin American ancestry in order to recognize Latina, transgender and gender non-binary members of our community, all of whom are systematically erased and marginalized when subsumed under the label ‘Latino.’ (2) All names are pseudonyms. (3) The word in English that most closely approximates ‘Don’ is the formal title ‘Sir,’ which is not commonly used in American English. (4) This particular school district officially lists ‘Filipino’ as a separate category from either ‘Asian/Asian-American’ or ‘Pacific Islander,’ which it also lists as two separate categories.

References Allman, P. (1999) Revolutionary Social Transformation: Democratic Hopes, Political Possibilities and Critical Education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Durán, L. (2017) Audience and young bilingual writers: Building on strengths. Journal of Literacy Research 49 (1), 92–114. doi:10.1177/1086296X16683420 Erickson, F. (2004) Talk and Social Theory: Ecologies of Speaking and Listening in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fitts, S. (2006) Reconstructing the status quo: Linguistic interaction in a dual-language school. Bilingual Research Journal 30 (2), 337–365. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. London: Longman. Horton, M. and Freire, P. (1990) We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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Jaspers, J. (2018) The transformative limits of translanguaging. Language & Communication 58, 1–10. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2017.12.001 Lippi-Green, R. (1997) English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge. Martínez, R.A. (2009) Spanglish is spoken here: Making sense of Spanish-English codeswitching and language ideologies in a sixth-grade English Language Arts classroom. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California. Martínez, R.A. (2010) Spanglish as literacy tool: Toward an understanding of the potential role of Spanish-English code-switching in the development of academic literacy. Research in the Teaching of English 45 (2), 124–149. Martínez, R.A. (2013) Reading the world in Spanglish: Hybrid language practices and ideological contestation in a sixth-grade English language arts classroom. Linguistics and Education 24 (3), 276–288. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2013.03.007 Martínez, R.A. (2017) Dual language education and the erasure of Chicanx, Latinx, and indigenous Mexican children: A call to re-imagine (and imagine beyond) bilingualism. Texas Education Review 5 (1), 81–92. Martínez, R.A. (2018) Beyond the ‘English learner’ label: Recognizing the richness of bi/ multilingual children’s linguistic repertoires. The Reading Teacher 71 (5), 515–522. doi:10.1002/trtr.1679 Martínez, R.A., Hikida, M. and Durán, L. (2015) Unpacking ideologies of linguistic purism: How dual language teachers make sense of everyday translanguaging. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (1), 26–42. doi:10.1080/19313152.20 14.977712 Martínez, R.A., Durán, L. and Hikida, M. (2017) Becoming ‘Spanish learners’: Identity and interaction among multilingual children in a Spanish-English dual language program. International Multilingual Research Journal 11 (3), 167–183. doi:10.1080/193 13152.2017.1330065 Martínez, R.A., Durán, L. and Hikida, M. (2019a) Where translanguaging meets academic writing: Exploring tensions and generative connections for bilingual Latina/o/x students. In I.G. Sánchez and M.F. Orellana (eds) Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-dominant Groups (pp. 179–196). New York: Routledge. Martínez, R.M., Hikida, M. and Durán, L. (2019b) Translanguaging and the transformation of classroom space: On the affordances of disrupting linguistic boundaries. In M. Pacheco and P.Z. Morales (eds) Transforming Schooling for Second Language Learners: Policies, Pedagogies, and Practices (pp. 181–198). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Mason Carris, L. (2011) La voz gringa: Latino stylization of linguistic inauthenticity as social critique. Discourse and Society 22 (4), 474–490. doi:10.1177/0957926510395835 Otheguy, R., García, O. and Reid, W. (2015) Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review 6 (3), 281–307. Poplack, S. (1988) Contrasting patterns of code-switching in two communities. In M. Heller (ed.) Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rowe, L.W. (2018) Say it in your language: Supporting translanguaging in multilingual classes. The Reading Teacher 72 (1), 31–38. doi:10.1002/trtr.1673 Silverstein, M. (1996) Monoglot ‘standard’ in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In D. Brenneis and R. Macaulay (eds) The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 284–306). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Zapata, A. and Laman, T.T. (2016) ‘I write to show how beautiful my languages are’: Translingual writing instruction in English-dominant classrooms. Language Arts 93 (5), 366–378. Zavala, M. and Golden, N.A. (2016) Prefiguring alternative worlds: Organic critical literacies and socio-cultural revolutions. Knowledge Cultures 4 (6), 207–227.

5 Translanguaging and Other Forms of Capital in Dual Language Bilingual Education: Lessons from la Frontera María Teresa (Mayte) de la Piedra and Alberto Esquinca

Introduction

In this chapter, we introduce what we call a nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy and show how it transformed practices in a dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program in El Paso, Texas, with students that we call transfronterizxs. We open the chapter with general background on languaging on the border, relevant literature on DLBE, and our theoretical framework. Then, after providing context for education in la frontera, we describe a DLBE classroom in an El Paso school that has opened up a translanguaging pedagogical space, where teacher and students questioned hegemonic stances toward language and ways of being and knowing. In this environment of confi anza, cariño y convivencia, through translanguaging and other community cultural wealth, students positioned themselves as experts and claimed the classroom as their space. Transfronterizxs, Language and Bilingual Education

Over the last decade, we have documented translanguaging as an integral part of the knowledge of bilinguals along the US-Mexico border. Our previous work (de la Piedra et al., 2018) examined the language and literacy practices of transfronterizxs, or border-crossers. Transfronterizxs’ languaging and literacy practices are shaped by their experiences of mobility across borders. The mobile literacy practices that they bring from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso include translanguaging across various situations, the use of multimodalities, and transfronterizx funds of 113

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knowledge. These practices are part of the border-crossers’ community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2006), which helps them navigate life in the United States. Unfortunately, borderland bilingual students and teachers are also subject to colonizing discourses and practices that constrain and police their languaging practices (Cervantes-Soon & Carrillo, 2016; Esquinca et al., 2018; Talamantes, 2021). In a recent study of engineering education in another DLBE program on the border (Esquinca et al., 2018), we found policies and practices that segregated emergent bilingual students, and perpetuated English-language hegemony. During the fi rst year of the study, the engineering design curriculum was taught in English only, Spanish and English were not granted equal status, and principles of DLBE education were not followed. In addition, a strict language separation policy was enforced during specific test-preparation practices. These monoglossic practices, shaped by the larger accountability structural context, forced teachers and students to construct translanguaging as not allowable. Oftentimes, emergent bilingual students were segregated from the rest of the students during instruction and reported feeling ‘left out.’ The strict separation of languages limited minoritized students’ expression, meaningful participation in their own learning, and their capacity to claim the bilingual classroom as their own. Privileging English in a DLBE program, policing translanguaging practices of borderland emergent bilinguals and excluding emergent bilinguals resulted, in part, from a hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge system and epistemological racism that privileges dominant ways of speaking, writing and being. Teachers and school administrators play significant roles in organizing the learning spaces for emergent bilinguals in ways that can either empower them, or serve to enforce hegemonic language policies. In this chapter, we introduce nepantlera translanguaging pedagogies in a DLBE program, also located in the US-Mexico border. These pedagogies starkly contrast with the colonizing language policies found in other DLBE contexts (Esquinca et al., 2018; Flores & García, 2017; Poza, 2014; Valdés, 2018). Translanguaging articulates with other capitals at the disposal of transfronterizx students to support transformation of their experience as students, ‘calling forth bilingual subjectivities and sustaining bilingual performances that go beyond one or the other binary logic of two autonomous languages’ (García & Li, 2014: 94). Furthermore, nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy includes the development of relationships of confianza, cariño and convivencia. Thus, when the teacher utilizes nepantlera translanguaging pedagogies, emergent bilinguals are able to leverage translanguaging as one of their multiple resources in their repertoire of capitals. Transfronterizx ways of knowing are seldom included in the curriculum; rather, the curriculum tends to be ethnocentric and to privilege Western ways of knowing and languaging. This chapter is intended as a counterstory (Yosso, 2006) to dominant narratives that present Latinx and emergent bilingual students as deficient. This counterstory centers on

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what is actually happening in classrooms where transfronterizx students learn alongside transfronterizx teachers in programs that value translanguaging. We show that translanguaging was often a decolonizing practice in which teachers and students engaged, not only to make meaning of the school material, but also to show care, empathy and solidarity, and to claim the DLBE classroom as their own space. Translanguaging as Community Cultural Wealth and Nepantlera Translanguaging Pedagogy

Our theoretical assumptions combine theories of language as a sociocultural phenomenon with theories that privilege the ways of knowing and being of Latinxs in the United States. We highlight how transfronterizxs act in their social spaces, including schools, through their languaging practices and other forms of community cultural wealth. Translanguaging approaches to theory and practice question the limiting ways of framing bilinguals. In our study, teachers framed students as either ‘Spanish-dominant’ or ‘English-dominant.’ However, most students were bilingual and their practices fell at different points along the bilingual continuum. The ideology of a ‘balanced bilingual’ directly contradicts the ways of speaking of transfronterizxs and negates their identities. We argue that enforcing ideologies of linguistic purism aligns with a white supremacist ideology that defines white ways of speaking as superior and the norm. In contrast, ‘a translanguaging conception of the language abilities of bilingual learners takes as its starting point the students’ complete linguistic repertoire … speakers “do” with language with their own repertoire of linguistic features and not simply with the two societally named autonomous standard languages’ (Sánchez et al., 2018: 38). In other words, translanguaging refers to the ways in which bilinguals regularly use language to make sense of their lives and worlds (García, 2009). In schools, translanguaging refers to the ways in which students and teachers ‘engage in complex and fluid discursive practices that include, at times, the home language practices of students in order to “make sense” of teaching and learning, to communicate and appropriate subject knowledge, and to develop academic language practices’ (García, 2014: 112). After a decade of research documenting these practices outside and inside the classroom, translanguaging is also proposed as ‘a practical theory of language’ (Li, 2018) that allows researchers to explain the complex and dynamic language use of bilinguals from a holistic, transdisciplinary, sociocultural/sociopolitical perspective. Just as the ‘New Literacy Studies’ perspective responded to a limiting view of literacy in the 1980s and 1990s (Street, 1984), translanguaging theory is a response to restricting views of language that compartmentalize linguistic features or narrowly defi ned ‘codes,’ rather than paying attention to the speakers’ entire repertoire. In addition, this theory ‘highlights the importance of feeling, experience,

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history, memory, subjectivity, and culture’ (Li, 2018: 17) to understand language practices. These notions are very important to our idea of nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy, because it goes beyond linguistic aspects of practice. In this chapter, we use translanguaging as a theory that explains the transfronterizxs’ use of language in DLBE classrooms, where translanguaging was also a pedagogical stance adopted by teachers and appropriated or initiated by emergent bilinguals. When this pedagogical stance includes multiple capitals that make up the Latinx community cultural wealth, we call it a nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy. We borrow the concept of Nepantla from Gloria Anzaldúa (2007), who calls it ‘the overlapping space between different perceptions and belief systems’ (Anzaldúa, 2007: 541). She refers to the in-between space between worlds, countries and/or languages which she used to break down binary thinking (i.e. female/male, mind/body). When you live in Nepantla, Anzaldúa (2002) says, ‘you are aware of the changeability of racial, gender, sexual, and other categories rendering the conventional labeling obsolete’ (Anzaldúa, 2007: 541). In our work, we previously used the concept of Nepantla to analyze the experiences of transfronterizx students (de la Piedra et al., 2018) who live en la frontera and exemplify the overlapping or in-between spaces theorized by Anzaldúa. Their lives and practices were located in-between nations, named languages and ways of being and knowing. More recently, Mayte and a colleague explored the concept of nepantlera teachers (de la Piedra & Araujo, 2021: 37): ‘Nepantlera teachers experience un sitio entre dos mundos, and build bridges among ways of knowing e integran los distintos conocimientos (from home and school) a través de su convivencia.’ In this chapter, we add to this notion by emphasizing translanguaging and the students’ agentive participation in this nepantlera pedagogy, focusing on ‘bilingual subjectivities and sustaining bilingual performances that go beyond one or the other binary logic of two autonomous languages’ (García & Li, 2014: 92–93). A critical race feminista approach (Delgado Bernal et al., 2019) allows us to understand translanguaging as part of the capital of repertoires of emergent bilinguals. Critical race theory scholars have long alerted us to the racist discourses, policies and practices that minoritized students encounter in schools. Critical race theory ‘builds from the knowledge of communities of color to reveal how forms of oppression mediate educational trajectories, and are committed to empowering communities of color to work toward social justice’ (Delgado Bernal et al., 2019: 110). Latinx critical race theory highlights how ‘race and racism impact the educational processes, structures, and discourses that implicitly and explicitly affect people of color, generally, and Latinos specifically’ (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001: 479). For Latinxs, racism embedded in educational institutions intersects with immigration status, language, race,

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class, gender, gender identity and sexuality. Thus, we observe that in schools, emergent bilinguals’ translanguaging, their brown bodies, their accents, their last names and their ways of being in the world are either ignored or policed. ‘Epistemological racism’ (Delgado Bernal, 2006: 556) and white supremacy are evident in the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge and ways of speaking and are manifested in the monoglossic policies described in the DLBE literature reviewed above. By centering Latinx ways of knowing, Latinx critical race theory challenges the epistemological racism often found in schools, while translanguaging nepantlera pedagogy works against Eurocentric ways of speaking. Latinx bilinguals develop their capital repertoires through lived experience in their families, communities and peer groups. Transfronterizx and other transnational students also develop their repertoires through their transnational lives and across national contexts. Thus, the lived experience of the youth ‘endows them with substantial linguistic and cultural expertise, including ways of speaking and being that young people draw from their homes and communities as well as practices that youth themselves have created or adapted’ (Bucholtz et al., 2018: 1). Recognizing that students develop their repertoires through lived experience in their homes and communities is a first step in questioning dominant narratives of deficit. Latina feminista perspectives tell us that marginalized ways of knowing are key to Latinx daily survival because they allow Latinx students to use their multiple capitals to confront racist Eurocentric environments that ignore and silence their experiential knowledge, ways of knowing, and languaging. According to Delgado Bernal et al. (2019) and drawing on Anzaldúa, the process of conocimiento ‘invokes ancestral wisdom, lived experiences, cultural knowledge and a resiliency that allows people to heal from the effects of race-based trauma and other forms of oppression as we strategically navigate within and outside of hostile educational environments’ (Delgado Bernal et al., 2019: 111). Yosso (2006) evokes the cultural wealth that Latinx people learn in their communities. Community cultural wealth includes several interrelated capitals, such as aspirational capital (the ability to maintain hope/dreams in the midst of difficulties), linguistic capital (communicative practices in more than one language or style), navigational capital (ability to maneuver in institutions), social capital (engaging social networks as resources), familial capital (cultural knowledge nurtured in the family) and resistant capital (skills and behavior that challenge inequality). Translanguaging is part of the linguistic capital that Latinxs have at their disposal, part of their community cultural wealth. While rarely acknowledged in schools, these capitals are key to the emotional and physical survival of Latinx bilinguals. In addition, a Latina feminista perspective highlights the legacy of the dual colonization that Latinxs have experienced. Colonization fragmented our brown bodies; the Latina feminista project proposes to mend mind, body and spirit. Like translanguaging, this perspective challenges binaries

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and artificially created boundaries. A Latina feminista perspective reveals the sitios (spaces) where decolonized discourse (lenguas) can unfold. ‘Lengua is a methodological tool that affords the opportunity to uncover the counter-discourses that challenge normative ways of thinking about race, [language,] class, gender, and sexuality. It also refers to the use of the multiple languaging that marginalized people employ as resistant strategies. Sitio involves claiming a historical, geographical, or philosophical space that nurtures resistance’ (Delgado Bernal et al., 2019: 112). Conceptualizing translanguaging practices as capital from a Latina feminista perspective allows us to bring forth ‘nuanced forms of understanding oppression, resistance, and transformation’ (Delgado Bernal et al., 2019: 112) and to see the potential of using translanguaging practices as resources not only for learning, but also to confront racism and white supremacy. We show that translanguaging is a decolonized lengua in which teachers and students engage not only to make meaning of the school material, but also to show care, empathy and solidarity, and to claim the DLBE classroom as their own sitio. La Frontera

With 2.3 million borderland residents, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez form a substantial bilingual and binational community where mutual dependency (Heyman, 2019) is evident. El Paso’s population is mostly Mexican and Mexican American (83%) and many are immigrants (25% are ‘foreign born’). Approximately 72% of El Paso residents speak Spanish. It is common to walk into a local grocery store and hear both Spanish and English spoken between employers and customers. On the Ciudad Juárez side, it is common to meet border residents who cross daily for work as a way of life and to hear the refrain ‘Gana en dólares pero gasta en pesos’ (Urbina Barrera & Haro Pérez, 2018). Compared to the rest of the United States, demographics show the historical marginalization suffered by El Paso residents. The median household income in El Paso is about $15,000 lower than the median Texas and US household incomes; 21% of El Paso residents are living in poverty. In El Paso, as in other cities along the US-Mexico border, some residents lack basic services such as water, wastewater services, electricity and paved roads. The community maintains historical, social and cultural connections with Ciudad Juárez. El Paso is a US borderland city in which Mexican culture prevails. The constant back and forth flow of residents explains the strong ethnolinguistic identity shared by most border residents, which has allowed residents to maintain and develop their unique linguistic and cultural practices. However, the relationship between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso is complicated by stark inequalities in economic resources, educational opportunities, status and mobility. Different perceptions about

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varieties of Spanish and English, and pressures to conform to a ‘pure’ Spanish and ‘pure’ English, also circulate in this border community, reproducing monoglossic ideologies in a variety of settings. Historically, children were brutally punished for speaking their home languages in school (Trujillo, 1998), and today we witness the effects of these practices. In addition, todays’ anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions have come to our border sister cities, affecting El Pasoans’ and Juarenses’ sense of security. The pictures of children in cages under our bridge depict the inhumane treatment of immigrants in our own cities. In addition, the massacre perpetrated by a male, white supremacist against 23 people, most of them Mexican or Mexican American, at a Walmart in August 2019, is the extreme embodiment of anti-Mexican discourses and their material consequences. Although a slogan of ‘El Paso Strong’ circulates in El Paso, we all feel more vulnerable after this massacre. El Programa

DLBE programs have had important benefits for the Latinx community, including improved academic achievement and the development of bilingualism and biliteracy. At the same time, researchers have documented that DLBE programs tend to promote monoglossic ideologies and have strict language separation policies (García, 2009). These ideologies and policies resemble the ‘linguistic purism’ of English-only programs (Martínez et al., 2015: 27) and may reproduce language ideologies that marginalize bilingual populations who translanguage as part of their everyday communicative practices. These recent critical perspectives on DLBE raise urgent questions about the unintended consequences of these programs on an already marginalized population. The DLBE program described here is different from the ‘boutique programs’ described by Flores and García (2017: 15), which ‘focused on “selling bilingualism” to powerful consumers.’ Although not immune to neoliberal forces that commodify languages, identities and ways of being, the DLBE program we studied served Latinx students almost exclusively. The fact that many of the students and all teachers are bilingual, and feel comfortable using Spanish, makes this context unique. Finally, because the program is located in the bilingual community of El Paso, students have access to out-of-school settings where the use of Spanish is unmarked. We acknowledge that these combined circumstances are rarely found across the United States. Nepantlera Translanguaging Pedagogy in a DLBE Classroom

From 2009 to 2012, we conducted ethnographic research in Border Elementary School, and collected a range of data. These include participant- observation in classrooms and other school settings, group

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interviews with students in DLBE classrooms, and individual interviews with teachers, administrators and staff members. Border Elementary School serves mostly Latinx and economically disadvantaged students, as well as a high percentage of transfronterizxs. Thirty per cent of the overall population of the school consists of emergent bilingual students and it offers DLBE programs. For our study, we selected Border Elementary School because of the increasing number of transfronterizxs enrolled, the nearness to a port of entry, and a well- established DLBE program in the school and the district. Border Elementary School offered two different types of DLBE program. One program, considered one-way, consisted mostly of newcomers and transfronterizxs in their first or second year in the United States who were all classified as ‘English Language Learners,’ and considered by the teachers to be ‘Spanish dominant.’ The other type of program, considered two-way, generally included two types of Latinx students – those classified as ‘English Language Learners’ and considered by the teachers as ‘Spanish dominant,’ as well as students who were classified as ‘Fluent English speakers,’ considered by the teachers to be ‘English dominant.’ The first group consisted mostly of firstor second-generation Mexican immigrants who used mostly Spanish at home. Some transfronterizx students considered to be ‘Spanish dominant’ were also in the two-way DLBE program. The second group was made up of those who spoke mostly English at home. In this chapter we focus on a science lesson in a 4th grade classroom in the two-way dual language classroom, and the participation of four transfronterizas – Mariana, Marissa, Eva and Patricia. Mariana, Marissa and Eva attended school in Ciudad Juárez before arriving at Border Elementary. Mariana started school in the United States in the middle of 3rd grade, and Marissa started 4th grade in the United States. Both had families on both sides of the border and crossed to Ciudad Juárez on the weekends. Eva lived in El Paso, Texas, ‘con mis abuelitos, mi madrina, mi mamá, yo, mi hermana y unos tíos.’ First, she moved to El Paso when she was five years old but moved back and forth from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez over the years. Patricia was born in Torreón, Coahuila, México. Her maternal grandmother and mother are Peruvian and her father is Mexican. Her family moved to El Paso when she was in 1st grade; however, she belongs to a transfronterizx family. Her father worked in Ciudad Juárez and crossed the border daily, while Patricia crossed the border twice a month. Regardless of their backgrounds, these four emergent bilingual students communicated that they preferred to use Spanish for learning and that they felt unsure using English. Eva, for example, stated ‘Yo sé inglés, Ms pero me gusta más español.’ The girls used Spanish with their family most of the time; at school, they reported using Spanish mostly with their classmates. However, as will be evidenced in our analysis, they often engaged in translanguaging.

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Ms O. was the 4th grade teacher, although we focus our attention on the science lesson because we wanted to explore disciplinary literacies in depth. The language policy of the DLBE programs in Border School designated science as a subject to be taught in English. Ms O. was born and had lived in Mexico until she moved to El Paso at the start of middle school where she was identified as ‘Limited English Proficient.’ We teach, live and do research en la frontera. We both translanguage when we teach, conduct and present research. By acknowledging translanguaging in our writing, following the students’ words and our own written fieldnotes, we push back against the hegemonic monolingual tradition of US academic writing. A Nepantlera Translanguaging Space: Border Elementary School and a Science Lesson

Below we show how translanguaging advanced a science lesson taught by Ms O. to 4th graders. Translanguaging also increased student active participation in science taught officially in English and allowed students to mobilize their linguistic and cultural resources for learning, and for ‘doing being bilingual’ (Auer, 1984: 7) in this dual language setting. We have organized our analysis to draw attention to what we consider are the four different aspects of a nepantlera translanguaging pedagogical space: (1) (2) (3) (4)

the construction of a space for convivencia y cariño; the inclusion of everyone; students’ claiming sitio as emergent bilinguals; advancing students’ own conocimiento.

The construction of a space for convivencia y cariño

In previous publications (de la Piedra & Araujo, 2021; de la Piedra et al., 2018), we have demonstrated that Ms O. was a teacher who understood her students. She carefully observed their learning processes, reflected on how to support their learning and designed ways to challenge them to learn. She organized a space of confianza and convivencia, where authentic caring was centered. In doing so, the teacher questioned Eurocentric environments that tend to ignore the Latinx community cultural wealth, including confianza and convivencia. During this particular science lesson with her 4th grade DLBE class, we observed convivencia and confianza, as well as the inclusion of the students’ experiential knowledge and bodies in their own learning. Before this observation day, Ms O. had been out of her classroom for a few days because her mother had passed away. Her students were concerned about their teacher’s emotional wellbeing and brought gifts and

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food for her. The following comes from fieldnotes during the science lesson, which also was the day Ms O. returned to school: Este globo se lo regalaron a Ms. O. porque hace unos días murió su mamá; los niños le hicieron flores de papel en Arte y decoraron una canasta con las flores y ese globo. Los niños también se han organizado para llevarle todos los días desayuno a Ms O., porque in Ms. O.’s words, ‘la quieren consentir.’ Unos le llevan pan y otros café. (Fieldnotes, November 2011)

Here we see how students used their familial capital, the cultural knowledge learned at home about consoling someone in distress, when relating to their teacher. They expressed their love for the teacher with acts of cariño during her time of grief, bringing her a basket of paper flowers they had made and a balloon. They also brought her breakfast every day because they wanted to make her feel better, and their parents joined in with these demonstrations of affection. Even though in this case the relationship was not defined by blood, teacher and students had a family-like relationship where they shared their convivencias. They established relationships of confianza, created community, demonstrated empathy and solidarity with one another and demonstrated awareness of their ‘mutual humanity’ (Galván, 2015). We observed similar ways of relating among families and the school community. This resembles transcaring (García et al., 2012: 799), where caring is ‘enacted to build a common collaborative “in-between” space that transcends linguistic and cultural differences between schools and homes.’ Transcaring in this classroom, like the ones described by García et  al. (2012), include ‘the ways in which teachers and administrators […] straddled languages, cultures, and modes of knowing and performing in the borderlands in which these immigrant students live’ (García et  al., 2012: 807–808). As shown here, transcaring also included students’ ways of relating to one other, and to the teacher and school community. Because of Ms O.’s absences, the students had worked with substitutes on the previous days; Ms O. thus felt the need to review science concepts in preparation for their test. Instead of reviewing, Ms O. taught the content. In this way, Ms O. showed authentic care for her students, manifested in high expectations and a sense of responsibility for their learning. She played a video about forms of energy. Ms O. framed the science knowledge as part of the experiential knowledge that students have in their own classroom, encouraging them to observe their surroundings and use their bodies. After watching the video, she instructed them: ‘I want you to take a look at the classroom and tell me what forms of energy you see or feel.’ This was one way in which Ms O. encouraged students to draw from their own experiences, allowing for the merging of body and mind in the classroom. Next, during a whole-class discussion, some children got up and spoke to one another. Ms O. stopped the class for a few minutes: ‘Some of you decided to not pay attention when I am explaining or when a friend is

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sharing an idea. Let me explain to you why this is wrong.’ She told them that when they are doing other things, they miss what the teacher or classmates are explaining: ‘Your classmates have very important things to say, but you are missing that information.’ She continued, using thinking aloud to model convivencia. ‘I am gonna ask you to pay attention. We are going to listen and we will ask ourselves, “Do I agree with what so and so is saying? Do I disagree?” That way we are going to learn.’ This brief moment shows another example of the teacher building a nepantlera translanguaging space, because it shows the teacher’s pedagogical stance of including her students’ community cultural wealth. Ms O. taught students how to convivir, interact with each other, listen and respect each other, and dialogue. The teacher modeled the thinking process that she wanted the students to perform when she stated, ‘We will ask ourselves, “Do I agree with what so and so is saying? Do I disagree?”.’ Thinking aloud was a practice that Ms O. used in order to model metalinguistic and metacognitive strategies. In this example, she modeled the thinking process explaining convivencia and dialogue. Including everyone: Validating bilingual identities along the continuum

Because science was taught in English, emergent bilinguals told us that sometimes they did not talk in class. Sometimes the translanguaging corriente (García et al., 2017) seemed to be under the surface for a while. However, the following excerpt shows how the translanguaging corriente started to surface, along with other elements of students’ community cultural wealth (i.e. the experiential knowledge of Mariana, a transfronteriza). Using English, Ms O. and the students discussed different kinds of energy (i.e. mechanical, electric), and how electricity travels. Then a student in the class, David, offered ‘thermal energy’ and Ms O. asked David to ‘show her an example of thermal energy in the classroom.’ David stood up and turned on the light. Ms O. asked the class if the light was thermal energy. Ms O. and David continued discussing if the light produced heat, and David concluded that the light he turned on was both light and thermal energy. This instructional conversation occurred in English. However, as the transfronterizx students started to engage with the lesson that was supposedly being taught in English, translanguaging erupted into instruction. Mariana’s participation initiates this disruption: Mariana: Miss, ayer estábamos en mi casa, cuando llegué la estufa estaba prendida y hacía mucho calor. Ms O.: Exactly, the heat from the stove is energy. Estufa is stove. Look at examples in our classroom; tell me examples of mechanical energy. Ismael: Us!!!! Ms O.: Yes David: ¿Por qué dice Ismael que nosotros, si nosotros no tenemos energy? No nos iluminamos, Miss.

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In this short interaction, Mariana’s translanguaging deviated from the English language of the science lesson in order to share her experience at home with heat from the stove. Ms O. replied in English, but referred to Mariana’s Spanish: ‘Estufa is stove.’ In addition, Ismael brought their own bodies into the conversation about mechanical energy, when he excitedly stated ‘Us!’ David, who had interacted using English in the previous conversation with the teacher, now used Spanish to question Ismael’s proposal that students were themselves examples of energy. Through questions that drew on students’ repertoire of linguistic practices and experiential knowledge, Ms O. and the students reflected on the kinds of energy that humans produce. It is important to highlight how Mariana, by translanguaging and drawing from her own experiential knowledge, paves the way for additional translanguaging throughout the lesson. After watching another video in English about energy sources, this time involving a music concert, Ms O. paused the video and asked for concrete examples of different energy sources. Patricia stated: ‘Cuando se mueven las lámparas.’ Ms O. responded: ‘Yes! Lights move to focus on singers.’ Students went on to discuss electric energy sources in the image. At that moment, Ms O. included the participation of emergent bilinguals who were new to the school and were in the initial stages of learning English. These students were transfronterizxs whose families had fled the violence in Ciudad Juárez. When the teacher noticed that Eva was not participating, she encouraged her: ‘Eva, you are quiet, other examples?’, and Eva provided her answer in the form of a question: ‘Instruments?’ Ms O. acknowledged Eva’s question as a valid response by stating, ‘Some instruments sometimes you have to plug them in.’ Ismael then challenged the teacher’s assertion supporting Eva’s thinking: ‘No miss, ALL of them, you have to plug them to the speakers.’ Ms O. continued to include students who had not been part of the conversation. She called on Marissa to discuss thermal energy sources: ‘Marissa, do you think heat is being produced? Give me an example.’ Marissa started her utterance using English: ‘In that …’ and abruptly stopped. Ms O. suggested: ‘Come and show me.’ Marissa stood up and went to the video screen and pointed to the lights in the image. Ms O. evaluated Marissa’s contribution as ‘Good!’ and then asked other students, ‘Can we help her? What is this?’ Students responded with the English word ‘lights.’ In this part of the lesson, we see Patricia’s translanguaging opening the door for her peers, Marissa and Eva, two transfronterizas, to continue translanguaging. In addition, we observed Ms O.’s awareness of the silent participation of Marissa and Eva. We show the teacher’s efforts to include them by asking them questions and encouraging them to ‘show’ her when they cannot produce oral language. The centrality of multimodality in translanguaging is noticeable here as well as throughout the rest of the lesson, in particular to encourage emergent bilingual students’ participation. In this example, in order to make sense of the academic content and

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to sustain their bilingual performance, students made use of their translanguaging practices, which not only included linguistic features but also multimodal signs as part of their semiotic repertoires. It is also clear that they do so, encouraged by the teacher, who herself orchestrated this assemblage of multiple modalities. Pennycook (2017) argues that when translanguaging, speakers include their bodies, their place and things at their disposal, as part of their ‘assemblage’ for making meaning. The teacher responded by validating these two students’ contributions, and recruited other students’ help. Her inclusion of these initially reluctant students was the background for subsequent interactions where we observed many other students translanguaging more freely. In that sense, we witness the ways in which the teacher and students are ‘doing language.’ As stated by García and Otheguy (2019: 10), ‘translanguaging goes beyond the linguistic system itself to incorporate doing language, which means assembling, as Pennycook (2017) has said, the linguistic and multimodal practices that speakers have acquired through social interaction, as well as their embodied cognition.’ Ms O. helped emergent bilinguals ‘negotiate rigid borders of languages, cultures, and ways of learning and performing, in order to expand their abilities and gain greater understanding’ (García et al., 2012: 808). We show here a community of learners in which different languaging was recognized and engaged in the collective process of meaning-making. Mariana, Marissa, Eva and Patricia were friends and transfronterizas. Mariana, Marissa and Eva had recently arrived in the program. They told us during lunch, on the day of the science lesson, that they understood the content that the teacher explained in English that morning, but that ‘todavía no pueden hablarlo’ [they could not speak it yet]. Eva dice clearly que todavía no lo sabe hablar; Patricia dice que ella suena así (referring to the fact that she has an accent when she speaks English); Mariana dice que le da pena porque hay niños ‘abusones’ that make fun de los que no saben inglés. I ask them si los niños a que se refieren son de su clase. They say that some students are, pero que más son de las clases de inglés. Mariana says que su mamá le dice que no les haga caso (Fieldnotes, November, 2011). The students felt ashamed because some student ‘abusones’ make fun of their accents. Even Patricia, who had attended school in the United States since 1st grade, felt that way. It seems that the hegemonic ideologies that subordinate the Spanish language and transfronterizx students exercise some pressure to keep the translanguaging corriente under the surface. However, little by little, the translanguaging corriente starts to emerge, because of Ms O.’s pedagogical decisions and the students’ agentive resistance. Students mobilized their repertoires of communicative resources, their lengua, including their bodies, their embodied cognition, in assemblage in order to ‘do’ with their translanguaging: participating and resisting dominant discourses of deficit. Students’ resistant and familial capital also played a role as part of the discourses at the students’

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disposal, as exemplified in Mariana’s recollection of her mother’s advice to ignore them, ‘que no les haga caso.’ Mariana, Marissa, Eva and Patricia are aware of the colonizing ideologies in their school and, in subtle ways, use their resistant capital, with the support of Ms O.’s nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy. The excerpt analyzed above sets the stage for the continued translanguaging throughout the remainder of the science class, among these same students, as shown next. Students’ claiming their sitio as emergent bilinguals

Later in the lesson, the students watched a video that explained that sound travels faster through a chair than through water, and faster through water than through gas. Ms O. paused the video in an image that showed this process. Ms O. reminded the students of a previous class when they discussed related content: Ms O.:

Remember when we were learning about matter, composed by particles? Mariana: Sí, en uno hielo es solid, se derritió y es liquid y lo tocamos. Marissa: Aquí está, mire Miss (shows la maestra su cuaderno con la información sobre el tema de ‘matter’). Eva: [La materia en estado sólido] pasa más rápido todo porque los particles están juntos y en gas están todos desparramados.

Translanguaging was a corriente that allowed for learning to continue to flow. Multiple modes facilitated the flow. The students watched a video. Then the teacher reminded them of a previous lesson, and Mariana used her translanguaging to co-construct the memory of this previous lesson where ice turned to liquid. Marissa brought in her notebook where she documented that particular lesson. And Eva brought in the scientific explanation of the video using her own everyday translanguaged discourse. Ms O. acknowledged and expanded on Eva’s contribution by organizing a role-play of matter in distinct states to facilitate the students’ understanding of sound energy traveling through different states of matter. She reminded the students that they did a similar experiment with heat and enlisted four students who represented the particles. They started representing particles of a solid object. Ms O. positioned the students very close to each other: Ms O.: Daniel: Ms O.: Students: Student X:

If I am an object that is vibrating, and I touch Daniel… [empuja suavemente a Daniel] I’m gonna move [moving] and Daniel pushes Charlie. . . Charlie is gonna move. It’s like passing germs!

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Eva:

Ms O.: Eva: Ms O.: Eva:

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[Placing a group of pencils she found on her table right next to each other and moving an eraser along the pencils] Porque es más fácil si están los lápices todos juntos; un borrador pasa más rápido, si están separados pasa más lento. Exactly, I love your example, you are making connections. Let’s say that instead of solid you are liquid [Ms O. separates each one of the students representing particles a bit] Tardan más. Exactly! El gas es más difícil. Los lápices estarían asíiii de largo [separando cada uno de los lápices y poniendo más distancia entre uno y otro].

After this interaction, in which they engaged in translanguaging, other students continued explaining how particles move when it is a solid object, and when it is gas. Then Mariana and Eva explained, in their own words, what they observed in the role-play and in the paused video, respectively. Mariana said: ‘Yo me fijé mientras ellos se movían, yo me fijé que se movían muy rápido y usted tratando de alcanzar.’ And Eva added: ‘Yo me estoy fijando en la foto. Todas las bolitas estan pegadas (en el sólido) y en el gas separadas’ [señalando la pantalla electrónica que muestra el video en pausa]. Ms O. took up these students’ observations and continued her explanation of the content, but now using the image in the video in relation to the role-play. By sustaining translanguaging throughout multiple modes, students not only showed their understanding of the topic, but also positioned themselves as expert contributors in the process of knowledge co-construction. We show how not only ‘English dominant students’ like Daniel or Charlie have the privilege to language. By collaboratively describing their observations in their own lengua, Mariana, Marissa and Eva claimed their sitio in this classroom. Throughout this example, we observed transfronterizxs increasingly taking risks. Students spontaneously and throughout the lesson asked questions. These questions were authentic, truly related to their interests and curiosity. Another fronterizo student, Juan, asked: ‘Imagínese que Ud. pone un globo de agua y lo pone en un concierto, el sonido ¿va a pasar por el globo slow or faster?’ Through their meaningful questions, students contributed to maintaining the translanguaging corriente and flow (García et al., 2017), as the next excerpt shows: Jesse: Ms O.: Ms O.:

[showing a paper with a hole he made in the paper] What happens when I make an hoyo and the sound passes en el hoyo? Jesse, I love your question! You are making good connections. Let me have your paper [she moves close to Jesse]. [Showing the paper to everyone] When is the sound going to travel fastest?

Ms O. supported the students’ claiming of their sitio when she acknowledged their translanguaged questions as valid and interesting (‘I love your question’), and when she showed everyone Jesse’s artifact, the

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paper with a hole, posing a question to continue the instructional conversation about how sound travels. The result was that the students seemed to feel free to ask real questions and participate, which was especially powerful for recently arrived students like Eva. Asking their own authentic questions related to their own interests and thinking process in their own lengua, students continued establishing their sitio as legitimate bilinguals, questioning and disrupting hegemonic power relations in this classroom. Advancing students’ own conocimiento: Ancestral wisdom, lived experiences and resiliency

Our analysis reveals how Ms O. used students’ lived experiences and the ancestral wisdom that students brought from their communities to construct scientific understandings. Students wrote and role-played stories of events in Ciudad Juárez in language arts and social studies, used remedios caseros as examples for science, and accounted for how they used math in grocery stores in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Students used their experiences reading and watching las luchas (lucha libre/wrestling), their own literacy practices of copying cooking recipes, as well as favorite song lyrics. They wrote and talked about their transborder experiences, such as their experience with crossing the border to access healthcare, visiting family and with ‘la migra.’ During the science lesson described here, students referred to their own experiences in their families and communities. They even recounted practices that they themselves did not use, but that they knew of because of participation as members of their communities. Mariana brought an example of ‘el comunicador,’ a string phone, to the discussion about how sound travels through matter: ‘Tengo una pregunta, ya ha visto el comunicador, antes se usaba, con dos latas y el hilo, ¿cómo se comunica con un hilo no más?’ Ms O. congratulated Mariana for ‘making connections’ to her own lived experiences. Mariana quickly answered her own question: ‘porque el wire, haga de cuenta que en medio hubiera un hoyito chiquito, como cualquier tubo … por el tubillo pasa el sonido’. Ms O. commented, ‘everybody in this classroom has at least played with one of those’, endorsing the use of a string phone as a good way to show how sound energy travels. She drew on the board the ‘comunicador’ and labeled the string as solid. As she drew, she explained orally: ‘We have two people; this person has a can, this one, another can.’ After the teacher fi nished her drawing, Eva stood up and went to the board to explain how sound energy goes through the ‘comunicador’: ‘Is a solid y pasa la energy muy rápido.’ Ms O. acknowledged Eva’s response and expanded it using scientific discourse: ‘[and the] particles are together, then the sound will pass through the string quickly.’ Talking into a plastic jar she found in her classroom, Ms O. in loud voice states: ‘Why are they

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using cans?’ The students replied saying that it is because it produces an echo, and ‘se devolvió’ [el sonido]. Ms O. encouraged, built on and validated her students’ conocimientos by allowing students to translanguage to recount their lived experiences in both Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, in the school, their homes and their communities. Note that these students were reluctant to participate at the beginning of the session. Eva and Mariana were silent, and Ms O. had to invite them to participate through questions, and even ask Eva to ‘show’ her. But as the lesson went on, Mariana claimed her sitio, using her lengua to provide a relevant example of how sound energy waves travel through matter by relying on her ancestral knowledge, ‘el comunicador [que] antes se usaba.’ Eva, using her body [standing up and going to the board pointing to the teachers’ drawing], then uses the English she knows, demonstrating her translanguaging abilities: ‘is a solid y pasa la energy muy rápido.’ In this way, Eva not only contributes to the co-construction of knowledge but, most importantly, she positions herself as an expert in the bilingual classroom. Conclusion

Eurocentric monoglossic and restrictive language ideologies dominate US schools and reify racial and linguistic hierarchies. The consequences of dominant narratives are exemplified in numerous recent studies (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Esquinca et al., 2018; Flores & García, 2017; Flores et al., 2020; Poza, 2014), in which monoglossic language ideologies encourage the segregation of minoritized students by language, the strict separation of languages, and raciolinguistic categories of students, as well as their silencing and dehumanization. The literature shows a framing of bilinguals that positions students as deficient, in need of remediation, devalues their cultural wealth and further marginalizes them. Thus, even in settings that may seem welcoming of students’ repertoires, such as DLBE programs, there are discourses where ‘English-dominant’ students are constructed as superior to others, and practices that reinforce language boundaries and exclude bilingual students’ translanguaging. Nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy, in contrast, allows for transformation in the classroom. First, nepantlera pedagogies allowed for a change in perspectives about language and bilingualism. At Border Elementary School, emergent bilinguals and their teacher were well aware of the linguistic discrimination in their school and community. In the science lesson, little by little, Mariana, Marissa, Eva and Patricia resisted the raciolinguistic ideologies (Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015) of linguistic purism that devalued their languaging. These students shared their pena and frustration in relation to those ideologies. However, through a nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy, Ms O. organized a space (sitio) where students could use their own ways of using language (lengua). In

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other words, this pedagogy supported emergent bilinguals ‘as they take up identities that are flexibly bilingual, and not simply Spanish-only or English-only’ (García et al., 2012: 812). Ms O. rejected dominant idealized notions of language and bilingual students. In contrast, she normalized her students’ flexible bilingualism in the classroom. When students used their lengua, they also resisted the hegemony of English and language purism ideologies that silenced them. In their own translanguaging, students contributed to this agentive work of resistance. In the science lesson, all students, those considered Spanish dominant as well as English dominant, collaborated in the construction of translanguaging interactions. Thus, we witness transformation of language ideologies in the students of this classroom when a nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy guided their practices. Second, nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy allowed for the transformation of social relationships in the classroom because it centers Latinx ways of being and knowing, including cariño, confianza and convivencia. We observed transcaring, a culture of authentic care (cariño) that afforded the creation of third spaces (Gutiérrez et al., 1999) in the classroom. Ms O. expressed, enacted and modeled for her students, cariño, respect, high expectations, collaboration, convivencia and confianza in her everyday pedagogical practice. The students’ actions were reciprocal and engaged similarly in transcaring with their teacher and classmates, for example, when they collaborated with each other, or when they brought bread, coffee, flowers and artwork for their grieving teacher. Cariño and convivencia made it easier for the students to take risks with their languaging and their active use of their community cultural wealth as legitimate sources of knowledge. Convivencia also enabled Ms O. to enact her own ways of being and knowing with her students. Doing so affirms her own ways of being a bilingual, Mexican and maestra. In these small but important everyday ways, students and teacher confronted the fragmentation of their minds, bodies and spirits, a product of our histories of colonization. Third, nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy allowed for the transformation of the knowledge valued in the bilingual classroom. The sitio, Nepantla or third space (Gutiérrez et al., 1999) created was evident when students made connections between the lesson’s content and their own experiential knowledge and ancestral wisdom. Translanguaging occurred alongside other capitals, such as familial capital, and experiential knowledge. Rather than assuming Eurocentric knowledge systems and epistemologies as the only valid knowledge, the teacher and the students made sense of the science concepts through their own lived experiences and capital. For example, el comunicador became a third space that brought the students’ experiential knowledge and the school curriculum together through translanguaging. Fourth, in the science lesson presented, we witnessed the transformation of the transfronterizx students’ identities in the moment of the

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pedagogical interaction, as well as the shifting of power relations in the classroom. Transfronterizxs positioned themselves as experts, and claimed the DLBE classroom as their sitio. Validating their own and each other’s use of translanguaging, students took control of their lengua in order to access and construct knowledge. We showed how students reclaimed their power to participate in the knowledge construction process. In doing so, they established that they belonged to this classroom and asserted their identities as legitimate members of this community of practice authorized to contribute their languaging, their embodied cognition and cultural knowledge. We observed enthusiasm when the teacher positioned students as experts and, as the lesson progressed, when students positioned themselves as experts. Students offered answers and questions, used their bodies to participate, and drew on their cultural wealth to establish themselves as valuable contributors to the lesson. In this sense, the practices we show here question and resist hegemonic policies and practices that tend to position emergent bilinguals as inexperienced, less proficient, or incapable. In our border context, as well as throughout the United States, there is an urgent need for nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy in schools that can confront white supremacy and the hateful rhetoric against immigrants. In August 2019, an avowed white supremacist traveled to El Paso with the purpose of causing harm to immigrants at a Walmart known to be a destination for Mexican shoppers. We realize that what is needed to avoid future horrific events like this one goes far beyond what we can do in schools. However, we do believe that we have to start changing minds and practices. Nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy, as we witnessed in this school, contributes to questioning the dominant and normalized ideologies that privilege English and language purism, and the regimes of power that enter DLBE classrooms every day. References Alim, H.S., Rickford, J.R. and Ball, A.F. (2016) Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes our Ideas about Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anzaldúa, G. (2002) ‘now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner work, public acts. In G. Anzaldúa and A.L. Keating (eds) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (pp. 540–578). New York: Routledge. Anzaldúa, G. (2007) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (3rd edn). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. (Original work published in 1987.) Auer, P. (1984) Bilingual Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Bucholtz, M., Casillas, D.I. and Lee, J.S. (eds) (2018) Feeling It: Language, Race, and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning. New York: Routledge. Cervantes-Soon, C.G. and Carrillo, J.F. (2016) Toward a pedagogy of border thinking: Building on Latin@ students’ subaltern knowledge. High School Journal 99 (4), 282–301. Cervantes-Soon, C.G., Dorner, L.M., Palmer, D., Heiman, D., Schwerdtfeger, R. and Choi, J. (2017) Combating inequalities in two-way language immersion programs: Toward critical consciousness in bilingual education spaces. Review of Research in Education 41, 403–427. doi:10.3102/0091732X17690120

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de la Piedra, M.T., Araujo, B.E. and Esquinca, A. (2018) Educating Across Borders: The Case of a Dual Language Program on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. de la Piedra, M.T. and Araujo, B.E. (2021) Maestras transfronterizas. In D. Schwarzer, M. Petron and C. Larrotta (eds) Bilingualism and Bilingual Education: Conceptos Fundamentales (pp. 35–50). New York: Peter Lang. Delgado Bernal, D. (2006) Learning and living pedagogies of the home: The Mestiza consciousness of Chicana students. In D. Delgado Bernal, A. Elenes, F.E. Godinez and S. Villenas (eds) Chicana/Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology (pp. 113–132). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Delgado Bernal, D., Pérez Huber, L. and Malagón, M. (2019) Bridging theories to name and claim a critical race feminista methodology. In J. DeCuir-Gunby, T. Chapman and P. Schutz (eds) Understanding Critical Race Research Methods and Methodologies: Lessons from the Field (pp. 109–122). New York: Routledge. Esquinca, A., de la Piedra, M.T. and Herrera-Rocha, L. (2018) Hegemonic language practices in engineering design and dual language education. Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal 12 (2), 44–68. doi:10.24974/amae.12.2.394 Flores, N. and García, O. (2017) A critical review of bilingual education in the United States: From basements and pride to boutiques and profit. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 37, 14–29. doi:10.1017/S0267190517000162 Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015) Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85 (2), 149–171. doi:10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 Flores, N., Phuong, J. and Venegas, K.M. (2020) Technically an EL: The production of raciolinguistic categories in a dual language school. TESOL Quarterly 54 (3), 629–651. Galván, R.T. (2015) Women Who Stay Behind: Pedagogies of Survival in Rural Transmigrant Mexico. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. (2014) Countering the dual: Transglossia, dynamic bilingualism and translanguaging in education. In R. Rubdy and L. Alsagoff (eds) The Global-Local Interface and Hybridity: Exploring Language and Identity (pp. 100–118). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O. and Otheguy, R. (2019) Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23 (1), 17–25. doi:10.1080/13670050.2019.1598932 García, O., Woodley, H.H., Flores, N. and Chu, H. (2012) Latino emergent bilingual youth in high schools: Transcaring strategies for academic success. Urban Education 48 (6), 798–827. doi:10.1177/0042085912462708 García, O., Johnson, S.I. and Seltzer, K. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. Gutiérez, K., Baquedano-López, P. and Tejeda, C. (1999) Rethinking diversity: Hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture and Activity 6 (4), 286–303. doi:10.1080/10749039909524733 Heyman, J. (2019) Academic Minute: What Borderlanders Think of Each Other. See https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/08/01/academic-minute-whatborderlanders-think-each-other. Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 9–30. doi:10.1093/applin/amx039

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6 Student Inquiry into the Language Practices de sus Comunidades: Rompiendo Fronteras in a Dual Language Bilingual School Maite T. Sánchez, Ivana Espinet and Victoria Hunt

Introduction

The educational system in the United States advances immigrant students’ shift to English as most students receive their education in Englishmedium classrooms (Baker & Wright, 2017; García, 2009). New York City is no exception to this trend. About 83% of students classified in New York State as Multilingual Language Learners/English Language Learners were placed in English as a New Language (ENL) classes in the school year 2017–2018. Of the remaining 17%, 11% attended transitional bilingual education classes and 6% attended dual language bilingual education programs (NYC Independent Budget Office, 2015). New York is one of the few states that, starting in the late 1960s and as a result of community organizing and the broader environment of civil rights activism, fought for bilingual programs for Latinx students, primarily of Puerto Rican descent (Flores & García, 2017; García & Sung, 2018). Initially, these bilingual programs were developmental or maintenance programs aimed at developing literacy in students’ home language alongside English (Crawford, 2004; Flores & García, 2017). However, by the mid-1980s, fueled by the English-only movement, students labeled as ‘Limited English Proficient’ were mostly educated in transitional bilingual education programs, where their home languages were used until they had learned enough English to be mainstreamed into English-only classrooms (Flores & García, 2017; García, 2009). At the end of the 20th century, bilingual education for minoritized students came under intense attack at the same time as the federal legislation No Child Left Behind pushed for English accountability and more 134

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funding for English-medium classrooms (de Jong, 2013; García & Kleifgen, 2018; Menken, 2008). While both transitional and developmental/maintenance bilingual programs started to be shut down, monolingual white students began to be included in bilingual education programs through programs now labeled two-way immersion or dual language (de Jong, 2013; Flores & García, 2017; Lindholm-Leary, 2001, 2005). In these programs, half the student population consisted of those identified as English proficient students, and the other half, minoritized bilinguals speaking the same home language, were identified as English learners (Howard & Christian, 2002; Howard et  al., 2018; Lindholm-Leary, 2001, 2005). These programs focused on the teaching of two languages by separating languages strictly and following an immersion pedagogy (Howard et al., 2018; Soltero, 2016; Swain, 1983). At a time when the label ‘bilingual program’ fell out of political favor, some minoritized communities found that they could continue to offer developmental/ maintenance bilingual education under the label of ‘one-way’ dual language (García, 2009). These programs serve minoritized bilingual students whose language performances fall along different points of the bilingual continuum, and not just those labeled as English learners (García, 2009). Unfortunately, these one-way dual language programs gradually adopted the same strict language separation policies as twoway dual language programs (García, 2011; Palmer et al., 2014; Sánchez et al., 2018). Regardless of the population, dual language programs continue to adopt language allocation policies that prescribe an exclusive space for English and another exclusive space for languages other than English. Instruction in English and the other language may alternate by day, time of day, week, academic subject and/or teacher (Cloud et al., 2000; Howard et al., 2018; Soltero, 2016). In the past decade, while advocates for immersion education in dual language programs have continued to stress strict language separation (Howard et al., 2018; Soltero, 2016), there has been increased research that documents how in dual language bilingual programs translanguaging pedagogical strategies are being used successfully (see, for example, Esquinca et al., 2014; Gort & Pontier, 2013; Henderson & Ingram, 2018; Henderson & Palmer, 2015; Martínez et al., 2015; Palmer et al., 2014, as well as Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, this volume). Sánchez et al. (2018) have proposed a language allocation policy for dual language bilingual programs where, in addition to spaces for students to hear and use one or the other language of instruction separately, there are also spaces where translanguaging is used intentionally for three purposes: (a) to have a more holistic understanding of what the bilingual children know as they access their full language repertoire (translanguaging documentation); (b) to scaffold instruction for individual students (translanguaging rings); and (c) to transform the normalizing effects of standardized language in school and the hegemony of English (translanguaging transformation).

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Scholars who support translanguaging in dual language bilingual education join the fight for equity with other scholars who highlight the connection between language and power and the furthering of the oppression of minoritized bi/multilingual populations. The uncritical implementation of dual language programs that focus solely on teaching ‘languages’ continues to stress raciolinguistic ideologies that are present when the language practices of speakers are valued differently depending on the social (and racial) status of the speaker (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Some scholars have recently proposed that critical consciousness, an awareness of the structural oppressions and a readiness to take action to correct them, should be an important pillar of dual language programs (CervantesSoon et  al., 2017; Palmer et  al., 2019; see also Chapters 2 and 7, this volume), alongside the traditional pillars of academic achievement, bilingualism and biliteracy and sociocultural competence (Howard et  al., 2018; Soltero, 2016). Cervantes-Soon et al. (2017) and Palmer et al. (2019) describe four elements that are central to building critical consciousness in two-way dual language programs: (a) continuously interrogating power (and the hegemony of English); (b) historicizing schools’ educational policy contexts (to acknowledge the marginalized experiences of minoritized bi/multilingual students and the importance of bilingual education for this population); (c) critical listening (acknowledging privileges and relinquishing power); and (d) engaging with discomfort to realize one’s role in social injustice. Highlighting the connection between language, power, race and oppression counterbalances what scholars decry as the abandonment of equitable education for minoritized bi/multilingual students and an increased focus on bilingualism for economic interest, mostly for white families (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Flores, 2013; Valdez et al., 2016; Varghese & Park, 2010). In this chapter, we focus on ways in which educators in a dual language bilingual school that serves primarily Latinx students designed and implemented a social study inquiry unit to explore the dynamic language practices of the community. This unit was designed and implemented over a two-month period in the school year 2018–2019, but was the result of a collaboration between the school and the CUNY-NYSIEB1 professional development and research project that started the previous year. We also zoom in to two 3rd grade classrooms that implemented the social study inquiry units to present how teachers and students started to explore and interrogate how language practices have usually been understood and performed in that school. In doing so, conversations about power started to emerge. We argue that this inquiry unit was a transformative space given that it disrupted the strict day-by-day language separation practices of the school that privileges a named language while making invisible the dynamic language practices of people. By engaging in a translanguaging space with flexible language practices and by exploring the role of language in people’s lives, students and teachers also noted the

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multilingualism of the school’s community members and started to engage in discussions about the connection between language and power, something that was not present before. Two of the authors of this chapter provided professional development to the school around translanguaging pedagogy in dual language bilingual programs as members of CUNY-NYSIEB (Maite Sánchez and Ivana Espinet). We supported the school in the planning of the inquiry unit, and helped collect the data presented in this chapter. Victoria Hunt is the principal of the school who welcomed the project. Maite identifies as Latina, whose light skin and the fact that she immigrated to the United States as an adult to pursue graduate studies put her in a more privileged position than other Latinx. She grew up with traditional understandings of bilingualism, but through her life experiences in the United States she came to understand and embrace her fluid language practices and she has worked with educators to leverage their students’ practices in their schooling. Ivana identifies as an immigrant, white Latina, daughter of a political refugee and mother of three bilingual children who attend bilingual programs. She understands that she is in a position of privilege as a white Latina and as having had access to higher education. In her professional work in schools, as well as at home, she moves fluidly between Spanish and English. Her experiences at home and at work have shaped her understanding of how families and schools enact a variety of language practices. Victoria is a white female, born in the United States, who was raised monolingually in English but learned Spanish while living and working in Peru following her undergraduate degree. As a person who has worked in Spanish/English bilingual programs for more than 20 years, she recognizes the privilege that is afforded to her as an English speaker with white skin and the allowances she is given with her developing Spanish language practices. We highlight here the work of two 3rd grade teachers in the school. Dora (pseudonym) is the Spanish-component teacher, meaning that she is in charge of teaching solely in Spanish every day with two separate groups of students, who alternate teachers and language each day. She identifies as a Latina of Mexican-American ancestry who grew up in California and who uses both languages in her life. Allyson (pseudonym) teaches the English component of the 3rd grade class and identifies as a white woman who, in addition to English, also spoke Italian with her grandparents as she was growing up. She has lived in Tanzania and Argentina, and has learned Swahili and Spanish. She uses Spanish in her everyday life, in and out of school. For this chapter, we analyzed notes that Maite, Ivana and other members of the CUNY-NYSIEB team took during the professional development sessions and classroom visits, transcripts of interviews with Allyson and Dora during and after the implementation of the lessons in the inquiry unit, and classroom materials. We also reflected among ourselves about the work at the school. We analyzed the data, focusing on the following

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research question: In what ways does a translanguaging inquiry unit on the language practices of the school’s members and their surrounding communities help expand the understanding of third grade teachers and students about the dynamic nature of language and the connection between language and power? We start by describing the dual language bilingual school that we have named ‘Unidad’ and what made Victoria welcome the design and implementation of the inquiry project. We then describe the design process of the project, focusing on how translanguaging was at the center of its design. Finally, through examples of activities in the 3rd grade classrooms and interview extracts, we provide evidence of how this inquiry unit disrupted the presence of solely two instructional spaces (the ‘English’ space and the ‘Spanish’ space), how it expanded teachers’ and students’ understanding of their language practices in the community and their multilingualism and, in so doing, how they also started to interrogate connections between power and language. The Setting: Unidad Elementary School and the Work with CUNY-NYSIEB

Unidad Elementary is a kindergarten to 5th grade Spanish/English dual language bilingual school located in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, and is part of the New York City Department of Education. Traditionally, Washington Heights has been made up predominately of Latinx, with 72% self-identifying as such (Office of the New York State Comptroller, 2015). A large percentage of Washington Heights residents track their origins to the Dominican Republic, but the area is rapidly gentrifying (Hernández et al., 2018). In an effort to highlight the contributions of this community in the face of rapid gentrification, a 200-block area that includes Washington Heights and the neighboring Inwood was designated as the ‘Little Dominican Republic’ district in 2018 (Fertig, 2018; Krisel, 2018). Unidad Elementary has just over 400 students. More than 70% of the students are Latinx and 35% of the students have been formally classified as Multilingual Learners/English Learners through the state’s language proficiency assessment. While 65% of students are considered English proficient, many children also speak Spanish or another language at home to varying degrees of fluency, including Russian, Portuguese, Mixteco, Italian, Hebrew, French and Arabic. With the exception of the music teacher, all other teachers and support personnel are bilingual in SpanishEnglish. Unidad was founded in 2012 guided by four cornerstones: (1) all students have the opportunity to become fully bilingual and biliterate and to develop multicultural understandings; (2) family partnerships with the school are a priority; (3) inquiry and hands-on opportunities guide learning; (4) maintaining formal university partnerships that provide opportunities for student teachers to learn how to become teachers, for in-service

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teachers to teach part-time at the universities, for staff to continue their professional development and to conduct research. This last cornerstone provides a context for both adults and children to be part of a larger learning community. Since the beginning, Unidad has maintained a strict language separation policy as was expected of dual language programs where access to students’ full language repertoire is discouraged (Howard et al., 2018; Soltero, 2016). At the beginning of the 2017–2018 school year, CUNYNYSIEB researchers were interested in partnering with a dual language program whose principal and teachers were open to exploring translanguaging pedagogy in the context of literacy instruction and they approached Victoria. She had been curious about the idea of translanguaging and welcomed the opportunity to collaborate. CUNY-NYSIEB researchers worked with the 4th grade teachers to design a short reading unit (two to three weeks) where students considered social issues and could explore translanguaging in books they were reading, and could engage in classroom discussions where language practices were more flexible. As a result, the children became more confident in making connections to their experiences with language at home and in school, and they developed understandings of how authors choose to use translanguaging as a literary device. Victoria, Maite and Ivana considered that although this project was a good starting point to address translanguaging, the whole school needed to be involved, and the design and planning of a unit needed to have more intentionality. The following year, and as a result of discussions between Victoria and the CUNY-NYSIEB team about expanding and strengthening the translanguaging work school-wide, we decided to explore together how to construct a translanguaging transformation space (Sánchez et al., 2018) – a space that went beyond the ‘English’ or the ‘Spanish’ days, and where more flexible language practices would allow for exploration of how languages were differently positioned in a power hierarchy. Victoria proposed doing this project in the school’s ‘Inquiry Through Explorations and Investigations’ curricula. The school had implemented this inquiry space from the school’s first year. During this time, students considered the New York City Department of Education’s social studies scope and sequence working in collaborative groups to explore issues and to create projects or presentations based on what they discovered. This inquiry time had always been in the language of the day (English or Spanish). We decided that this would be a perfect opportunity to explore the language practices of bi/ multilinguals, something that the school had not done before. We decided to start small. The CUNY-NYSIEB team provided weekly professional development sessions to all teachers in the school for a month and a half on translanguaging pedagogy. Each grade-level team was asked to design one inquiry unit around the language practices of the community, where students were encouraged to use all their linguistic resources and not just

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the language of the day. Teachers in dual language classrooms are expected to distinguish the two named languages in writing through a different color. English time is often considered ‘blue’ and Spanish considered ‘red.’ Following this pattern, the Inquiry translanguaging space became known as the ‘purple’ space. During this translanguaging space, generally two periods a week, both teachers and children were allowed to use language in ways that deepened their understandings and conveyed the message they wanted to express to different audiences. Because it was social studies content, the fluid use of language by the students reflected the content they were studying – the language practices in the community in and around the school. Moving away from strict language separation was in itself a big change for the school; it was the first time that such an opportunity had been supported by the principal and the teachers. The Inquiry Project: Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space

Inquiry processes provide space to bring the world into the classroom and the children out into the world to ask, explore and make sense of their findings. The philosophy of inquiry-based learning finds its roots in Dewey’s (1938) experiential learning pedagogy in which learners actively participate in personal or authentic experiences to make meaning from them. It also has roots in Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy which called for learners to engage in a dialogical relation between practice and theory (Freire, 1970). Inquiry-based teaching focuses on guiding students through the process of questioning, investigating, analyzing and making sense of their findings. Students’ questions are at the center of learning, and teachers and students go through the process of exploring together (Rogovin, 2001). Victoria and the CUNY-NYSIEB team considered that while it was essential that the process be flexible, it was also necessary to design classroom activities that purposefully fostered and expanded the opportunities for students to learn. With this charge, the CUNY-NYSIEB team designed a system of support for this collaboration with Unidad. With input from Victoria and the teachers, we proposed an initial framework to design an inquiry unit that emphasized student-led inquiry into the language practices of the community. We also planned a professional development structure for teachers to learn about translanguaging, to plan, to make modifications and to reflect together as a professional community. We will provide details for each of these below. The framework

The CUNY-NYSIEB team developed what we called the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space Framework.’ The framework included five elements:

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(1) Children learning to work as bilingual ethnographers: This meant that the students’ questions would guide the inquiry. It also meant that during the inquiry activities, the students would use their full communicative repertoires to learn about the linguistic and cultural practices in their communities. The teachers had to consider how they were going to introduce the idea of translanguaging, so the children could leverage their home experiences as bilinguals and use those linguistic practices to study their communities as ethnographers. (2) Bringing in/going out: This meant making sure that there was a twoway connection between the classroom and the families and communities. Based on their questions, the students could bring to school artifacts from home, share them and tell stories about them. In order to explore their communities, it was also essential that the students leave the school to gather data in their community, observing, recording conversations, interviewing people and taking pictures and notes. (3) Translanguaging criticality: By providing opportunities for students to investigate and learn about linguistic and cultural practices, the inquiry would embrace translanguaging. In doing so, teachers needed to be ready to address issues of language, power and race that are central to the experiences of minoritized bi/multilingual people. (4) Families are active participants throughout the process of the inquiry: Students’ families and communities are understood as valuable sources of knowledge that must be involved in the education process. Integrating the experiences of families and their practices is an important aspect of critical pedagogy (Gonzáles et al., 2005). This approach requires flexibility from teachers in the design of instructional spaces and in their approaches to teaching, so that family members, children and teachers learn together as they examine and build on their linguistic practices. (5) Each grade shares/gives back to the community what they have learned: An essential piece of the inquiry process is that the children have an opportunity to share what they have learned with the rest of the school community and with their families. Each grade had to figure out what might be the best ways to share what they had learned with the children’s families but also with their colleagues. The professional development structure for planning and reflection

Based on our experience during the collaboration that took place in 2017–2018 at Unidad, we understood that it was important to set up structures for purposeful planning and reflection. All the school staff participated in an initial professional development session in which the CUNY-NYSIEB team introduced the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space Framework’ and explored translanguaging in the

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context of dual language bilingual programs following Sánchez et al.’s (2018) text as a reference. After this initial session, all grades worked in grade teams during two school-wide afterschool professional development sessions that focused on helping grade teams identify their inquiry units’ topic or essential question and examining systematically the resources that the students, families and community had, so that they could be leveraged. Afterwards, grade teams worked individually with Maite, Ivana and another member of the CUNY-NYSIEB team to design classroom activities that aligned with the framework of each team’s inquiry project. Each team implemented its inquiry unit at different times during the year. They all documented their experiences and shared their work as well as their reflections with the rest of the school. At the end of the year, all grade teams gathered in one fi nal professional development session in which they reflected on the inquiry process, the challenges and the implications for continuing their work in the classroom. A Translanguaging Inquiry Unit: Exploring and Expanding Students’ and Teachers’ Understandings

During the year, we documented the professional development, the planning of the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ inquiry unit focusing on the language practices of the school’s members and the surrounding community, and its implementation. The analysis of data answering our research question about ways in which the inquiry unit helped expand the understanding of 3rd grade teachers and students about the dynamic nature of language, and the connection between language and power, yielded three important fi ndings that we discuss below: (1) disrupting the presence of solely two instructional spaces; (2) acknowledging the multilingualism of the school community members; and (3) questioning the connection between language and power. Disrupting the presence of solely two instructional spaces

As stated earlier, and consistent with guidelines for dual language programs from the field (Howard et al., 2018; Soltero, 2016) and from the New York City Department of Education, Unidad elementary school had followed a strict language separation policy for English and Spanish instruction. While the students still continued to translanguage among themselves, the teachers’ instruction was consistent with the language allocation of the day, and students were encouraged to perform in that language. The teachers had participated in multiple conversations about how ‘English often takes over’ and the importance of protecting the ‘Spanish time.’ Allyson, who is the English-side teacher, explained:

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In my teaching practice, it’s always much easier for me to default to English without the rigidity [of the language separation]. We’ve talked about this a little bit, but without the rigidity of ‘today is a Spanish day’ and ‘you must do this all in Spanish,’ I don’t push myself necessarily as much as I should or as much as I expect the kids to in my own languaging, especially around Spanish. (Personal communication, 19 August 2019)

As Allyson mentioned, the purpose of the strict separation is not only to encourage students’ use of Spanish, but also to make sure that teachers are consistent in their language practices. However, Victoria and the teachers acknowledged that the strict separation, while providing necessary spaces to protect and develop Spanish, does not necessarily expand students’ interest in learning or developing their Spanish language practices. It can also create an expectation of Spanish use – registers for academic audiences – that does not represent the Spanish language practices of many Latinx families. In addition, some of the teachers understood that when the students do not access their full linguistic repertoire for learning they might not be fully engaging with the content and learning activities. As Dora explained: We want to push the Spanish within the school because we understand the power dynamics. The default is English but at the same time we want the students to really use the resources they have. I think that’s really meeting them where they are and using both languages to empower them. (Personal communication, 25 January 2019)

Victoria saw the opportunity to partner with CUNY-NYSIEB as a time to explore in community these important ideas. The ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ inquiry unit was the fi rst time that Unidad implemented a designated time, not during the English or Spanish time, specifically to explore issues about language and without guidelines for students and teachers on how to language. This space in itself is a transformative event for this dual language bilingual school, one in which the language practices of the people are at the center of instruction, rather than the named languages of Spanish and English (García & Li, 2014; Sánchez et al., 2018). During the first lesson of the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ inquiry unit in the 3rd grade classrooms, Dora and Allyson started by explaining to their students that for the inquiry time they were not going to follow the ‘language of the day,’ and introduced the idea of translanguaging. Allyson gave the example of a light switch: when bilinguals communicate with each other, they do not turn on or off one or the other language. She was surprised with her students’ receptivity, she recalled: And [my students] kind of laughed at me. They were like, ‘No, of course not; of course, that’s not how it is.’ [My students] were just so open to this idea (…) that language is fluid, and that we’re always using all of that. (Personal communication, 28 January 2019)

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In Dora’s class, whereas most of her students were also open to the idea of translanguaging, there were some that, as she said, were still ‘grappling with that idea because this is a Spanish classroom, and [the other classroom it’s] an English classroom’ (Personal communication, 25 January 2019). Whereas in their personal use of language students acknowledge the fluidity of practices, it was more difficult to visualize it in their schooling given that the school day is organized into monolingual spaces, in both English and Spanish. After introducing the concept of translanguaging, Allyson and Dora introduced the idea that the students were going to be ‘language ethnographers,’ that they would ask questions, and fi nd answers for: ‘Why does language matter to me in my life? In my family? To my classroom community? And fi nally, why does language matter in my wider community?’ (Fieldnotes, 25 January 2019). They showed a video of a DominicanAmerican woman in her workplace in which she uses language in different ways depending on her interlocutor (Pero Like, 2018). Afterwards, the teachers asked the students what they noted about the woman’s use of language (for example, with whom and why, her body language and tone, the features she accentuates). Dora recalled that the students were very observant in their remarks, with phrases such as: ‘She’s talking street language,’ ‘She’s screaming at her Dominican friends’ or ‘She spoke differently with the fi rst person she interacted with, which was a Latina than with someone else. She used a different kind of Spanish that sounded happier’ (Personal communication, 25 January 2019). Dora reflected that, through this video, students were making sense of the fact that English or Spanish were not separate entities, and that translanguaging is a practice of bi/multilinguals. What they hear, whether it is in the street, in the community, in music or in other contexts is different – not better or worse – from what is accepted as English or Spanish in school. Allyson and Dora planned other activities in the inquiry unit in which students’ and teachers’ language practices were not constrained by the school’s language of the day and in which they analyzed the language practices in their communities. They went on an exploration of the linguistic landscape of the community through a community walk. Students prepared questions in advance for business owners and workers, including: ‘Why does language matter to you?’ and ‘Why is it important for you to speak more than one language in this community?’ As bilingual ethnographers, the children strolled in the streets near the school, observing and taking notes. Children could hear and see on signs many different languages including Arabic, Mixteco, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, Spanish and English. They interviewed store owners who shared how they languaged in different ways depending on who they were communicating with and for what purpose. A travel agent owner shared with students: ‘I use mostly English when I work. In my family, I speak Spanish with my partner, and English

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and Spanish with my kids because I want them to learn Spanish’ (Fieldnotes, 25 January 2019). Allyson was pleasantly surprised when the students noted translanguaging happening in conversations in stores and in the streets. Specifically, she recalled that they went to a store and saw the uncle of one of the students and the children used the term ‘translanguaging’ to describe his language practices. Allyson reflected that when she heard the students making these types of comments, she felt that they were starting to normalize translanguaging and considering it as part of being bilingual: I did wonder what are the outcomes [of this inquiry unit] gonna be for them, what are we actually preparing them to do? And then when I was outside on the community walk with the students, the observations that they were able to make, and then also the way that they were able to analyze those [observations]. Like, ‘Oh, Giani’s uncle? He’s translanguaging.’ [For my students] That’s totally normal. That, for me, was a very magical moment because I was like, ‘Now you have language to talk about why [translanguaging] is a good thing he’s doing and why this is cool, and why it’s okay and why it’s also good.’ (Personal communication, 1 March 2019)

By enacting a translanguaging space in Allyson’s and Dora’s classrooms, students and teachers engaged in a transformative instructional space that was new in the school. Rather than having discussions about the language practices of the community solely in the language of the day, this space was strategically planned so that translanguaging was enacted and studied. Students and teachers were not only able to access freely their full language repertoire, but also were able to recognize that practice in themselves and in others, despite being in a dual language school that organized their instructional time into two separate, bounded languages. In the next section, we focus on how the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ inquiry unit also helped to disrupt the notion that the school members were only Spanish, English and/or bilingual (SpanishEnglish) speakers and highlighted members’ multilingualism. Acknowledging the multilingualism of the school community members

While Unidad is a dual language Spanish/English bilingual school with a majority of Latinx students, the explorations in the inquiry unit specifically about language practices brought attention to the multilingualism of the school’s community members. The classroom discussions brought to the surface the use of languages other than Spanish and English in the community, as well as ways of languaging, that were never openly acknowledged. One of the inquiry unit’s activities that Dora and Allyson modeled in order to stimulate explorations into the different ways in which people use language was their personal language web (see Figure 6.1 for Dora’s and Figure 6.2 for Allyson’s). Visually, these teachers

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Figure 6.1 Dora’s personal language web

Figure 6.2 Allyson’s personal language web

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represented in different colors the different ways of languaging that they use in their lives, and with whom and in which situation. While this activity’s goal was for students to create their own language webs (individually, then with their family members, and to fi nally create a classroom language web), this was also an eye-opening experience for the teachers because this activity made them reflect on their own languaging in their lives. When Dora showed her personal language web to her students, they were surprised to see that in addition to her Spanish and English practices, Portuguese was also part of her life. Students were very curious and had many questions about how she had learned Portuguese and how much she used it in her life. Students tended to view Dora as the ‘Spanish’ teacher and although they knew she spoke English, until they saw her language web, they did not realize how much Spanish and English she used and that she was multilingual. The discussions generated by Dora’s language web went beyond her use of Spanish, English and Portuguese to include different ways of languaging in her life. She recalled discussing with her students that while she speaks Spanish, she does not just speak the same way with everyone. She languages differently if she is in Sinaloa Mexico, if she is talking to her in-laws who are originally from the Dominican Republic, or if she is talking to her own family: ‘When I’m speaking to my family here [in the United States], even though it’s Mexican Spanish, it is very much California’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). Dora’s language web generated conversations among the students about the languages that they speak outside of school and language practices that they use with family members, friends and in the community. In Allyson’s class, sharing her personal language web became not only a personal exploration of her own language practices, but also an opportunity to explore with the students the complex role of language in their lives. While modeling activities that she would like the students to do was part of Allyson’s practice, creating, sharing and discussing with her students her own linguistic profi le provided an opportunity to discuss the idea that teachers ‘are also linguistic beings. And that it’s an emotional part and it’s a political part, and it’s a complicated part of our identity’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). Similarly to Dora, Allyson’s students were curious about the other languages in her life, including Swahili, Italian and American Sign Language. Allyson shared that through discussions of her language web, ‘the kids came up with much better questions, and then also shared much more vulnerable things with me because I had done that’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). Discussions in Allyson’s class also included language aspirations. In her language web, Allyson noted that she knew words in Arabic that she used while in restaurants but that she wanted to learn more Arabic so that when she goes back to Tanzania, she will be able to speak with friends who speak Arabic there, and not only Swahili.

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She recalled that her students commented, ‘Oh wow, you still have linguistic goals’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). Her students also noticed in her language web that for each language she displayed, she had ‘friends’ attached to them, and started having conversations about the importance of language in creating and sustaining friendships. She recalled that a student then shared a story: ‘Oh, I wasn’t friends with this girl before I knew Spanish. Now, we’re really good friends’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). The conversation around languages and purposes was a big takeaway from students’ explorations about language. Allyson reflected: ‘We don’t just speak whatever language just because … or very few of us do. Right? So, for [my students], that reason [building relationships] was very clear’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). After discussions about the teachers’ personal language webs, students in Allyson’s and Dora’s classrooms created their own language webs, thinking about the languages they used to communicate with their immediate family members, their friends and their neighbors. As they created their personal language webs, Dora recalled her students having conversations with each other about the different ways in which they spoke Spanish and/or English outside of school, whether based ‘On the community here or it’s based on a specific country or even how you speak to your family in the same language. That was the whole exploration for them to really understand this is my variation of the language’ (Personal communication, 25 January 2019). Students then brainstormed questions for their family members and worked on their own language webs with them at home. The school has a Family Friday event where family members are welcomed bi-weekly to the classroom to engage with the students in different activities. In one of these Family Fridays, students in Dora’s and Allyson’s classes asked their family members about their language learning trajectories and heard from members of each other’s families as they shared. While in the past, families were categorized in the context of the classroom as ‘Spanish’ or ‘English’ families, the exploration of language webs with family members unpacked all the different languages that were present in the students’ lives: From that exploration, we also learned that there were a number of parents who spoke other languages. We had Mixteco, we had Russian, we had Hebrew, we had German (…) Swedish. So that was fun for the kids to get to see [that] in our family communities there are so many more languages present and how rich it is that they were able to draw these great connections. (Allyson, Personal communication, 28 January 2019)

A fi nal language web exploration in Allyson’s and Dora’s classrooms was the creation of a classroom language web in which students visually displayed the languages of their classroom communities in different colors so that the variety of languages could be easily identified (blue for English,

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Figure 6.3 Classroom language web from Allyson’s classroom

red for Spanish, orange for Mixteco, green for French, purple for Hebrew, yellow for Chinese, and other colors for Swahili, Italian, German, Swedish, Russian and American Sign Language). Once the classroom language web was completed in Allyson’s class (Figure 6.3), the students were able to see visually the role of languages in their lives that went beyond the two languages of their bilingual Spanish/English school. The classroom language webs were the first time in which the presence of languages other than English and Spanish, and variations within each language, were acknowledged and unpacked in a positive and intricate way at Unidad. Latinx students were able to see themselves as speakers not only of ‘Spanish’ or ‘English,’ but speaking differently depending on the situation and their interlocutor. They were also able to see that they themselves and their classmates and teachers live in multilingual environments that go beyond English and Spanish. We believe that discussing the diversity of their language practices and visualizing them was a transformative experience that challenged the English/Spanish binary that the students experience throughout the day in a dual language school. It also opened flexible spaces that revealed the fluid multilingual practices in their community. As we will see in the next section, these conversations started to generate questions in the 3rd grade students about the power of English over other languages and how it affects the students. Questioning the Connection Between Language and Power

In educating Latinx students, conversations about language, power and identity are often missing from the curriculum and classroom

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interactions (Brook-Garza, 2015; Chávez-Moreno, 2019; García & Kleifgen, 2018; Palmer, 2010; Palmer et al., 2019). As we have seen in the previous sections, by embarking on the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ inquiry unit, the teachers had to reposition themselves as learners who accompanied their students on the journey in which those discussions began to emerge. Allyson, who identifies as a white teacher who had the privilege of learning languages other than English, reflected on how important it was for her to observe that her students, ‘grapple with the reality that this is not an English-only society and this is not an English-only country, despite the political realities’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). This forced her to be transparent with her students about her own language learning so they would understand that as a teacher, she also continues to learn. Through her personal language exploration, Allyson understood that it was essential for her students to examine their language practices. She came into these understandings only after looking into her own experiences and being explicit about the emotional and political contexts of her language practices and how they are a complex part of her identity. She explained that ultimately, ‘we just can’t expect students to do this work without modeling it for them. We can’t expect them to develop into their own ideologies, their own critical consciousness without having done that work ourselves fi rst’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). Allyson and Dora noted their students being curious and inquisitive about the extent to which English holds power in their classroom and community. When students in Allyson’s class looked at the final version of the classroom language web, she recalled students’ questions such as: ‘There’s a lot of English and a lot of Spanish, and not as much Mixteco. Why is that? Why don’t many people speak Mixteco?’ or ‘Why don’t many people here speak Swedish?’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). During the community walk, her students also noticed that while the businesses and the local clinic had signs in multiple languages and translanguaging was the norm for people interacting in the street, the official signs were all in English. As the students debriefed their experiences inside and outside the classroom, Dora and Allyson began to foster conversations that engaged students in thinking about how English holds power in their communities. In Allyson’s classroom, she had the students think about, ‘Why is English in power? Why is English so important? Why isn’t Spanish important in the same ways to certain people, and how can we change mindsets through that?’ (Personal communication, 28 January 2019). Prompting the students to make connections between these questions, their observations in the community, and their personal lives, provided a platform for the children to begin to think critically about how languages are valued differently (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019). It also started to empower them to think of themselves as social actors who can share their ideas with others and challenge this hierarchy.

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Interrogating power differentials often leads to uncomfortable conversations that teachers have to facilitate. Palmer et al. (2019) propose that schools deliberately create spaces to engage communities in productive discomfort. Dora described how after doing work with the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ inquiry unit and examining their communities and their own language practices, the children had to begin to prepare to take the New York State test in English. A few weeks before the state test, Dora, who is the Spanish-side teacher, suddenly switched to include English time in her instruction in order to help students prepare for the English Language Arts test. Some of her students began to question why they had to take that test solely in English, if they were in a bilingual school. Dora reflected that this was the fi rst time that her students had asked such questions and considered that ‘the translanguaging unit prepped them to have these bigger conversations about a bigger policy’ (Personal communication, 19 May 2019). The fact that the students had spent time thinking about language practices and how they are valued in different ways prompted these children to begin to examine issues connected to language and power that affect them as students. The teachers reflected that this kind of questioning was new in these 3rd grade classrooms. Dora used the discussion about testing as an opportunity to connect students’ metalinguistic awareness of how their language practices are enacted to the realities of a policy that privileges English: ‘I told them that [the test] is going to be in English, but you are not just using un lado, it’s a unified process, right?’ (Personal communication, 19 May 2019). She discussed later that her students’ questioning pushed the class community to examine how, from the Spanish component of the dual language bilingual program, they could counter the hegemonic mandate of an Englishonly exam by being conscious of also leveraging what had been relegated to the Spanish lado. It brought to light how the inquiry unit as a translanguaging space was a catalyst for students interrogating how the two separate language spaces are conceived and enacted in ways that have direct consequences for them. Dora’s response to the students’ questions was embedded in the work that they had done early in the inquiry unit, in which she explicitly discussed with the children how bilingual speakers have access to their full linguistic repertoires. This prompted students to think about the fact that, as bilinguals, even when encountering an exam that was designed with a monolingual and monoglossic framework, they always have access to their full linguistic repertoires and should leverage them. With the support of the teachers’ careful planning, the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ inquiry unit started to foster critical consciousness (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2019) among the students in three ways: first, they engaged in questioning the reasons why English holds more power in their communities even if people

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use different languages for different purposes; second, they started to realize that language polices affect them as they affi rm the hegemony of English; and third, they reflected that as bi/multilinguals, they always have access to their full linguistic repertoires even in spaces that seem monolingual (in English or Spanish), and that they should be accessing all they know as bi/multilingual people. Conclusion

This chapter focuses on ways in which Unidad, a dual language bilingual elementary school serving primarily Latinx students, designed and implemented a social study inquiry unit, the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space,’ aimed at exploring the dynamic language practices of the community. This experience was the first time that the dual language bilingual school sanctioned translanguaging in the classroom, and established a designated instructional time, not during the English or Spanish time, specifically to explore issues of language use and without guidelines on ‘how to language.’ This pedagogical space in itself was a transformative event for the school, one in which the language practices of the community were at the center of instruction, rather than the named languages (García & Li, 2014; Sánchez et al., 2018). This space disrupted the strict day-by-day language separation practices of the school that have privileged monolingual spaces for ‘English’ and ‘Spanish’ time that center on monolingual, standardized registers of named languages and that left invisible the dynamic language practices of the community, primarily of Latinx students and their families (García, 2011; Sánchez et al., 2018). Through the study of the 3rd grade classrooms of Dora and Allyson, we found that students were very curious about learning the roles that languages, and languaging, play in their lives and those of their communities. Through careful planning and reflection on the part of the teachers, students engaged in the creation of language webs – first individually and then of the entire classroom – that visually brought up to the surface language practices that teachers, students and their families engaged in, and that had not been formally acknowledged in the classroom. This exploration revealed how the students’ language practices extended beyond the languages of instruction – English and Spanish – as their families and communities communicate using Mixteco, Hebrew, Chinese, French, German, Italian and Russian. By visiting businesses around the school, students had the opportunity to ask questions about the roles that language plays in the lives of people, highlighting the dynamic multilingualism in their community. This experience was transformative for teachers and students because, for the first time, they had the opportunity to reflect on how their language practices are valued. By participating in a translanguaging space that allows for flexible language practices and by exploring the role of language in people’s lives,

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students and teachers also started to engage in discussions that connected language with issues of power. These discussions started to foster critical consciousness, an awareness of structural oppressions, particularly around the hegemony of English through the signage in the communities and the assessments that impact instruction. Although these discussions did not address raciolinguistic ideologies that posit the language practices of Latinx students as deficient in the eyes of white speakers (Flores & Rosa, 2015), the ‘Language Ethnographers in a Translanguaging Space’ unit started centering the language practices of bi/multilingual people as the norm, rather than at the periphery and viewed as undesirable. This educational experience at Unidad makes visible how a school can collaboratively design educational experiences centered on Latinx children’s language practices, transforming the double monolingualism of instructional spaces so prevalent in dual language programs. By creating an instructional space where translanguaging was the norm and was valued, and by collectively analyzing the dynamic role of language in their community, Unidad teachers and students engaged in efforts to bring back equitable education for Latinx communities in dual language bilingual programs. Note (1) CUNY-NYSIEB stands for the City University of New York – New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals. To learn more about CUNY-NYSIEB, see CUNYNYSIEB (2021).

References Baker, C. and Wright, W.E. (2017) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (6th edn). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Brooke-Garza, E. (2015) Two-way bilingual education and Latino students. Educational Leadership and Administration: Teaching and Program Development 26, 75–85. Cervantes-Soon, C.G. (2014) A critical look at dual language immersion in the new Latin@ diaspora. Bilingual Research Journal 37 (1), 64–82. doi:10.1080/15235882.2 014.893267 Cervantes-Soon, C.G., Dorner, L., Palmer, D., Heiman, D., Schwerdtfeger, R. and Choi, J. (2017) Combating inequalities in two-way language immersion programs: Toward critical consciousness in bilingual education spaces. Review of the Research 41 (1), 403–427. doi:10.3102/0091732X17690120 Chávez-Moreno, L.C. (2019) Researching Latinxs, racism, and white supremacy in bilingual education: A literature review. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 17 (2), 101–120. doi:10.1080/15427587.2019.1624966 Cloud, N., Genesee, F. and Hamayan, E. (2000) Dual Language Instruction: A Handbook for Enriched Education. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle. Crawford, J. (2004) Educating English Learners: Language Diversity in the Classroom (5th edn). (Formerly Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory, and Practice). Los Angeles, CA: Bilingual Educational Services. CUNY-NYSIEB (eds) (2021) Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilingual Students: Lessons from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project. New York: Routledge.

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de Jong, E.J. (2013) Policy discourses and U.S. language in education policies. Peabody Journal of Education 88 (1), 98–111. Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education. Minneapolis, MN: Kappa Delta Pi. Esquinca, A., Araujo, B. and de la Piedra, M. (2014) Meaning making and translanguaging in a two-way dual language program on the U.S.-Mexico border. Bilingual Research Journal 37 (2), 164–181. doi:10.1080/15235882.2014.934970 Fertig, E. (2018) Welcome to the Little Dominican Republic. WNYC News, 7 September. See https://www.wnyc.org/story/welcome-little-dominican-republic/. Flores, N. (2013) The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: Cautionary tale. TESOL Quarterly 47 (3), 500–520. doi:10.1002/tesq.114 Flores, N. and García, O. (2017) A critical review of bilingual education in the United States: From basements and pride to boutiques and profit. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 37, 14–29. doi:10.1017/S0267190517000162 Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015) Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85 (2), 149–171. doi:10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder & Herder. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. (2011) From language garden to sustainable languaging: Bilingual education in a global world. NABE Perspectives, November/December, 5–10. García, O. and Kleifgen, J. (2018) Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Language Learners (2nd edn). New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O. and Sung, K. (2018) Critically assessing the 1968 Bilingual Education Act at 50 years: Taming tongues and Latinx communities. Bilingual Research Journal 41 (4), 318–333. doi:10.1080/15235882.2018.1529642 Gonzáles, N., Moll, L.M. and Amanti, C. (eds) (2005) Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gort, M. and Pontier, R. (2013) Exploring bilingual pedagogies in dual language preschool classrooms. Language and Education 27 (3), 223–245. doi:10.1080/09500782. 2012.697468 Henderson, K.I. and Ingram, M. (2018) ‘Mister, you’re writing in Spanglish’: Fostering spaces for meaning making and metalinguistic connections through teacher translanguaging shifts in the bilingual classroom. Bilingual Research Journal 41 (3), 253–271. doi:10.1080/15235882.2018.1481894 Henderson, K.I. and Palmer, D. (2015) Teacher and student language practices and ideologies in a third-grade two-way dual language program implementation. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (2), 75–92. doi:10.1080/19313152.20 15.1016827 Hernández, R., Sezgin, U. and Marrara, S. (2018) When a Neighborhood Becomes a Revolving Door for Dominicans: Rising Housing Costs in Washington Heights/ Inwood and the Declining Presence of Dominicans. New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. See http://dominicanlandmarks.com/Housing-Policy-Brief.pdf. Howard, E.R. and Christian, D. (2002) Two-way Immersion 101: Designing and Implementing a Two-way Immersion Education Program at the Elementary Level. Berkeley, CA: Center for Research on Education Diversity & Excellence, University of California. See http://www.cal.org/twi/pdfs/two-way-immersion-101.pdf. Howard, E.R., Lindholm-Leary, K.J., Rogers, D., Olague, N., Medina, J., Kennedy, B., Sugarman, J. and Christian, D. (2018) Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education (3rd edn). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

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Krisel, B. (2018) Upper Manhattan designated fi rst ‘Little Dominican Republic’. Patch, 7 September. See https://patch.com/new-york /washington-heights-inwood/ upper-manhattan-designated-fi rst-little-dominican-republic. Lindholm-Leary, K.J. (2001) Dual Language Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Lindholm-Leary, K.J. (2005) Review of Research and Best Practices on Effective Features of Dual Language Education Programs. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics and the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition at The George Washing ton University. See https: //www.researchgate.net / publication/240623592_Review_of_Research_and_Best_Practices_on_Eff ective_ Features_of_Dual_Language_Education_Programs. Martínez, R., Hikida, M. and Durán, L. (2015) Unpacking ideologies of linguistic purism: How dual language teachers make sense of everyday translanguaging. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (1), 26–42. doi:10.1080/19313152.2014.977712 Menken, K. (2008) English Learners Left Behind: Standardized Testing as Language Policy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. NYC Independent Budget Offi ce (2015) New York City Public School Indicators: Demographics, Resources, Outcomes. New York: New York City Independent Budget Office. See https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/new-york-city-publicschool-indicators-demographics-resources-outcomes-october-2015.pdf. Office of the New York State Comptroller (2015) An Economic Snapshot of Washington Heights and Inwood. New York: Office of the New York State Comptroller, New York City Public Information Office. See https://www.osc.state.ny.us/osdc/rpt2-2016. pdf. Palmer, D. (2010) Race, power, and equity in a multiethnic urban elementary school with a dual immersion ‘strand’ program. Anthropology in Education Quarterly 41 (1), 94–114. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2010.01069.x Palmer, D.K., Martínez, R.A., Mateus, S.G. and Henderson, K. (2014) Reframing the debate on language separation: Toward a vision for translanguaging pedagogies in the dual language classroom. The Modern Language Journal 98 (3), 757–772. doi:10.1111/modl.12121 Palmer, D.K., Cervantes-Soon, C.G., Dorner, L. and Heiman, D. (2019) Bilingualism, biliteracy, biculturalism, and critical consciousness for all: Proposing a fourth fundamental goal for two-way dual language education. Theory Into Practice 58 (2), 121– 133. doi:10.1080/00405841.2019.1569376 Pero Like (2018) Codeswitching at work. YouTube, 4 June. See https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lhJ_5Je3oEY. Rogovin, P. (2001) The Research Workshop: Bringing the World into your Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Sánchez, M.T., García, O. and Solorza, C. (2018) Reframing language allocation policy in dual language bilingual education. Bilingual Research Journal 41 (1), 37–51. doi: 10.1080/15235882.2017.1405098 Soltero, S.W. (2016) Dual Language Education: Program Design and Implementation. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Swain, M. (1983) Bilingualism without tears. In M.A. Clarke and J. Handscombe (eds) On TESOL ‘82: Pacifi c Perspectives on Language, Learning and Teaching (pp. 35–45). Washington, DC: TESOL. Valdez, V.E., Delavan, G. and Freire, J.A. (2016) The marketing of dual language education policy in Utah print media. Educational Policy 30 (6), 849–883. doi: 10.1177/0895904814556750 Varghese, M.M. and Park, C. (2010) Going global: Can dual-language programs save bilingual education? Journal of Latinos and Education 9 (1), 72–80. doi: 10.1080/15348430903253092

7 An Experienced Bilingual Latina Teacher and Pre-K Latinx Students in the Borderlands: Translanguaging as Humanizing Pedagogy Suzanne García-Mateus, Kathryn I. Henderson, Mónica Téllez-Arsté and Deborah K. Palmer

Introduction Spanish was their fi rst language! It was fluid, it was easier. There were some kids like Adriana and Jaime who knew a lot of English but they just kind of knew when to use it – there was no question about it. It was very natural. It just kind of went here and there. I think because I grew up in Laredo [Texas] speaking both [Spanish and English] all the time, I never looked at it as a negative thing, I just naturally promote that in my classroom. It’s very natural to go back and forth. You’re not thinking about it. You just do it. You just communicate. It’s super natural in the classroom with kids when you let them be themselves.

In the above comment, pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) bilingual teacher Mrs Mónica Téllez-Arsté (from now on, Mrs Téllez) reflected on her classroom pedagogical approach which involved substantial translanguaging, in her words, the natural going back and forth in what are seen as separate languages: the language practices and meaning-making processes of bilinguals (García & Li, 2014). This case study explores the linguistic experiences of very young Latinx students in her dual language bilingual education (DLBE) classroom in Central Texas. Texas was once a part of Mexico and still shares a long border with its Spanish-dominant southern neighbor. There is a rich history of languages in contact in the region; some of the named languages and language varieties have been identified as 156

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English, Spanish, Spanglish, Chicano English, Pocho, TexMex and Spanish of the Southwest (Sayer, 2013; Zentella, 2014). Bilingual Latinx students, each individually drawing on their own unified linguistic repertoire, are known to engage in diverse language practices including ones that transcend the boundaries of externally imposed, socially constructed named languages and language varieties (Otheguy et al., 2015; Sayer, 2013). Mrs Téllez’ classroom, comprised of Latinx students, was a translanguaging space that reflected the multilingual region, community and homes of the children, as well as the lived experiences of Mrs Téllez herself. The initial socialization into the institution of schooling by its nature is likely to be transformative for young children; unfortunately, often this ‘transformation’ re-inscribes and internalizes ideologies of whiteness and English dominance, preparing children for the colonizing experience of K-12 schools. Substantial research has documented the historical dehumanizing and oppressive process of schooling for Latinx children (Valdés, 2001; Valenzuela, 1999; Zentella, 2014). Denying Spanish speaking and bilingual Latinx children access to their full linguistic repertoires as they begin school has detrimental impacts on their linguistic, academic and socio-emotional well-being and development (Cummins, 2001; García, 2009; Salazar, 2010). In this counter-hegemonic and translanguaging space, under the guidance of Mrs Téllez, young students in their fi rst months in school were fully engaged linguistically and academically. They were supported to develop dynamic bilingualism and powerful bicultural identities in a way that drew on the linguistic and cultural toolkits they carried into school with them on day one. This chapter will start with a discussion of our translanguaging-ashumanizing theoretical framework. We will then introduce the context and provide some background information about the school, Mrs Téllez and her young students. Next, we offer a window into the pedagogical approach of Mrs Téllez. After providing a sense of the whole-class dynamics, we turn to an example of student interactions illustrative of the type of academic and linguistic experiences fostered within the classroom where four Latinx boys (Jaime, Jimmy, Daniel and Andrew) talk and laugh together during free reading time. We will argue that Mrs Téllez established a translanguaging transformative space in order to accomplish the straightforward, yet radical, classroom humanizing pedagogy of ‘let[ting] them (kids) be themselves.’ We will end with a discussion of the school and classroom characteristics that made this classroom a translanguaging and humanizing transformative space and the policy and social changes that have occurred in the last ten years that make spaces like this classroom so important. Translanguaging as Humanizing Pedagogy

A translanguaging pedagogical framework, according to García et al. (2017), consists of three elements: (a) stance, (b) design and (c) shifts. The

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translanguaging stance represents the educator’s beliefs and ideological orientation toward diverse language practices. The translanguaging design includes the teacher’s intentional and planned use of young students’ diverse language practices as a resource. Finally, translanguaging shifts represent the moment-to-moment changes in teacher and student language practices that flow within a bilingual and bicultural classroom space. An educator embracing a translanguaging pedagogical approach in the classroom fosters a classroom corriente – the flow of students’ dynamic bilingualism that runs through our classrooms and schools (García et al., 2017: 21) – through their beliefs and actions, planned and unplanned. Returning to the comment that opened this chapter, Mrs Téllez’ words powerfully captured the essence of this three-part translanguaging pedagogical approach. She expressed her translanguaging stance when she said: ‘I never looked at it [speaking both English and Spanish] as a negative thing.’ Mrs Téllez valued and positively viewed diverse bilingual language practices. Her translanguaging design was captured in this statement: ‘I just naturally promote that in my classroom.’ Mrs Téllez created classroom structures that supported linguistic fluidity reflecting her upbringing, home and community linguistic experiences. And Mrs Téllez also talked about her translanguaging: ‘It’s very natural to go back and forth.’ As we present examples from Mrs Téllez’ classroom, we will demonstrate her translanguaging pedagogical approach: how she embodied a pluralist translanguaging stance and curricular design, and empowered a powerful classroom corriente by sanctioning and embodying translanguaging. We combined our translanguaging framework with concepts from humanizing pedagogy. Drawing on Freire’s (1970) conceptualization of humanization and pedagogy, Salazar (2013) outlined principles of humanizing pedagogy that include the power of culture. Each person brings individual and community strengths that are essential parts of one’s humanity. Developing the whole individual is necessary for humanization (Salazar, 2013). To deny another’s humanity is to deny one’s own humanity, and educators who engage in being and being with promote individual and collective humanization (Freire, 1970). Instructional practices that align with the principles of humanizing pedagogy include understanding the backgrounds and realities of young children, valuing and utilizing the sociocultural resources of students, linking students’ prior knowledge to new learning, and developing caring and trusting relationships (Salazar, 2013). In this chapter, we will demonstrate how Mrs Téllez’ translanguaging pedagogical approach developed, ratified and celebrated her students’ humanity, alongside her own. A translanguaging pedagogy is also transformative when the practitioner addresses social inequities experienced by minoritized communities (García & Li, 2014) with the intention of transforming social and linguistic inequalities. In doing so, a transformational classroom space seeks to ‘construct and constantly modify [students]

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sociocultural identities’ (García & Li, 2014: 67). Mrs Téllez created a transformative classroom space that disrupted hegemonic ideologies of whiteness and monolingualism. Methods and Participants

Data collection in Mrs Téllez’ classroom in 2010–2011 was part of a larger study that sought to understand teachers’ agentic local implementation of dual language in the context of a district-wide initiative. Over the course of five years (2010–2015), the three fi rst authors collected video/ observational data and carried out interviews with teachers at Hillside Elementary School in various classrooms (see Henderson & Palmer, 2020, for a thorough description and some of the fi ndings from this larger study). In Mrs Téllez’ classroom, we observed approximately two hours per week and collected video data and accompanying fieldnotes of classroom instruction with a focus on language arts throughout the fall and spring semester, late September through May. We interviewed Mrs Téllez formally three times at the beginning, middle and end of the academic school year. Hillside Elementary School and the bilingual program

In 2010, Hillside Elementary School (a pseudonym) was a small (approximately 300 students) community that was predominantly Latinx. The school was in the fi rst year of implementing a DLBE program model that the district planned to implement district-wide beginning the following year. Hillside was a pilot school, implementing the program ahead of the rest of the district, because the principal, Mr Martínez, and teachers supported additive, enrichment-based bilingual education. They organized the school community, wrote a proposal explaining why their campus should be selected as a pilot school, and were competitively selected. Mr Martínez was an advocate for bilingual education as well as a vocal supporter of teacher professionalism. His reputation as a principal included providing teachers with substantial autonomy in classroom decision making, as well as defending and supporting their actions (Palmer et al., 2015). The DLBE model followed was the 50/50 Gómez and Gómez Dual Language Enrichment Model, which divided language of instruction by content area (Gómez et al., 2005). At the pre-K level, according to the model, math was taught in English, science and social studies in Spanish, and language arts in the students’ ‘native language’ (Dual Language Institute, 2019). In Mrs Téllez’ ‘one-way dual language’ pre-K classroom, in which all students were labeled by the school district as home language speakers of Spanish and English Language Learners,1 this meant that language arts was taught in Spanish. Thus approximately 80% of all

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content instruction was designated to be in Spanish. The model had additional important features that influenced classroom language practices, including a language of the day that dictated the language choice for morning routines, miscellaneous conversations, hallway interactions (M/W/F Spanish; T/Th English), designated time for bilingual pair work, and bilingual centers. In many ways, the Gómez and Gómez model was not aligned with a translanguaging pedagogical approach; the model was based on language separation by content area and language of the day. However, other aspects of the model did align with a translanguaging approach, including the daily ‘bilingual pair work’ which in later grades became ‘bilingual centers.’ The model also encouraged teachers to engage children in metalinguistic discussions which included activities such as working with cognates. Importantly, given Mr Martínez’s leadership disposition, teachers had autonomy to adapt the model to fit their classroom context and needs. Thus, as we will demonstrate in this chapter, Mrs Téllez’ classroom became a transformative translanguaging space in the way in which she implemented the DLBE model, which in many ways was a result of her own identity, teaching expertise and instructional practices. Mrs Téllez: An experienced practitioner

In 2010 Mrs Mónica Téllez-Arsté, one of the co-authors of this chapter, was a Latina bilingual educator with over 15 years of teaching experience. She was certified in Early Childhood and Bilingual Education and had a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction. She was a National Board Certified teacher (https://www.nbpts.org/national-board-certification/ overview/). Mrs Téllez was also Montessori trained and worked for two years in a Montessori DLBE program early in her career. She had taught at Hillside Elementary at that point for over 10 years and had a reputation as a strong bilingual teacher in the school, community and district as indicated by co-teachers, parents and administrators. She was a bilingual advocate and contributed to making Hillside a DLBE pilot campus. (All of these descriptors are still true; Mrs Téllez is now in her 20th year at Hillside.) Mrs Téllez’ linguistic background and pathway to bilingual education was intimately connected to her upbringing on the border between Laredo, TX and Nuevo Laredo, MX. Mrs Téllez grew up bilingual, listening to and speaking both English and Spanish. Bilingual languaging was a normalized part of her identity and upbringing. However, when she went to college, her bilingualism was not something she thought of as a resource for her career. This oversight reflects a common experience of EnglishSpanish bilingual college students in the US borderlands. Their home and community language practices (i.e. primarily Texas-based Spanish) do not have the status of a standardized or institutionalized language (Showstack, 2012; Urcioli, 2008; Winstead & Wang, 2017). Mrs Téllez’

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views about language also reflected the normalization of bilingualism in her community – speaking two languages was not thought about as a differentiating characteristic to capitalize on, but rather a normal part of daily life. As such, when Mrs Téllez started college, her original motive in pursuing education was to work with very young children, and she gave no thought to the language of instruction. She had taught swimming lessons for five summers to adults and children of all ages, and the three-, four- and five-year-olds were her favorite. When her advisor suggested she pursue bilingual education, she was exposed to scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and substantial reflection on language, culture and race within education. Over time she embraced her bilingual identity as a resource and committed to developing a generation of bilingual students who would always value it. These experiences connected to her translanguaging stance and practices and her educational philosophy, and contributed to her classroom as a transformative and agentive space even while under the authority of an institution or public school. She reflected: My main philosophy is that language is culture and culture is self. To truly be who you are and to honor yourself and your family, you need to embrace everything about your culture and your identity. I try to help children see the beauty in everyone’s culture and to recognize what makes everyone special and unique in their own way. I want them to understand that they should respect all cultures and take pride in where they come from. (Personal communication, 1 August 2019) The researchers

The other three authors of this chapter were all researchers working in Mrs Téllez’ school in 2010, and are all currently professors of bilingual education in public universities. Suzanne is a Chicana in her 40s and the daughter of first-generation immigrants from Mexico. She cannot remember a time when she did not understand Spanish, although she started using her Spanish at 19 years old. She was a bilingual educator, including a 1st grade two-way immersion teacher, in Title 1 schools in both Texas and Missouri before pursuing her doctorate. Her research examines the intersection of race, class and language in bilingual school settings. Katy is a white woman in her 30s of predominantly Scottish ancestry in a bilingual, bicultural, mixed-ethnicity family. She grew up in an affluent, majority white and English-speaking Boston suburb. Starting at a young age, travel and study abroad in Spain, Italy and Cuba impacted her language practices. She taught elementary DLBE in Guadalajara, Mexico for five years prior to completing her PhD. Her research targets DLBE school contexts and focuses on language policy, language ideologies and translanguaging pedagogies. Deb is a white woman in her 50s, the great-granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who learned Spanish as an adult and who

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has worked in the field of bilingual/dual language education for nearly 25 years, fi rst as a two-way DLBE teacher in California, and subsequently as a qualitative researcher and teacher educator. She has been a professor for her three co-authors, and was the primary investigator on the study that produced this chapter. As a white woman in the field of bilingual education, she continues to learn from her students and research partnerships. She is committed to working toward justice and supporting transformation in the education of Latinx bilingual children in the United States. The bilingual Latinx children

The young children in Mrs Téllez’ classroom were four and five years old. For the majority of them, it was their first time in school. The classroom originally had 16 students. One student left in the fall and two new students joined during the spring semester. All students except one were Latinx, and Mrs Téllez’ classroom was labeled as a ‘one-way dual language program,’ with all students labeled as ‘native Spanish speakers’ or, as mentioned earlier, classified as ‘English Language Learners.’ However, we challenge these static labels (García-Mateus, 2020; Henderson & Palmer, 2019). As Mrs Téllez described in the opening vignette, there were students in the classroom who spoke more English, and all of the students had English language practices as part of their linguistic repertoires. As noted, the students and Mrs Téllez were raised in a bilingual region, community and home. Translanguaging was the ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ way of communicating for them. The key focal participants in this chapter were all bilingual Latinx students and included Jaime, Jimmy, Daniel and Andrew. They were all from Spanish speaking homes and low socioeconomic backgrounds, and were born in the United States. All focal students learned Spanish at home and their parents spoke Spanish as their fi rst language. Findings Mrs Téllez’ humanizing pedagogical practices in a translanguaging space

We describe below four aspects of Mrs Téllez’ pedagogical practices that show her humanizing pedagogical practices, as well as how she opens a translanguaging space in her classroom: (1) her daily routines, (2) her deep respect for young children as whole people, (3) her leveraging of the children’s and her own translanguaging, and (4) her attention to the children’s development of their metalinguistic awareness and bilingual identities. Daily routines

It is a radical proposition to put young Latinx students’ linguistic and cultural identities and bilingual languaging at the heart and center of a

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public school classroom. The knowledge that this classroom was, at its core, designed to support them as people was inherently transformative for these preschool students. Because of the structures and practices in place as routines in the classroom, Mrs Téllez’ students grew as empowered learners, developing the confidence and skills to understand and act upon their world. Their teacher supported their development of positive bilingual/bicultural identities alongside their academic skills. This transformative experience began at the very beginning of the school year, with Mrs Téllez’ commitment to getting to know her young students, including their linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and personalities. For example, according to the bilingual program model, ‘bilingual pair work’ (i.e. a daily time in which children work together in pairs on an academic task) should begin at the start of the year. However, Mrs Téllez reserved the first months of school for getting to know the students, as she explained: I need some time to just get to know my kids, get to know their personalities, get to know academically their levels, and that kind of thing too… [Beginning pair work immediately] is totally inappropriate [for children this young]. So, I have to give them some time, and I obviously have to do some more anecdotal observations type things in class. Especially for the fi rst month of school. Kind of really know them academically and their personalities too. (Personal communication, 2010) Mrs Téllez’ deep respect for her children as whole people

This was also the foundation of Mrs Téllez’ humanizing pedagogical approach (Salazar, 2010); she worked to understand the backgrounds of her young students and valued their sociocultural resources. Over the years, Mrs Téllez developed many classroom structures to support her humanizing approach. She greeted students every day as they entered her classroom. She taught different fun ways to say hello (‘choca cinco,’ ‘abrazos,’ ‘besos de Hollywood’) and over time students would begin choosing how they wanted to greet her and one another. After greetings every day, she held a whole-group carpet meeting with a stuffed animal that was passed around to take turns speaking – or not. As she explained, ‘They have a choice to share and we share out any information we’d like to about ourselves. Like “fui a la piscina,” “comí una dona”’ (Personal communication, 2010). Mrs Téllez also had students share a ‘Mensaje del Día’ – each day, one student, in roster order, shared any message they wanted, and Mrs Téllez would write it and read it aloud. She also had an ‘Estrella de la Semana,’ assigning a different student as ‘star’ every week so the whole class had an opportunity to get to know them and their families. She asked her students and their caregivers to fi ll out and draw, or cut out magazine clippings to represent, their favorite things, family life and cultural background. Students could bring in pictures, toys, books and other cultural items to share every day. Across these

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classroom routines, Mrs Téllez intentionally incorporated student agency, reflecting another tenet of her humanizing pedagogy. Students chose their greeting; they chose what news (if any) they wanted to share each day. When it was their turn, they chose their mensaje del día, and fi nally each family chose what to bring in to share when their child was ‘estrella de la semana.’ Mrs Téllez’ humanizing pedagogical practices worked in tandem with her translanguaging approach to empower her young students. These planned routines reflected a linguistically responsive classroom design (García et al., 2017). A key piece of getting to know her students was getting to know their language practices; student agency included linguistic agency. Greetings were introduced using different languages practices and students chose the language of their greeting. Students could share (or not) during circle time and during the mensaje del día, drawing on their full linguistic repertoire. Families had no linguistic rules or requirements for estrella de la semana, and the products were linguistically diverse, reflecting the range of language practices in students’ homes. The combination of a humanizing approach following the translanguaging corriente fostered a transformative interactive space for Latinx and bilingual children, which we will see in examples below. Translanguaging and linguistic flexibility

Like most pre-K classrooms, Mrs Téllez’ classroom had a carpet area, and this was where she would lead students through whole-class book readings, songs and demonstrations. Following a district-wide expectation, Mrs Téllez generally followed the guidelines for the Gómez and Gómez bilingual model (Gómez et al., 2005), in that she taught math in English and all other subjects in Spanish. She followed the language of the day for the morning routine and transitional periods. However, the translanguaging corriente was still always present, as students and Mrs Téllez drew on their full linguistic repertoires for meaning-making (García et al., 2017). The following illustrative classroom interaction was from a video taken in Mrs Téllez’ classroom in the fall of 2010. Mrs Téllez was sitting on a chair next to an easel at the front of the carpet area. All of the students were sitting on their designated spots on the carpet facing her. Behind Mrs Téllez was a set of windows with Mexican flags colored in by the students. Below the easel was a calendar in English. Next to the easel was a similar, although slightly larger, calendar in Spanish. There was almost no free space on the walls that was visible from the camera angle. It was covered with student work, anchor charts, diagrams, alphabets, number charts in both Spanish and English, and a bilingual word wall. Many of the anchor charts were teacher-made and laminated; some looked worn, others appeared brand new.

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In the following interactions, Mrs Téllez was modeling for students a math activity. As such, it was designated as English instructional time. She had a picture of a tree with leaves sitting on the easel and the students were supposed to trace it using fall colors. After ensuring that she had all the students’ attention, she began: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Mrs Téllez: Marco: Sabrina: Mrs Téllez: Marco: Mrs Téllez: Sabrina: Jaime: Mrs Téllez: Jaime: Ismael:

So watch. Look at the tree, right. What is Mrs Téllez doing? “Tracing” “Trace” Tracing with marker No pinta con marcador No. We don’t color with marker. That’s right! Trace ¿Y tu nombre? Why don’t we color with marker? And your name? Se se se se rompe. [Makes hand gestures in the air back and forth as if the paper would rip if they colored with marker] 12 Mrs Téllez: The paper will rip [Makes hand gestures in the air back and forth] and you will get all dirty. It’s a mess. 13 Oscar: And your name? 14 Mrs Téllez: Yes. That’s very important. I will do it at the end. I am going to try and make my tree look like a fall tree. What colors are from fall, de otoño? 15 Lupita: Verdes y yellow 16 Mrs Téllez: What else? What other colors? 17 Several Students: And rojo! Naranja! Red! 18 Mrs Téllez: Orange. Red 19 Liliana: Yellow 20 Mrs Téllez: Yellow 21 Marco: Con un poquito green 22 Mrs Téllez: A little green 23 Pedro: ¡Café! 24 Mrs Téllez: And brown. That’s right. So I am going to use diff erent colors. Different fall colors. 25 Jimmy: ¿Todos los colores? 26 Mrs Téllez: All the fall colors my friend.

This clip is an illustrative example of the linguistic interactions in the classroom during whole-group time. The fluidity in language practices is visible here. Students shared thoughts in what is said to be English (Lines 2, 3, 7 and 19), Spanish (Lines 5, 8, 11, 21 and 23), and both (Lines 15 and 17). The teacher used both languages to ensure students’ comprehension (Line 14), and Jaime (Lines 8 and 10) called attention to what he said in Spanish by repeating it in English, the supposed language of instruction. These acts supported the bilingual identities and practices in the classroom in a fluid manner.

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Upon viewing the video clip, Mrs Téllez reflected that her use of both languages (Line 14) was likely done unconsciously. It was the natural habit of a bilingual teacher with years of experience in bilingual education as she communicated with young Latinx children whose language practices varied. For the teacher, it was a purposeful use of translanguaging. The word ‘fall/otoño’ was essential for understanding the whole lesson. It was the key word to scaffold meaning-making. We mentioned earlier that the pre-K year is typically when children are exposed to and internalize ideologies of English dominance, preparing them for the colonizing experience of K-12 schools. These nuanced moments in Mrs Téllez’ classroom, where the teacher’s and students’ linguistic interactions ebbed and flowed, were also transforming historical social and linguistic inequalities into positive ones for young Latinx and bilingual children. The translanguaging-speaking practices worked in tandem with translanguaging-listening practices. Mrs Téllez listened and responded to young students regardless of language choices. Mrs Téllez actively worked to have all the students’ voices heard, which stemmed from her humanizing and translanguaging stance. She affi rmed student responses by acknowledging them and recognizing them as important (Line 14). She repeated students’ answers and fostered English language development, one of the goals of using English for math instruction, by repeating in English students’ answers in Spanish (Lines 18, 20 and 22). In Line 5 when Marco stated the classroom rule, Mrs Téllez affirmed and repeated the contribution (Line 6) and asked a follow-up question about it (Line 9). Mrs Téllez was constantly reinforcing classroom community rules and used the word ‘we’ to position herself as a member of the community. These actions supported the development of caring and trusting relationships (Salazar, 2013) and the co-construction of positive bilingual and academic identities – a key characteristic of the ways in which a translanguaging pedagogy can also be transformative. Mrs Téllez carefully listened to young children even when she could not understand them. At the pre-K level, students’ oral language was sometimes inscrutable and included what seemed like invented words. Mrs Téllez used hand gestures to facilitate meaning-making and encouraged her students to do the same. Ismael (in Line 11) had been identified as having a speech impediment. Mrs Téllez worked with him to use hand gestures. Ismael’s verbal utterance in Line 11 was difficult to understand without his gestures. When she repeated what he said to the whole class, she also repeated his gesture. In other words, rather than imposing an English- or Spanish-only time upon the group, Mrs Téllez validated the variety of ways in which students communicated at the appropriate moment in order to make meaning about the content at hand. We argue that these moments were transformative for young children as they engaged in interactions that placed value on their diverse discursive practices. Another way in which Mrs Téllez supported transformative

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schooling and positive identity development for her young learners was by promoting metalinguistic awareness. Developing student metalinguistic awareness and bilingual identities

The language policy embodied in the classroom was one of linguistic flexibility and agency. Students were encouraged to make their own language choices and to take language risks. As part of this agentic process, young children were developing deeper awareness of their own bilingualism and of the implications of their language choices. This contributed to their co-construction of positive bilingual identities (García & Li, 2014). In the following classroom interaction, Mrs Téllez had selected a ‘Cheer’ out of a little red box on the carpet area to reward Ramón. The cheers were from a teacher resource called ‘Dr. Jean’s Cheers’ (Feldman, 2017). All the cheers were in English. So, Mrs Téllez would translate them on the spot based on the language of the day, or if a child requested it. In this way she modeled a bilingual identity. In the following interaction, after completing the chant, Ramón requested his cheer to be in Spanish. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Mrs Téllez and students: Ramón: Daniel: Jimmy: Mrs Téllez: Marco: Mrs Téllez:

8 Oscar: 9 Mrs Téllez: 10 Mrs Téllez and students:

Na Na Na Na; Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey Hey, Good job! ¡Ahora en español! ¡En español! ¡Inglés! ¡inglés! We are only supposed to do it in English. ¡Inglés! That was English. That was in English. But okay. We can do it in Spanish. Because it is your cheer, right? ¡Buen trabajo! ¡That’s right! Ahora en español. Nah Na Na Na; Na Na Na Na; Hey Hey Hey, Buen Trabajo!

Mrs Téllez and her students sang the cheer in Line 1 to the tune of ‘Na, na, na, na; na, na, na, na; Hey, Hey; Goodbye,’ originally by the band called Steam and later popularized by artists including The Supremes. Immediately after completing the cheer, Rámon and then Daniel requested the cheer in Spanish. Jimmy and Marco, wanting to participate too, shouted for the cheer to be in English. Several aspects of this short interaction were meaningful. First, Ramón’s request for the cheer to be done in Spanish illustrates both the status of Spanish in the space and Ramón’s agency, autonomy and metalinguistic awareness. Then, when Marco in Line 6 shouted for it to be done in English, Mrs Téllez clarified in Line 7 that it had been in English, fostering and developing metalinguistic awareness (and causing the observing researcher to chuckle). In Line 5, Mrs Téllez acknowledged to the students that this linguistic shift was breaking the rules set by the DLBE program model since it was during English instructional time: ‘We are supposed to do it only in English.’ But Mrs

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Téllez generally tailored the DLBE model to meet the linguistic needs of her bilingual and Latinx students. So by stating the linguistic expectation and then breaking it in order to honor Ramón’s request ‘because it is [his] cheer,’ she embodied a humanizing and translanguaging stance that put her students at the center and core of the classroom. Her young students had linguistic rights and agency, and bilingual children could leverage both languages when they wanted to. In small moments like this, Mrs Téllez’ pre-K classroom became a transformational space for student agency, identity construction and translanguaging; students and their bilingual/bicultural identities were repeatedly placed at the core of her classroom practice and students were encouraged to speak up and act as their whole selves. Humanizing peer interactions during children’s literacy acts

The previous section demonstrated Mrs Téllez translanguaging as humanizing pedagogy during structured whole-class time led by the teacher. Her pedagogical practices fostered humanizing and transformative students’ interactions as a result. In this section we describe a peer interaction during independent reading followed by an analysis of the translanguaging and linguistic creativity displayed by the students. A large portion of the day was dedicated to play and free time. The young students’ interactions during these designated times for free play were translanguaging spaces; students were able to engage and make meaning across their full linguistic repertoires (García et al., 2017; López, 2019). The classroom had Spanish books, English books and bilingual books, and during free-reading time students selected their own books. As we will show in the interaction and analysis that follows, students engaged in meaning-making drawing on their full linguistic repertoires; the interactions supported the potential for students to transform and grow, linguistically and academically, in these free-play spaces. A peer literacy interaction: Hey! You’re not my mummy!

Jaime, Jimmy, Daniel and Andrew were all on the carpet reading books they had selected. It was November and Mrs Téllez had identified Jaime, Jimmy and Andrew as choosing to engage more in English, and Daniel as engaging predominantly in language practices associated with Spanish. Jaime was reading the Where’s My Mummy? book. Mrs Téllez had guided her students through this book by Carolyn Crimi (2008) in a read-aloud. The book is written in English and is about Little Baby Mummy who went to play hide and seek with Big Mama Mummy in order to avoid bedtime. However, after hiding for what felt like a long time, Little Baby Mummy began to look for his Mama Mummy. As Little Baby Mummy looked, he came across characters who were not Mama Mummy, including Bones (a skeleton), Blob (a wiggly, wobbly, green mass) and Dracula (a vampire), who all told Little Baby Mummy to go to bed because

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of creatures in the night. Little Baby Mummy continued on, declaring he was not scared, until he sat by a tree and a mouse came out. He got very scared by the mouse and cried out for Mama Mummy who then appeared and consoled him. The Where’s My Mummy? book became a classroom favorite and the following descriptions of the peer interactions during free reading reveal why. Andrew sat next to Jaime and began to watch him read. Jimmy and Daniel were on either side reading their own books. Jaime flipped through the fi rst pages and stopped on the page where Little Baby Mummy meets Bones and read, ‘Hey! You’re not my mummy!’ Jaime flipped the page to where Little Baby Mummy meets Glob; he put his fi nger on the page and dragged it from left to right and pointing to Glob said, ‘Moco moco!’ In an action typical for young children when playing with taboo subjects like bodily fluids, he tapped Jimmy on his back to get his attention and said, ‘Jimmy! Moco moco!’ and then Jaime, Andrew and Jimmy all laughed. These little boys claimed the agency in their classroom to play, in a carnivalesque way (Bakhtin, 1981), with taboo subjects such as boogers, invoking chaos in a space (public school classroom) that is normally highly focused on maintaining order. It is also worth noting that despite his teacher’s impression that Jaime was more likely to engage in English, he chose to use ‘moco,’ a term associated with Spanish – and most likely a term used in his home. Jaime exhibits comfort bringing his whole self – including his entire linguistic repertoire – into this classroom space when engaging with a book in English. Jaime then flipped to the page where Little Baby Mummy gets scared by the mouse and read, ‘Mummy! It’s a mouse!’ Then he closed the book, signaling he was done. Daniel immediately tried to trade his book with Jaime but was unsuccessful; Jaime would not let it go. Daniel tried again, and this time Jimmy also attempted to trade. The negotiation was challenging, but ultimately Jimmy won the book trade and Daniel accepted it. It was now Jimmy’s turn with the book, and looking at the cover he read, ‘Where’s my mummy?’ Jimmy fl ipped through the fi rst few pages and stopped when Little Baby Mummy met Bones. Dragging his fi nger across the page from left to right he said, ‘Hey! You’re not my mummy!’ He flipped to the next page where Little Baby Mummy meets Blob, giggled, and said, ‘Moco moco!’ followed by, ‘Hey! You’re not my mummy!’ Turning another few pages he paused and read, ‘Mummy! It’s a mouse! Mummy! It’s a mouse! Mummy it’s a mouse!’ At this point, Andrew walked back and, as soon as Jimmy closed the book, Andrew reached to get it. Jimmy moved the book behind him and said ‘No! Es mía!’ Daniel and Andrew reacted: 1 Daniel:

[Patting Jaime on the shoulder and pointing at Jimmy] ¡Jimmy dijo que no! [Jaime was reading and did not respond to Daniel]

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2 Jimmy:

[Opening the book again] Hey! You’re not my mummy! [Andrew walked around the other side of Jaime] 3 Andrew: Jaime, esa Jimmy. Jimmy say no. 4 Jaime: Jimmy, ¿hay qué con palabras, okay? 5 Jimmy: [nodding] Moco moco! 6 Jaime: Moco moco!. [Looks at Daniel and then Andrew] Moco moco! [Jaime laughs].

After the boys laughed, Jimmy kept the book and continued reading, repeating the same phrases. As soon as he fi nished, Daniel traded books with Jimmy, this time with no struggle. Daniel and Jimmy were now lying down on their stomachs next to one another. Daniel started with the book flat on the ground with the cover facing toward him: 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Daniel: Where’s ma mummy? You’re not my mummy [Flips book around and begins to read the page where Little Baby Mummy and Big Mamma Mummy decide to play hide and seek]. Daniel: Mommy, we go to chasla Jimmy: No! Dice ‘Mommy vámonos.’ Ridg! Daniel: [Flips the page]. Mommy [pause]. Mommy, is that you mommy? Jimmy: No, dice…… [indecipherable words] Daniel: Is that you? Hey! You’re not my mummy. Jimmy: Moco moco!

Translanguaging in Latinx bilingual children’s literacy acts

The peer interaction between Jaime, Jimmy, Daniel and Andrew provided insight into the multi-layered meaning-making processes in this translanguaging space. With regard to developing their biliteracy skills and identities, the students were deriving meaning from the images in the texts. At this developmental stage, this was an important concept of print and key to reading development and comprehension (Heath, 1983; SoutoManning & Martell, 2016). They were also learning and demonstrating knowledge of English and Spanish print directionality – the notion that print only makes sense if the reading happens in a certain direction – by dragging their fi ngers across the page as they read from left to right. They also demonstrated recognition of word boundaries – the concept that words have a start and fi nish and are not all connected – by pointing at words. Throughout the interaction, Jaime, Jimmy, Daniel and Andrew also engaged in diverse oral language practices. Mrs Téllez’ read-aloud of the book established key formulaic phrases that were derived directly from the book. For example, the phrases ‘Where’s my mummy?’ and ‘You’re not my mummy’ were written in the book and repeated at different times by Jaime, Jimmy and Daniel. The young students also established and coconstructed their own conventions based on their independent readalouds. For example, the insertion of the word, ‘Hey!’ before saying ‘You’re not my mummy’ was not part of the book, but rather a convention

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constructed by Jaime and repeated by Jimmy (Line 2) and Daniel (Line 12). Another example was the phrase, ‘Mummy, it’s a mouse!’, which was not the actual phrase in the book, but captured the meaning of Little Mummy Baby being scared of the mouse, said by Jaime, and later repeated by Jimmy. A particularly vivid example was the phrase ‘Moco! Moco!’ which was initially read by Jaime, and then repeated by Jimmy. The young children drew on their own linguistic repertoires and meaning-making and Glob became a big moco – and this was with reason; the Glob character in the book does look like a big moco! Converting Glob into a moco was also a shared joke with which the students could engage, connect and laugh together in their free space. It appeared to be the reason why all the students wanted the book and it was also the way they resolved their dispute over whose turn it was with the book (Lines 4–6). This sort of linguistic creativity used by young children, like Jaime, in order to get attention from others, is what others have referred to as a way to use humor to detract from their ‘desire to come out from under in a highly stratified society’ (Bell & Pomerantz, 2016). In other words, despite the design of the dual language model, where languages were to be strictly separated, Mrs Téllez created a welcoming and fluid space where young students could be creative with their use of language. When Jaime used the word ‘moco’ he was drawing from his diverse linguistic resources and experience to engage with a book in English. There were some more subtle examples of the children’s engagement with their translanguaging, their unitary repertoire, in the interactions. Sometimes the students’ pronunciation of ‘mummy’ sounded closer to ‘mommy,’ and Daniel clearly read ‘mommy’ during his independent readaloud. In Line 7, Daniel also said ‘ma’ rather than ‘my.’ In these examples, we see young students drawing on their own phonemic inventory – it was likely that Daniel had more practice hearing and saying ‘mommy’ or ‘mamí’ which is phonemically closer to ‘mommy’ rather than ‘mummy,’ so when given the freedom to perform his own reading, he naturally drew on his own linguistic resources. Also, the ‘schwa’ sound of ‘mummy’ is not performed when using Spanish, in which Daniel, we were told, has more practice. So when speaking and reading out loud in English, Daniel ignores the ‘schwa’ sound, one that he perhaps still does not have in his repertoire. And yet, this does not prevent him from engaging in the psycholinguistic guessing game of meaning-making that is reading (Goodman, 1967). These peer interactions demonstrate young students resolving their differences without teacher assistance. These interactions also revealed how Mrs Téllez’ humanizing pedagogy translated to humanizing peer interactions. Students accepted their peers’ fluid language practices even when they did not understand one another or disagreed with one another. This translanguaging space also included all students engaging with the book and understanding the ways Jaime was using the word ‘moco,’ and

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the connotation it had in relation to a Little Baby Mummy. Although the linguistic interaction between the boys may seem typical, expected even, it occurred in a transformational space. In pre-K classrooms where designated ‘English Language Learners’ are usually placed, the goal is to develop children’s English proficiency. The above interaction might have been policed and reinforced as an English sanctioned time. Instead freetime reading became a transformational space because children were able to communicate using their bilingualism in dynamic ways and, in doing so, they were also able to be their authentic bilingual selves. Linguistic creativity and bilingual meaning negotiation: ‘chasla’ and ‘Ridg!’

As young children often do, Jaime, Andres, Jimmy and Daniel were creative with their use of language. For example, Daniel, who the teacher has identified as having in his repertoire more words in what is said to be Spanish, says ‘chasla’ (Line 8), perhaps for ‘chase her.’ It is interesting to note Daniel’s linguistic creativity and translanguaging in coming up with ‘chasla,’ for this word phonologically approximates the English word ‘chase,’ although he blends it what is associated with Spanish morphology, ‘la.’ Daniel’s reading shows how he is selecting features from his own unitary repertoire, as he leverages his translanguaging. This linguistic creativity is also made evident when Jimmy in Line 9 interacts with Daniel who speaks more Spanish. He corrects Daniel, telling him that it does not say ‘chase her,’ but: ‘Dice “Mommy vámonos”.’ Jimmy then urges Daniel on with his reading, exclaiming: ‘ridg!’ When bilingual children are given ample time and space to be linguistically responsible and creative, they become what Flores (2019) refers to as language architects. When we reconsider the ways in which young children engage appropriately and creatively with language, when we view them as language architects, their language practices become ‘integral to the development of their academic identities rather than simply a bridge at best or a barrier at worst’ (Flores, 2019: 7). The process of making meaning from the book was co-constructed and contested at times. In Line 8, Daniel departed from the reading conventions and formulaic phrases established by Jaime’s and Jimmy’s readalouds when he said, ‘Mommy, we go to chasla.’ Daniel was creatively making meaning for the image on the page in which Baby Mummy was asking Big Mama Mummy to go play hide and seek. Daniel showed great linguistic creativity when he uttered the word ‘chasla,’ which may not exist in dictionaries of English or Spanish, but it was Daniel’s own word for what he was trying to communicate. Jimmy, however, was participating in Daniel’s read-aloud lying down next to him and challenged Daniel’s reading by telling him, ‘No, dice vámonos. Ridg!’ Jimmy’s exchange may represent his impatience with Daniel’s ‘chasla,’ telling him that it says ‘vámonos,’ and encouraging him to read! The interaction shows how developing biliteracy skills requires flexible and creative space for meaning-making.

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Jimmy and Daniel drew on their full linguistic repertoires and both boys made sense of the text in English with their whole selves. Daniel used ‘chasla,’ and Jimmy made it clear that he did not agree with Daniel’s reading and that it said ‘vámonos.’ Jimmy was not simply telling Daniel to say it in Spanish or in English. They were listening (and at times not listening) to each other for meaning. And when Jimmy did not agree with Daniel’s reading, he demanded that Daniel read in a way that made sense to him. Daniel made no signal to Jimmy that he understood or accepted his interpretation. But the young students seemed comfortable with these moments of contestation as they made meaning of the text. No-one was upset. Daniel continued reading fluidly and Jimmy co-read alongside him. In the following section, we discuss and offer concluding remarks about Mrs Téllez’ class as a transformative and humanizing space for young Latinx children. Discussion: Mrs Téllez’ Humanizing Pedagogy in Translanguaging Spaces

Mrs Téllez’ classroom was a transformative translanguaging space because she drew from her borderland identity, expertise and instructional practices to support young Latinx children in co-constructing meaning. For example, the translanguaging corriente in the classroom reflected the language use in the teacher’s and young students’ bilingual homes, school and community. Translanguaging was not romanticized, nor was it sanctioned; it just was what the interactions were. In other words, translanguaging was normalized which made for a transformative experience for students. The students and teacher did not walk around always being mindful about the way they used their languages; they were just being themselves and talking and communicating with their whole beings. Mrs Téllez’ classroom was a transformative translanguaging space because it was a humanizing space. By humanizing her own bilingual Latina identity, Mrs Téllez constructed a classroom in which her students were likewise humanized. They were free to be themselves, and quite literally had substantial free time every day to play, learn, develop and grow linguistically and academically. Mrs Téllez and her students engaged in translanguaging when they were listening as well as when they were speaking or reading. Mrs Téllez listened to all her students, regardless of their language features and whether these were sanctioned as being from English, from Spanish, or simply their own. Mrs Téllez repeated her students’ words, expanded on their questions and respected language choices and requests. By modeling what listening looked and sounded like, Mrs Téllez impressed upon her students to do the same. For example, Jimmy and Daniel listened to each other’s interpretation of the book, even when they did not agree with or necessarily understand one another.

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School as an institution has historically silenced students like Jaime, Jimmy, Daniel and Andrew. Listening to one another is humanizing and transformative. Flores and Rosa (2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) have proposed that a listening subject is most important in the construction of how one ‘hears and interprets the linguistic practices of language-minoritized populations as deviant based on their racial positioning in society as opposed to any objective characteristics of their language use’ (Flores & Rosa, 2015: 151). An individual’s perception of others is also influenced by institutional embodiments of whiteness (Malsbary, 2014). In Mrs Téllez’ classroom, we observed that translanguaging gave young children a better chance to have meaningful interactions. Mrs Téllez’ combined experiences of growing up on the Texas/Mexico border and having been part of a critically engaging teacher education program provided her with the tools to shield her pre-K Latinx students from ideologies and perceptions that negatively racialize and linguistically oppress others. A translanguaging space where humanizing listening is paramount can be a part of transforming and liberating the voices of those who are so often silenced by white supremacist institutions. Students in Mrs Téllez’ classroom were in a safe space to play and take risks and take on new roles. Jaime, Jimmy, Daniel and Andrew all engaged in scaffolding language as they re-read Where’s My Mummy? The young students co-constructed their own language for meaning-making. Blob became Moco. Students were creative with their use of language, expanded formulaic phrases, and engaged using their full linguistic repertoires. In summary, Mrs Téllez’ transformative translanguaging pedagogy was humanizing in that it ratified the linguistic and cultural practices of the children (and her own). All were encouraged to be fully human in the pursuit of linguistic and academic development. Context matters: Ten years later

Coming together recently to revisit these videos of linguistic interactions in Mrs Téllez’ classroom from nearly 10 years ago has led us to reflect upon the important role that context and history plays. The young children in Mrs Téllez’ classroom in 2010–2011 were said to be Spanish dominant in what was described as a one-way dual language classroom. As Hillside has moved into a two-way dual language program model and the neighborhoods surrounding it have become more and more gentrified (Heiman, 2017), Mrs Téllez’ classrooms are now increasingly English dominant. The rise of two-way dual language programs across the nation has been critiqued as an illustration of interest convergence (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Heiman, 2017; Valdez et al., 2016), in that these programs seem to cater to members of the dominant group, typically white and upper-middle

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class families, who see the benefit in raising bilingual children and fiercely advocate for this opportunity for their children (Flores & García, 2017; García-Mateus et al., 2021; see also Chapters 2, 3 and 6, this volume). Combating English dominance – a central challenge at Hillside now – was not nearly as much of an issue in 2010. And, given the status and role of English in the larger society, it was also not a challenge for Mrs Téllez to convince her young students to take risks and engage in English. In a very real sense, this means that even though Mrs Téllez still teaches in the same school, the transformative translanguaging space that we just offered a window into no longer exists – at least not at Hillside, for the younger siblings of these (now much older) children. It is urgent, therefore, that practitioners refocus their lens to ensure that any DLBE program’s primary purpose is to address social inequities and promote the development of positive bilingual identities for Latinx bilingual children, especially in gentrifying two-way dual language settings (García-Mateus, 2020; García-Mateus & Palmer, 2017). Cervantes-Soon et  al. (2017) have insisted that the development of critical consciousness be an important core goal in DLBE. Two-way dual language programs, and English-dominant spaces in general, are not the topic of this chapter. There are still classrooms today similar to that of Mrs Téllez in which young Latinx students are said to be dominant in Spanish (see, for example, Chapters 4, 5 and 8, this volume). A majority of Latinx students in the United States are educated in segregated schools and classrooms in which most, if not all, of their classmates are bilingual and Latinx (Gándara & Escamilla, 2016). In those classrooms, most Latinx students are classified as ‘English Language Learners,’ as were all but one of Mrs Téllez’ students in 2010. Imposing English-oriented labels onto linguistically creative bilingual children unnecessarily perpetuates the racial, linguistic and class divides entrenched in the history of public schooling in the United States. Mrs Téllez’ example in 2010–2011 speaks loudly in support of bilingual instructional spaces for students classified as ‘English Language Learners.’ The possibility exists for transformative, humanizing translanguaging pedagogies merely through a shift in teacher and classroom language practices. Mrs Téllez created a transformative translanguaging space by fundamentally ratifying her own and her young students’ humanity through their own linguistic practices. Research demonstrates that Latinx Spanish speakers can internalize dominant oppressive ideologies, including perceiving their own language as ‘wrong’ and ‘bad’ (Bartlett & García, 2011; Showstack, 2012; Valdés, 2001; Zentella, 1997). Mrs Téllez, an experienced bilingual educator, embraced her own cultural and linguistic background. In celebrating her own Latinx bilingual humanity, she created a classroom space to humanize those bilingual/bicultural Latinx students who were like her.

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Conclusion and Implications

A major implication of our research in Mrs Téllez’ classroom is that experienced bilingual practitioners can and will fi nd ways to engage in transformative translanguaging and humanizing pedagogical practices when given autonomy and support. Mrs Téllez put the needs of her young students fi rst. She got to know her students and based her pedagogical decisions on what she knew about them. This fundamentally reflected a humanizing pedagogy (Salazar, 2013) and necessitated a transformative translanguaging approach. The model proposed by the school district in many ways did not align with a translanguaging approach, and yet, through the teacher’s expertise, experience and professionalism, Mrs Téllez made it work for her context and students. Mrs Téllez was engaging in translanguaging pedagogical practices long before the concept of translanguaging had been popularized. In fact, in 2010 when the children in this chapter were in her classroom, much of the literature related to translanguaging that we have cited here did not yet exist. Practitioners like Mrs Téllez play a crucial role in the ways in which we, as scholars in bilingual education, understand young children’s language practices and the sense-making they partake in when it comes to language learning. These sorts of creative linguistic interactions have always been documented in our communities (Abdi, 2011; Alim, 2004; Anzaldúa, 1987; Canagarajah, 2007; Zentella, 1997). The concept of translanguaging emerged and was refi ned to include a social justice component – a sort of languaging for social equity, justice, and as a loving representation of what it means to grow up bilingually as a person of color in the US context. Latinx bilingual teachers have been engaging in transformative bilingual languaging practices with their students for a long time – often feeling the need to quietly close their doors in order to do so. It is time their practice-based approach is named, validated and better understood. In these dark times, it is Mrs Téllez, still a teacher at Hillside after 20 years, and the countless committed, linguistically creative and gifted bilingual teachers like her that give us light and hope. Note (1) ‘One-way’ dual language in this Texas context offi cially referred to a classroom or program in which all students were labeled as English Language Learners and spoke the same home language, which was usually Spanish. Practically speaking, it meant the classroom contained all Latinx students with a wide range of linguistic profi les. This classroom also included one student who did not carry the English Language Learner label and was not Latinx (see Henderson & Palmer, 2015, for a more detailed examination of this classroom context).

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García-Mateus, S. (2020) Bilingual student perspectives about language expertise in a gentrifying two-way immersion program. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1797627 García-Mateus, S., Strong, K., Heiman, D. and Palmer, D. (2021) One white student’s journey through six years of elementary schooling: Uncovering whiteness and privilege in two-way bilingual education. In N. Flores, A. Tseng and N. Subtirelu (eds) Bilingualism for All? Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Dual Language Education in the United States (pp. 244–265). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gómez, L., Freeman, D. and Freeman, Y. (2005) Dual language education: A promising 50–50 model. Bilingual Research Journal 29 (1), 145–163. doi:10.1080/15235882.20 05.10162828 Goodman, K.S. (1967) Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist 6, 126–135. Heath, S.B. (1983) Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heiman, D. (2017) Two-way immersion, gentrification, and critical pedagogy: Teaching against the neo-liberal logic. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Henderson, K.I. and Palmer, D. (2015) Teacher scaffolding and pair work in a bilingual pre-kindergarten classroom. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 3 (1), 77–101. Henderson, K.I. and Palmer, D. (2019) ‘I wonder why they don’t do the two-way’: Disrupting the one-way/two-way dichotomy, re-envisioning the possibilities of dual language bilingual education. NABE Journal of Research and Practice 9 (1), 47–59. Henderson, K.I. and Palmer, D.K. (2020) Dual Language Bilingual Education: Teacher Cases and Perspectives on Large-Scale Implementation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. López, D. (2019) Jugando y explorando together: Translanguaging and guided play in a bilingual kindergarten classroom in NYC. Journal of Bilingual Education and Instruction 21 (1), 1–16. Malsbary, C. (2014) Will this hell ever end? Substantiating and resisting race-language policies in a multilingual high school. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 45 (4), 373–390. doi:10.1111/aeq.12076 Otheguy, R., García, O. and Reid, W. (2015) Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review 6 (3), 281–307. Palmer, D., Henderson, K., Wall, D., Zúñiga, C.E. and Berthelsen, S. (2015) Team teaching among mixed messages: Implementing two-way dual language bilingual education in at third grade in Texas. Language Policy 4, 1–21. Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017) Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46 (5), 621–647. doi:10.1017/S0047404517000562 Salazar, M. (2010) Pedagogical stances of high school ESL teachers: ‘Huelgas’ in high school ESL classrooms. Bilingual Research Journal 33, 111–124. doi:10.1080/152358 81003 733415 Salazar, M. (2013) A humanizing pedagogy: Reinventing the principles and practice of education as a journey toward liberation. Review of Research in Education 37 (1), 121–148. Sayer, P. (2013) Translanguaging, TexMex, and bilingual pedagogy: Emergent bilinguals learning through the vernacular. Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly 47 (1), 63–88. See https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/tesq.53 Showstack, R. (2012) Symbolic power in the heritage language classroom: How Spanish heritage speakers sustain and resist hegemonic discourses on language and cultural diversity. Spanish in Context 9 (1), 1–26. Souto-Manning, M. and Martell, J. (2016) Reading, Writing and Talk: Inclusive Teaching Strategies for Diverse Learners, K-2. New York: Teachers College Press.

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Urcioli, B. (2008) Whose Spanish? The tensions between linguistic correctness and cultural identity. In M. Niño-Murcia and J. Rothman (eds) Bilingualism and Identity: Spanish at the Crossroads with Other Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Valdés, G. (2001) Learning and Not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Valdez, V., Freire, J. and Delavan, G. (2016) The gentrification of dual language education. The Urban Review 48 (4), 601–627. Valenzuela, A. (1999) Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Winstead, L. and Wang, C. (2017) From ELLs to bilingual teachers: Spanish-English speaking Latino teachers’ experiences of language shame & loss. Multicultural Education 24 (3–4), 16–25. Zentella, A.C. (1997) Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell. Zentella, A.C. (2014) TWB (talking while bilingual): Linguistic profi ling of Latina/os, and other linguistic torquemadas. Latino Studies 12 (4), 620–635.

8 Collaborative Corridos: Ballads of Unity and Justice Cati V. de los Ríos and Kate Seltzer

Introduction

As the movement for ethnic studies courses in K-12 schools continues to grow across the United States (Buenavista, 2016; Weston Phippen, 2015),1 limited qualitative research exists about the curricular nature of courses and the writing involved in these classroom spaces (de los Ríos, 2017). Even less is understood about the experiences of bilinguals and emergent bilinguals in these classroom spaces where state-mandated policies and high-stakes testing are not as critical, and thus afford teachers greater autonomy in their language and literacy pedagogies (de los Ríos, 2018). In some of our previous collaborative work (de los Ríos & Seltzer, 2017; Seltzer & de los Ríos, 2018) we have explored how ethnic studies courses as well as mainstream English Language Arts courses that engage culturally relevant and ethnic studies approaches can be fertile spaces for translanguaging, critical literacies, the promotion of critical metalinguistic awareness and the development of what we call raciolinguistic literacies, or the (re)tuning of teachers’ listening practices toward higher levels of awareness of their own raciolinguistic ideologies and an explicit challenge to these ideologies through action alongside language minoritized students (Seltzer & de los Ríos, 2018). In this chapter, we build on our previous scholarship as we take readers into a unique curricular space for critical translanguaging: a Chicanx/Latinx Studies course situated in an urban high school in the southwest region of the United States that primarily served both non-Black Latinx bilingual and African American students from working-class backgrounds. Given the enduring demographic shifts in urban and suburban communities across the west and southwest, many neighborhoods and schools that were once predominantly Black are now also home to Latinx immigrant communities, primarily from Mexico and Central America (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014; Paris, 2010). Many African American and Latinx

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students find themselves living side-by-side in highly segregated urban and working-class suburban communities where they are often positioned to share and leverage each other’s language and cultural practices (Martinez, 2017; Paris, 2010). However, most language and literacy research continues to view these two racially and linguistically minoritized communities as mutually exclusive (Paris, 2009). This chapter examines a transformative critical translanguaging space (Li, 2011) fostered by a curricular unit that leveraged a literary and oral history genre, corridos, associated with a specific racialized linguistic community, Mexican bilinguals2 , as a means for collaboration and sharing with another racialized linguistic group, African Americans, as well as other Latinx students from Central American backgrounds. Toward this end, we draw upon the rich bodies of literature on translanguaging (García, 2009; García & Li, 2014), translanguaging pedagogy (García et  al., 2017) and critical translingual approaches in ELA high school settings (Seltzer, 2019; Seltzer & de los Ríos, 2018) to understand how such a classroom space – which was positioned as within the school but outside the curricular and instructional status quo – encouraged culturally, ethnically and racially diverse students to draw on their fluid linguistic and cultural repertoires. In this space, students engaged with humanizing counter-narratives of people of color, particularly at the intersections of Black and Latinx people’s sociopolitical experiences and histories. Our chapter builds upon literacy and language scholars who have highlighted the importance of examining the cultural and language sharing between and across students of color in classroom and school settings (Alim, 2005; Martinez, 2017; Paris, 2009, 2010). We also extend this work, demonstrating that classrooms that make linguistic flexibility the norm, through their uses of multilingual, multimodal mentor texts and their openness to the unmarked use of students’ English and Spanish practices in text production, can be transformational, cultivating a nuanced, coalitional critical consciousness among languageminoritized students. Translanguaging Pedagogy and Creating Transformative Translanguaging Spaces

Translanguaging posits that rather than holding two or more autonomous language systems, as has been traditionally assumed, bi/multilingual people select and deploy particular features from an integrated, unitary linguistic repertoire to make meaning and participate in diverse communicative contexts (García, 2009; García & Li, 2014; Vogel & García, 2017). This understanding of translanguaging incorporates not just ‘named languages,’ as Otheguy et al. (2015) put it, but also language varieties, such as ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ registers for different purposes and varying contexts. The notion of translanguaging is rooted not in the construction of bilinguals as the sum of two monolinguals – or two

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named, standardized languages – but in ‘the practices of bilinguals that are readily observable’ (García, 2009: 140). Furthermore, translanguaging has been defi ned through a sociolinguistic and sociocultural lens which ‘can only be properly understood as negotiated and interactional, contextualized and situated, emergent and altering, and with ideological and identity constituents, all of which are enacted in the classroom’ (Lewis et al., 2012: 657). Classroom literacy pedagogy that takes up a translanguaging lens views students’ language practices as interwoven and inextricable, and coordinates classroom instruction so that students are given the opportunity to draw on all their linguistic and semiotic resources at all times to make meaning (de los Ríos & Seltzer, 2017; García, 2009; García et al., 2017; Lewis et al., 2012). As outlined by García et al. (2017), the three interrelated strands of this kind of translanguaging pedagogy include: (1) the translanguaging stance, or a philosophical toolkit that reflects a teacher’s belief that a bi/multilingual student draws from one linguistic repertoire that includes linguistic and other multimodal features that are usually assigned to different languages or modes; (2) the translanguaging design, or the teacher’s curriculum and instructional and assessment plan for the classroom that emerges from her stance and responds to students’ language practices and bi/multilingual realities; (3) the translanguaging shifts, or the teacher’s unplanned ‘moves’ that change course with the flow of bilingual students’ languaging, inquiries and particular needs in the classroom. This framework highlights the ways in which students and teachers can engage in practices that transgress monolingual and even traditional bilingual models of teaching and learning. From a teaching perspective, a translanguaging pedagogy can be comprehended as an instructional framework that teachers can use to: (a) mobilize students’ bilingualism as they engage with complex content and texts; (b) provide bilingual students with opportunities to develop linguistic practices for academic contexts; (c) create space for students’ everyday bilingualism and ways of knowing; and (d) support bilingual students’ socio-emotional development and bilingual identities (García et al., 2017). Building on these theoretical and pedagogical understandings, Li (2011: 1223) defi nes what he calls ‘a translanguaging space’ as ‘a social space for the multilingual language user [that brings] together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their physical and cognitive capacity into one coordinated and meaningful experience.’ Thus, a key aspect that classroom teachers must keep in mind about translanguaging – as both a stance and as something that bilinguals ‘do’ – is that it is more than the deployment of a unitary linguistic repertoire. It is also, in fact, an integrated

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manifestation of students’ larger social, political and cultural learning experiences and worlds (Li, 2011). As such, translanguaging is tied to students’ identities and plays an important role in their social relationships with others. This understanding is critical in creating learning ecologies that work to encompass more holistically who young people are and what they bring to their classrooms. Critical Translingual Approaches

A critical translingual approach (Seltzer, 2019, 2020) calls for educators to take up a translanguaging pedagogy in ways that explicitly connect language with systems of power and identity. Grounded in theories of translanguaging – as well as scholarship in critical literacy (Shor, 1999; Morrell, 2008) and critical language awareness (Alim, 2005; Baker-Bell, 2013, 2020) – a critical translingual approach not only views all students’ language practices as interrelated and thus integral to their learning, but also understands students’ translanguaging and translingual sensibilities (Seltzer, 2020) as inherently transgressive and capable of countering the monolingual ideologies at work in all classrooms, but particularly in English classrooms. For this reason, as we discuss in this chapter, a critical translingual approach can help teachers design language and literacy experiences that draw on students’ complex linguistic repertoires and cultivate solidarity among students of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. As Seltzer and García (2020: 25) write, ‘By focusing on linguistic features, and not language as an autonomous structure, translanguaging theory makes it possible for African American and Latinx students to understand their language development as being part of the same process, despite the socio-political differences between what are seen as “varieties of English” and “different languages”.’ As will be seen in our discussion of Mr Miranda’s critical translingual approach through his design of collaborative writing of corridos (for more on Mr Miranda’s approach, see de los Ríos & Seltzer, 2017; Seltzer & de los Ríos, 2018), classrooms – so often made up of students who seemingly speak ‘different languages’ or ‘different varieties of English’ – can take up translanguaging theory in ways that transcend such distinctions and become transformational sites of collective resistance to oppressive, monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015). In what follows, we describe the context of Mr Miranda’s Chicanx/Latinx classroom and the translanguaging design that is central to this chapter. Corridos

A dissident folklore ballad (Saldívar, 1997), the corrido is a justiceoriented literary genre that has its origins in the late 19th century. The

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corrido is a resistant cultural form that has long critiqued the status quo (Paredes, 1958) and is associated with ‘the rise of national consciousness’ (Simonett, 2014: 225) of conflicts at the US-Mexico border during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Corridos have historically commented on a range of topics including social, political and historical events, Mexican national affairs, US-Mexican relations, as well as crimes, romance, heroes, political struggles and transnational immigration (Chew Sánchez, 2006). As a resistant cultural form against white supremacy (Paredes, 1958), the ritualized composition and performance of corridos ‘instantiated the idea of a unified and legitimate subject whose life of struggle was worthy of being told’ (Saldívar, 2006: 153). The word corrido stems from the word correr, meaning to run or flow; hence, the corrido reports stories swiftly and directly, typically in 6–16 stanzas of four to six lines each and up to 10 syllables per line (Paredes, 1958). As ‘a running account of events’ (Westgate, 2013: 997), a corrido’s primary function is to narrate a story or event of local or national interest (Simonett, 2001). The historical and traditional corrido includes a number of ballad conventions: (1) a formal opening that contains the initial call of the balladeer to the public; (2) the stating of the place, time and name of the protagonist of the ballad; (3) the argument of the protagonist; (4) the message; (5) the farewell of the protagonist; (6) the farewell of the balladeer. (Simonett, 2014: 226) Simonett reminds us that all of these elements are not necessarily employed in every corrido; however, there is often the presence of two or more. Some of our previous work (de los Ríos, 2018, 2019; de los Ríos & Seltzer, 2017; Seltzer & de los Ríos, 2018) has outlined the power and potential of listening to and writing corridos as literacy pedagogy for Latinx bilinguals and emergent bilinguals, especially as Mexican corridos are situated in many Mexican American students’ extensive communicative repertoires (Rymes, 2014). In this chapter, we describe how Mr Miranda extended this literary genre and approach to writing pedagogy across racial and ethnic groups of students in one urban classroom setting. School Context

This study derives from a 10-month project that took place in an 11th grade elective course entitled Chicanx/Latinx Studies, offered at an urban public high school in the greater Los Angeles area. The public school is located in what is now commonly identified as a Latinx immigrantdominant neighborhood. However, historically there has been a

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longstanding African American community in the northern part of town, making up approximately 13% of the entire city of La Feria (pseudonym). According to data from the California Department of Education, the school demographics at the time of the study (2015–2016) were 85% Latinx, 12% African American and 3% undisclosed. Eighty-one percent of the student body received free or reduced-price lunch, and about 42% of the student body were classified as English Language Learners, with the primary language being Spanish. The Chicanx/Latinx Studies elective course was composed of fi rst- and second-generation students, primarily of Mexican descent with a few students of both Central American (primarily from El Salvador and Guatemala) and Mexican mixed ancestry, and at various points along the bilingual continua (Hornberger, 2003). Important to this chapter, there were four African American students who self-enrolled in the course in 2015–2016, the year of the study. The teacher, Mr Miranda, is a first-generation bilingual Chicano who was raised in the same working-class immigrant community where the school is located. Mr Miranda has been teaching at the school since 2010 and is also an alumnus of the school where this study took place. Initially when Cati began to conduct research in Mr Miranda’s classroom, ‘translanguaging’ was not a term that he or the students used. However, his teaching demonstrated a clear translanguaging stance and his instructional design worked to mobilize students’ bilingualism and transnational knowledge for learning. Mr Miranda saw students’ different varieties of Englishes and Spanishes as assets from which to build and fortify stronger understandings of self, community and the larger sociopolitical world. Mr Miranda’s innate embrace of translanguaging was one of the primary reasons why his classroom was selected for inquiry. While Chicanx/Latinx Studies courses had been offered since 2008, the 2015–2016 academic year had the largest number of non-Latinx students enrolling and participating. When Cati asked Mr Miranda why he thought that might be, he answered that ‘it was mostly because of students’ friends taking the course and my own personal relationships with Black students on campus.’ This social and demographic context made this ethnic studies classroom an even more fertile site for studying critical translingual approaches to teaching and for examining the linguistic and cultural sharing between Latinx and African American students. Collaborative Corridos Unit

As a Chicanx/Latinx Studies teacher, Mr Miranda’s primary curricular aim was to create a space where concepts of race, colonialism, hegemony and solidarity were explored – especially through the lens of racialized young people in the United States (de los Ríos et al., 2015). Through historical and literary texts, multimodal popular media, spoken word poetry and music, the year-long course examined how notions of

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power and privilege in the United States affect communities of color, particularly Chicanxs and Latinxs. In this unit, Mr Miranda used an array of multimodal and multilingual texts to explore issues of immigration and racism in the United States and at the US-Mexico border. Prior to the collaborative writing of ballads, Mr Miranda introduced his students to the political and social justice history of corridos as both a literate and cultural practice against white supremacy and US expansionism and colonialism (Paredes, 1958). His multimodal presentation included historical photographs, audio of significant corridos from the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the California Gold Rush and rhythmic language, as well as strong sensory images, artwork and symbols. Importantly, although hip hop texts were not explicitly incorporated into this unit, Mr Miranda made important connections between the corrido literary genre and the origins of hip hop music, communicating that both of these genres aim to speak truth from the intersectional margins of society. This was one of the many instances where Mr Miranda drew explicit connections between the experiences of Chicanx/Latinx and African American students’ cultural and linguistic practices that were also aligned with a critical sociopolitical consciousness. Once the students had a grasp of the structure and typical content of corrido compositions, they listened to and conducted a close reading of the corrido, ‘Somos más americanos’ by the norteño ensemble, Los Tigres del Norte. Through powerful figurative language, this corrido questions who and what constitutes ‘America’ and American culture. The song’s lyrics were provided to the students in both English and Spanish. Using the Freirean culture circle approach (Souto-Manning, 2010), students discussed the song as a generative theme, or a codification of a larger and familiar societal issue. They then launched into writing collaborative corridos through the collaborative poetry exercise, ‘Pass the Poem.’ Students were broken into groups of four to seven, and within those groups each student contributed a stanza to a larger ballad that was passed from one student to the next, urging each participant to link and build their own stanza off the previous one. Students’ stanzas all explored themes that situated their larger understanding of the importance of accessing ethnic studies curricula in their lives as well as who and what is considered ‘American’ (de los Ríos et al., 2021). The process of creating their collaborative corridos – and, in fact, the process of reading and producing all texts in Mr Miranda’s class – very much transgressed monoglossic norms. As they wrote, and especially as they engaged in the collaborative editing process, students in the small groups translated, summarized, explained and made connections using different language practices. As we will show in the Findings section, the resulting corridos were heteroglossic in nature (Bakhtin, 1981), saturated with students’ multiple voices and knowledge. The collaborative nature of the exercise, the cultural specificity and criticality of the genre, as well as

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the fact that translanguaging was the communicative norm in Mr Miranda’s class overall, made room for students to articulate their solidarity with one another, particularly around issues of race and racism, on their own linguistic terms. After fi nishing their collective ballads, students read and shared them aloud with their group-mates and began an editing process where two to three revisions were made by each group member. In this process, students deleted some words, slightly rewrote sections and/or rearranged lines of their stanzas. Students were quick to dismiss the correction of each other’s formal grammatical or syntax errors, and instead ‘massaged’ each other’s wording and style. This was especially important, as the language practices of students of color are too often viewed by the school as in need of repair or of stripping away and replacement with ‘academic language’ (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Martinez, 2017). At the end of the process, the groups read their corridos aloud to the whole class. After participating in this activity, the students wrote a short reflection about the process, including what their stanza depicted and how it connected to the greater corrido as well as the class as a whole. As will be shown in our Findings section, this kind of classroom activity – from the use of a metalinguistic mentor text that encouraged critical thinking such as ‘Somos más americanos’ to his explicit invitation for students to write the collaborative corridos using any and all of their language practices – highlights the ways in which Mr Miranda’s translanguaging design was essential to creating a critical translanguaging space and classroom ecology where students began to take risks and to break out of the monoglossic confines of traditional school writing. We will also demonstrate how this kind of literacy experience enabled all students of color to draw on and share their different language practices to express their overall learning as well as the sense of community and solidarity they built within the classroom. Methodology and Positionality

As equity- and justice-minded researchers, the relational care and ethical dimensions of our research projects are of the utmost importance to us. We both have worked in racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse communities and classrooms with teachers with whom we have longstanding relationships, and through that work we have always embraced a critical introspective stance in our investigative efforts (Delgado Gaitan, 1993). Throughout our individual and collaborative work we have adopted an ‘inquiry stance’ alongside students and teachers, ‘a continual process of … questioning the ways knowledge and practice are constructed’ (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009: 121), which calls us to engage in our own critical reflexivity throughout the iterative research process. This includes that we not only remain cognizant of power

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relations across race, class and gender, but that we are also ‘explicit about the space in which [we] stand politically and theoretically – even as [our] stances are multiple, shifting, and mobile’ (Fine, 1994: 24). The ‘space in which we stand’ is informed by our own backgrounds and experiences. Cati comes to this research as a bilingual Chicana who was raised in a Spanish speaking, Mexican immigrant, working-class household. As a child attending California public schools, Cati was designated as an ‘English learner’ and saw a language speech pathologist in elementary school who aimed to correct her accent and language practices. Her own experiences as a bilingual child as well as her childhood saturated in the rich oral literary traditions of Mexico, including corridos, have compelled her to research the myriad bi/multilingual literacy practices overlooked and misrecognized by educators. Kate is a white woman and primarily an English speaker, despite having an immigrant parent and thus experiencing translanguaging and transnationalism in her upbringing. While her background provided Kate with some insight into the lives and experiences of the bi/multilingual students she taught as a classroom teacher and has worked with in her research, she is acutely aware of how her race, socioeconomic status and privileged ways of using English have limited her understandings of raciolinguistic ideologies. It is through her work and collaborations, like this one with Cati and Mr Miranda, that Kate’s own raciolinguistic literacies continue to emerge. Mr Miranda has been a focal teacher in much of Cati and Kate’s collaborative and comparative case study work. We have written about him across multiple publications and, important to note, Mr Miranda has also been a co-author and co-presenter with Cati on several research endeavors and at national refereed conferences. Aligned with the ethics of community-based and participatory research, Cati regularly invites Mr Miranda to participate in co-writing, presenting and analysis when he desires to and is able to. This open invitation has not only strengthened the collaboration and research analysis but also fortified the iterative nature and growth of Cati’s and Mr Miranda’s ongoing, nearly decade-long partnership. This chapter focuses on one week-long unit from Cati’s larger study that inquired, ‘How did one teacher foster a translanguaging space through collaborative corrido writing?’ Data collection included participantobservations of Mr Miranda’s 55-minute class period that week, fieldnotes and analytic memos, students’ collaborative corridos, students’ written reflections on the corridos, and two interviews with Mr Miranda about the design and aim of this curricular unit and the larger year-long course. We took an iterative approach to our analysis of these data that combined both inductive and deductive approaches (Maxwell, 2013). Deductive codes were used from existing literature and a previous pilot study that Cati had conducted in Mr Miranda’s classroom. Some of these codes included racial literacy, translanguaging, language ideologies,

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linguistic creativity and language sharing. Inductive codes were derived from the data themselves, particularly students’ corridos and reflections on those corridos. Data were sorted, indexed and read through for recurrent patterns and themes. Following a systematic coding process and the constant reference back to our guiding research question, we developed major themes and sub-themes. We returned to the data at this point to re-evaluate our interpretations of the themes and to pair strong and relevant excerpts from the data to those themes. Triangulation was used to justify emerging themes and sub-themes (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

Findings

Like storytelling, corridos ‘“offer us an opportunity to exchange experiences”; a balladeer “takes what he tells from experience … and makes it the experience of those that are listening to his tale”’ (Benjamin, 1968: 83–87, as cited in Westgate, 2013: 1006). Here, we home in on two collaborative corridos that represent and capture the storytelling and joint learning that occurred between Latinx, more recent Latinx immigrant, and Black students. Some of these topics include the ways in which students contested dominant narratives, reclaimed who they are, created new spaces of understanding, strived to unlearn stereotypes, built collective solidarity and pushed the bounds of what it means to imagine new worlds of dignity and empathy. One group of students, Chris, Denisse, Karina and Jason, reflected on their cumulative learning over the academic year that centered Chicanx/ Latinx experiences in the United States, but also engaged comparative racial perspectives when exploring larger conceptual themes like institutional racism, gender and sexuality, and discrimination. Their collaborative corrido, titled ‘Challenging what we thought we knew,’ read: I’ve seen the struggles through the lenses The lenses of someone else And we all tried to make sense Of their pain and celebrated their gain I can never fully understand their struggle But this class has taught me [to] take a stand (Jason) We are more than what you see Con la raza behind me We are more than what people think We’ve changed our stereotypes in a blink Think about our people and their pain We have so much more to gain (Denisse) Yo soy una chican@ Mexican and Salvi

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Esta clase me enseño Quien somos tu y yo Mis padres les echaron ganas Para que yo saliera adelante (Karina) This class helps students of color. Folks struggled for us to take this class like no other Now I look at immigrants differently They come just to make a living This class has helped me in life. It confused me but made me think twice About the assumptions I used to make (Chris) In many ways, the students engaged the corrido not just as a template for their writing, but also as a literary device that portrayed their solidarity across geographical, racial, ethnic, linguistic and metaphorical borders. For example, Jason, who is African American, noted that he has now seen struggle through ‘the lenses of someone else.’ Similarly, Chris, who is also African American, noted that the class helped him empathize with the discrimination endured by Latinx immigrant communities in ways that made him ‘think twice’ about what he had been conditioned to believe about Spanish speaking immigrant communities. In Chris’s reflection on this exercise, he shared: In my part of the corrido, I meant that in my Chicano Studies class I learned things that made me look at immigrants different. It made me realize that we should all be looked at the same and treat each other the same. We all have struggles and they are each unique but have similarities. Our commonality of struggle is what brings us together.

Because the class had a Chicanx/Latinx Studies emphasis, Chris was asked to step into the nuanced experiences of Latinx migrants, something he shared that he had never had the opportunity to do while in a classroom. Along this same line of ‘unlearning stereotypes,’ Jason shared in his post-assignment reflection: This class has taught me a lot of history from the eyes of a different racial group and the culture of different people. Though I may never fully understand their pain, I do understand they underwent some vigorous pain to get their gains and it’s opened my eyes. Thus, I can no longer be ignorant. I can no longer think with the same stereotypes I have been taught about certain groups.

In their corrido stanzas and their reflections, Jason and Chris draw on the metaphor of sight. As Chris began to see through the ‘lenses of someone else,’ he ‘looked at immigrants differently.’ For Jason, seeing ‘from the eyes of a different racial group’ enabled him to ‘open’ his own eyes. This widening of Chris and Jason’s consciousness and ways of seeing others has, in their words, pushed them to ‘take a stand’ (Chris) and question ‘the

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same stereotypes I have been taught about certain groups’ (Jason). Importantly, both Jason and Chris apply their new lenses to find solidarity with Spanish speaking immigrant groups in the ‘struggle’ that they, as people of color, have experienced. This re-seeing that occurred through the class and the corridos in particular was clearly a major point of learning for both students. Like historical and traditional corridistas [balladeers], the students were encouraged to ‘privilege communal testimony over institutional authority’ (Westgate, 2013: 997), and write about issues that are typically not amplified enough. For example, Karina, who wrote her stanza in Spanish, identifies herself as a ‘chican@’ of both Mexican and Salvadoran descent. In this stanza, Karina articulates her pride in being part of both the larger Chicanx identity group through her father and the ethnic group of her mother. This particular enunciation of her identity is hyper-local, one that is often erased in discussions of US Latinx youth whose identities are too often collapsed into one hegemonic ethnolinguistic category, what Kun (2004) has called the ‘Mexicanization’ of US Latinos, especially those residing in Los Angeles. While Jason and Chris expressed how the class encouraged them to learn about groups and topics outside their personal experiences, Karina’s stanza seems to express her self-exploration and growth as a bilingual and multi-ethnic young woman of color. As Denisse shared in her stanza of the corrido, the class made her reflect on who ‘we’– a collective that included both Latinx and Black students – were and the shared ‘pain’ they experienced. (Re)seeing herself and her classmates as ‘more than what people think,’ she reflects on how this pain may have shaped them, making her and her peers stronger. Without the class, which shed light on the kinds of racism and linguistic and cultural discrimination that have marginalized immigrants and people of color generally, Denisse would not have had the opportunity to, as she put it in her reflection, ‘break those stereotypes and the perception people have of us.’ This criticality, also tied to explicit action, is one Denisse learned alongside her peers and expressed in her stanza of the corrido. Another group of students, Ariana, Melissa, Giselle, Madeline, Richard and Mariyah, created a collaborative corrido that, like that of the first group, explored their learning over the course of the year of Chicanx/ Latinx Studies. They expressed this learning through a series of stanzas that, taken together, demonstrate the power of this kind of collaborative, translanguaged writing activity. The group’s corrido read: Racism is a sickness that we’ve all suffered It’s a disease with no cure Or is it? It doesn’t matter if you rich or poor Black or Latino

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It touches all our lives Through this class I see this is absurd And that it’s deeper than we’ll ever know (Ariana) Cada cara se ve triste No assumen de la gente Porque tienen su propio camino Mexicano, negro o gringo Todos somos iguales Y es lo que nos hace carnales (Melissa) In our short time here we have learned a lot Under a rug, histories left to rot We have realized an identity And developed a new mentality One of acceptance and understanding Through the lens of unity and caring (Giselle) Me vine de mi tierra El Salvador Con la intención de llegar a los Estados Unidos Ahora con mis lentes miro el mundo muy diferente Hablando de historias de muchos países Y la lo último todos somos iguales Claro que diferentes, pero con muchas similares (Madeline) This class is more than just a real one Talking stories of Michoacan Walking in, seeing the world oh so dirty Walking out, seeing the world oh so clearly Can’t stop the spirits when they need you This life is more than just a redo (Richard) I am in chicano studies Kickin it with all my buddies We learned so much about history Which was fi rst all a mystery Now I have opened eyes That the truth was in disguise (Mariyah) Although this corrido appears to ‘alternate’ (or ‘switch’) between English and Spanish, stanza by stanza, the process of creating and editing it, as we stated earlier in the chapter and explain further here, was highly translingual and transgressed monoglossic norms. Ariana starts out the poem with the powerful metaphor of racism as a ‘sickness that we’ve all suffered’ (our emphasis), questioning whether such a ‘disease’ has a ‘cure.’ She explicitly states that racism affects ‘Black’ and ‘Latino’ people (as well as ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ people). Seemingly picking up on these ideas, Melissa,

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using Spanish, writes ‘Mexicano, negro o gringo/Todos somos iguales’ [Mexican, black or white/We are all equal]. In Madeline’s fourth stanza, also rendered in Spanish, she expresses solidarity with Latinx people from ‘muchos países’ [many countries]. By learning the histories of these countries alongside the history of Mexico (and perhaps her own, El Salvador), Madeline’s line could be read as an expression of solidarity across Latinx people whose lives have been impacted by colonialism and racism and have fought to resist its repressive and damaging effects. Using English and Spanish, these three students build off one another’s expressions of solidarity across racial and ethnic distinctions, creating an unmarked and untranslated poem that centers their translanguaging and their raciolinguistic literacies. Another notable element of this group’s corrido that emerged through the normalization of linguistic and cultural flexibility in Mr Miranda’s classroom is the way it draws on and meshes different genres of music and poetry. As has been discussed at length in this chapter and in our past work, Mr Miranda’s use of the corrido genre was chosen in large part because of its cultural resonance with many of the Chicanx students in the class. What we can also see in this group’s collaborative poem is that Mr Miranda’s use of corridos – a genre created by those on the margins and which remains rooted in resistance – made space for other students who may not have had cultural ties to this music to bring their own poetic and musical influences into the writing of these reflective poems. In Richard’s stanza, for example, the last two lines are lyrics from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song, ‘Can’t Stop.’ Students also drew on elements of hip hop and spoken word rhyme schemes, figurative language and the use of repetition, making their collaborative corrido one that meshes not only English and Spanish, but also genre elements and musical styles. In this way, students not only built on one another’s ideas; they built on, incorporated, and played off of the linguistic and musical touchstones each of them brought to this reflective writing process. As Giselle expresses beautifully in her stanza, their Chicanx/Latinx Studies classroom – which cultivated a ‘norm’ of translanguaging and linguistic sharing and encouraged all students to draw on all their linguistic and cultural repertoires at all times – enabled students to look ‘under the rug’ at their own histories which had been ‘left to rot.’ Through this attention to students’ histories and the growth of their critical consciousness, they ‘realized an identity/And developed a new mentality’ that transcended racial and linguistic distinctions and enabled them to see themselves and their classmates as united in struggle. Conclusion and Implications

Present across the collaborative corridos, and contributing to the creation of the critical translanguaging space, were expressions of students’

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translingual sensibilities (Seltzer, 2020) – a set of attitudes, stances and dispositions that both align with the theoretical foundations of translanguaging and speak to the linguistic creativity and criticality (Li, 2011) that racially and linguistically marginalized students embody, but that are typically disregarded in the English Language Arts classroom. For these students, part of their solidarity seems to have emerged through a shared understanding of struggle at the intersections of race and language and a commitment to resisting the raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that shape that struggle. This criticality and transgressive spirit are key elements of students’ translingual sensibilities that were fostered through this kind of collaborative writing experience. What we see in this activity, and in ethnic studies curricula overall, is the cultivation of a critical translanguaging space. By design, an ethnic studies curriculum foregrounds the ancestral legacies of Indigenous communities and people of color and teaches counter-narratives that destabilize raciolinguistic ideologies and that, in turn, can nourish raciolinguistic literacies through critical forms of reading and writing in the classroom. This kind of pedagogy is transformational, as it has the potential to challenge the monolingual-white supremacy experienced by not only Latinx emergent bilingual students, but all racial and language minoritized students in both monolingual and bilingual classroom settings. What our study illustrates is that more research should take up an approach, particularly in English-medium settings, that goes beyond the conception of translanguaging as a ‘fashionable academic idea’ (Canagarajah, 2019: 3). Teachers like Mr Miranda are designing and implementing activities like collaborative corrido writing in linguistically and racially diverse classrooms across the United States, and their innovations can serve as empirical models of how classroom teachers can take up translanguaging in culturally empowering, transformative ways that forge solidarity across geographies and racial, ethnic and linguistic categories. Notes (1) It was precisely the banning of ethnic studies in Arizona in 2010 and the struggles that have followed that has led over a dozen states to expand these courses. California has moved forward to create legislation to support and expand ethnic studies. (2) We recognize that our use of ‘Mexican’ and ‘Latinx’ absolutely includes Black Mexicans and Black Latinxs. We also recognize that African Americans can also be Latinx. However, in this classroom study, none of the Mexican or Central American students identified as Black Latinxs and vice versa.

References Alim, H.S. (2005) Critical language awareness in the United States: Revisiting issues and revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher 34 (7), 24–31. doi:10.3102/0013189X034007024

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Baker-Bell, A. (2013) ‘I never really knew the history behind African American language’: Critical language pedagogy in an advanced placement English language arts class. Equity and Excellence in Education 46 (3), 355–370. doi:10.1080/10665684.2013.80 6848 Baker-Bell, A. (2020) Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (E. Holquist and C. Emerson, trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Buenavista, T.L. (2016) The making of a movement: Ethnic studies in a K-12 context. In D. Sandoval, A. Ratcliff, T.L. Buenavista and J. Marin (eds) Whitewashing American Education: The New Culture Wars in Ethnic Studies (pp. vii–xxvii). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Canagarajah, S. (2019) Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing. New York: Routledge. Chew Sánchez, M. (2006) Corridos in Migrant Memory. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Cochran-Smith, M. and Lytle, S.L. (2009) Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research in the Next Generation. New York: Teachers College Press. Delgado Gaitan, C. (1993) Researching change and changing the researcher. Harvard Educational Review 63 (4), 389–411. doi:10.17763/haer.63.4.b336053463h71081 de los Ríos, C.V. (2017) Picturing ethnic studies: Photovoice and youth literacies of social action. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 61 (1), 15–24. doi:10.1002/jaal.631 de los Ríos, C.V. (2018) Toward a corridista consciousness: Learning from one transnational youth’s critical reading, writing, and performance of Mexican corridos. Reading Research Quarterly 53 (4), 455–471. doi:10.1002/rrq.210 de los Ríos, C.V. (2019) ‘Los músicos’: Mexican corridos, the aural border, and the evocative musical renderings of transnational youth. Harvard Educational Review 89 (2), 177–200. doi:10.17763/1943-5045-89.2.177 de los Ríos, C.V. and Seltzer, K. (2017) Translanguaging, coloniality, and English classrooms: An exploration of two bicoastal urban classrooms. Research in the Teaching of English 52 (1), 55–76. de los Ríos, C.V., López, J. and Morrell, E. (2015) Toward a critical pedagogy of race: Ethnic studies and literacies of power in high school classrooms. Race and Social Problems 7, 84–96. de los Ríos, C.V., Seltzer, K. and Molina, A. (2021) ‘Juntos somos fuertes’: Writing participatory corridos of solidarity through a critical translingual approach. Applied Linguistics. doi: 10.1093/applin/amab026 Fine, M. (1994) Working the hyphens: Reinventing self and other in qualitative research. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) The Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 70–82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015) Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85 (2), 149–171. doi:10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O., Johnson, S. and Seltzer, K. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. Hornberger, N. (ed.) (2003) Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice in Multilingual Settings. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Kun, J. (2004) What is an MC if he can’t rap to banda? American Quarterly 56 (3), 741– 758. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/40068241.

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Lewis, G., Jones, B. and Baker, C. (2012) Translanguaging: Developing its conceptualization and contextualization. Educational Research and Evaluation 18 (7), 655–670. doi:10.1080/13803611.2012.718490 Li, W. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1222– 1235. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035 Martinez, D.C. (2017) Emerging critical meta-awareness among Black and Latina/o youth during corrective feedback practices in urban English language arts classrooms. Urban Education 52 (5), 637–666. doi:10.1177/0042085915623345 Maxwell, J. (2013) Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach (3rd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miles, M.B. and Huberman, M. (1994) Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Morrell, E. (2008) Critical Literacy and Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access, Dissent, and Liberation. New York: Routledge. Orfield, G. and Frankenberg, E. (2014) Brown at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future. Los Angeles, CA: Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Otheguy, R., García, O. and Reid, W. (2015) Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review 6 (3), 281–307. doi:10.1515/applirev-2015-0014 Paredes, A. (1958) ‘With His Pistol in His Hand’: A Border Ballad and its Hero. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Paris, D. (2009) ‘They’re in my culture, they speak the same way’: African American language in multiethnic high schools. Harvard Educational Review 79, 428–447. doi:10.17763/haer.79.3.64j4678647mj7g35 Paris, D. (2010) ‘The second language of the United States’: Youth perspectives on Spanish in a changing multiethnic community. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 9 (2), 139–155. doi:10.1080/15348451003704883 Rymes, B. (2014) Communicating Beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity. New York: Routledge. Saldívar, D.J. (1997) Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Saldívar, R. (2006) The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seltzer, K. (2019) Performing ideologies: Fostering raciolinguistic literacies through roleplay in a high school English classroom. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 63 (2), 147–155. doi:10.1002/jaal.966 Seltzer, K. (2020) ‘My English is its own rule’: Voicing a translingual sensibility through poetry. Language, Identity and Education 19 (5), 297–311. doi:10.1080/15348458.20 19.1656535 Seltzer, K. and de los Ríos, C.V. (2018) Translating theory to practice: Exploring teachers’ raciolinguistic literacies in secondary English classrooms. English Education 51 (1), 49–79. Seltzer, K. and García, O. (2020) Broadening the view: Taking up a translanguaging pedagogy with all language-minoritized students. In Z. Tian, L. Aghai, P. Sayer and J. Schissel (eds) Envisioning TESOL Through a Translanguaging Lens – Global Perspectives (pp. 23–42). Cham: Springer. Shor, I. (1999) What is critical literacy? Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice 1 (4), 2–32. Simonett, H. (2001) Banda: Mexican Musical Life across Borders. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Simonett, H. (2014) ‘Corrido’. In D. Horn, H. Carolyn Feldman, M. Courteau, P. Narbona Jerez and H. Malcomson (eds) Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Vol. IX (pp. 225–230). London: Bloomsbury.

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Souto-Manning, M. (2010) Freire, Teaching, and Learning: Culture Circles across Contexts. New York: Peter Lang. Vogel, S. and García, O. (2017) Translanguaging. In G. Noblit and L. Moll (eds) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Westgate, C.J. (2013) Notes on the wire: Ballads, biases, and borders of performance journalism. Media, Culture & Society 35 (8), 996–1010. doi:10.1177/0163443713501934 Weston Phippen, J. (2015) How one law banning ethnic studies led to its rise. The Atlantic, 19 July. See https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/07/how-onelaw-banning-ethnic-studies-led-to-rise/398885/.

9 Critical Translanguaging Literacies and Latinx Children’s Literature: Making Space for a Transformative and Liberating Pedagogy Luz Yadira Herrera and Carla España

Introduction

There is increasing attention to and availability of children’s literature that represents the varied cultures, languages, ways of being and experiences of children in the United States. A popular infographic based on data compiled by University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center showed that in 2018, only 5% of children’s books published in that year depicted Latinx characters (Huyck & Park Dahlen, 2019). This percentage had increased slightly from 2.4% in 2015 (Huyck et al., 2016). Although there have been some gains since then, there is still a lot of work to be done to increase the opportunities, publication and integration into curriculum of literature written by Latinx authors that authentically represents Latinx experiences. In this chapter we focus on children’s literature that depicts the dynamic language practices – using features of English and Spanish – of bilingual Latinx children and their families.1 Latinx writers of children’s literature use translanguaging, as Pérez Rosario (2015: ii) notes, ‘as a means of affirming or negotiating cultural identity.’ Sometimes it is also used to represent ‘culturally specific traditions and customs,’ where an English translation does not make sense (Pérez Rosario, 2015: ii). But translanguaging for bilingual writers goes beyond these simple uses, sometimes explicitly showing how their repertoire is not bound by the separation of English and Spanish. Bilingual authors use their entire

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repertoire for creative, critical and meaning-making purposes. We particularly focus here on how this literature can create opportunities for educators to engage in critical pedagogical practices that sustain (Paris & Alim, 2017) Latinx bilingual students by developing what we call their critical translanguaging literacies, that is, their ability to use their entire repertoire, regardless of the language of the written text, to critically examine their histories and lives in US society. It is important to note that just because children’s texts are written solely in one language, it does not mean that bilingual students engage with these monolingually (García & Kleifgen, 2019). When bilingual students read monolingual texts, they are still actively drawing from their entire semiotic repertoire to make meaning (García, 2020; García & Kleifgen, 2019). That is, even when they read a text printed all in English, bilingual children will still make connections, infer and extend their understanding of the text by engaging their entire meaning-making repertoire, their translanguaging. However, we argue here that to develop critical translanguaging literacies, Latinx bilingual children need to engage with texts in which translanguaging is used in order to open up a space for them to question their histories, experiences and lives, their language and cultural practices, and the ways in which these have been silenced and stigmatized. In this chapter, we chose to highlight works that have been recently published by Latinx authors – texts that explore and grapple with complex and multi-layered topics with characters and stories brilliantly crafted. Many of these books also have a Spanish edition available. However, for this chapter, we focus on the original version of these works, which primarily use features of English but because of their critical content and the translanguaging practices they show on the printed page, lend themselves to supporting teachers in enacting a critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy. Our Positionalities

We have drawn from our experiences as Latina women and educators to design literacy instruction for Latinx bilingual students that uses temas and textos that raise not only their literacy and biliteracy awareness, but also their critical consciousness. Luz is a bilingual Mexicana, born in Mexico and raised in an immigrant community in Los Angeles. She taught bilingual and multilingual students in New York City, some of whom were newcomer immigrant students, others of whom were US-born but were designated as ‘English Language Learners.’ Carla was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, and began her K-12 schooling in New York City, where she was labeled an ‘English Language Learner.’ She began teaching in transitional and dual language bilingual programs as a middle-grade educator. In our experiences as teachers, and regardless of the language policy of the type of school program in which we were teaching, we have always

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supported the children’s language practices and their multiple/multimodal literacies. We have made room for bilingual read-alouds. And we have advocated for the acquisition of children’s literature about Latinx people for the schools’ bilingual libraries, knowing that these textos are important to expand Latinx children’s experience in shared and guided reading, as well as writing. The seeds of what we today call a critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy were planted long ago in our own teaching practice. Characteristics of a Critical Translanguaging Literacies Pedagogy

Centered on using meaningful children’s literature that reflects translanguaging practices (García, 2009), a critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy can enable educators to: (1) explore and make connections between the stories that students read and their families’ journeys; (2) affirm students’ community language and literacy practices; (3) sustain children’s complex and dynamic language practices, identities and cultures; and (4) critique unjust social structures and racism that dehumanize languageminoritized students. These practices can be transformative and liberating in the teaching of all children, but they are especially meaningful for minoritized bilingual children. A critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy rests on the use of bilingual children’s literature, particularly what Duyvis (2015) calls ‘own voices’ literature. This is literature by authors from minoritized groups, writing from their own experience for a variety of purposes. For instance, this ‘own voices’ literature can be used to guide or begin discussions on identity by using texts to rethink, reimagine and recreate ways of being that tackle tensions, shame or internalized notions of deficiency which have been projected onto language-minoritized communities. Educators can use these mentor texts to spark creative student writing, such as memoir writing and narratives that represent authentic characters with their respective voices in meaningful situations. The use of ‘own voices’ literature can also lead to project-based learning around topics such as racism, identity, intergenerational connections, family and community knowledge, (im)migration, family separation, gender inequalities and foreign policy. Engaging children in project-based learning that is centered on meaningful topics and ‘own voices’ literature can create opportunities for families to participate in the classroom community, reading and integrating family/community knowledge. Using bilingual children’s literature in instruction can also support teachers’ and students’ study of

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language use in texts and in lives. Most importantly, it enables noticing how this literature ‘leverages community funds of knowledge’ and builds ‘critical language awareness’ (Alamillo, 2017: 151, 161). As Sims Bishop (1990) reminds us, books can be mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors, and reading can be a powerful guide for selfaffirmation, and so it is vital that children see positive reflections of themselves as they engage in literature. With literature that authentically reflects the varied cultural and linguistic practices of Latinx communities, children can make connections as they see representations of self, family, local community and social issues in larger society and across other texts. This also enables children to move beyond making connections with the reading to producing authentic writing and engaging in other culminating projects. Teachers and students can then resist monolingual standards in storytelling, as well as expand ways of remembering the stories of caregivers, community members and ancestors, and honoring new ways of being, new ways of remembering and new ways of resisting. A critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy focuses on what Latinx bilingual students are communicating as students draw from their entire linguistic repertoires when engaging in the classroom. It also focuses on how the students share their ideas, taking a dynamic approach to language use and not a deficit approach that would view students from the perspective of lacking English or lacking Spanish. Students can then take more risks without fear of their language practices being monitored or constantly policed to meet monolingual standards. In this way, students can engage more deeply with the content, since they will no longer have to worry about getting the language ‘wrong.’ In the next section, we show how we can do this by designing our teaching and learning experiences around what we call ‘the three Ts: temas, textos and translanguaging’ (España & Herrera, 2020). Temas, Textos and Translanguaging: The Three Ts of a Critical Translanguaging Literacies Pedagogy

We use a critical translanguaging literacies framework in thinking about the design and implementation of lessons that include temas that sustain our students’ cultures, histories, identities and language practices, textos that stand in solidarity and affirm these, and translanguaging that honors and supports students’ languaging in the teaching and learning experience (España & Herrera, 2020). For topic selection for curriculum design to be authentic, the lives of bilingual Latinx children must be understood within the present socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures. Bilingual Latinx students’ present realities are intricately connected to historical injustices, and their socio-emotional responses reflect the tensions of living at the intersections of identity negotiation in a world that sometimes makes it seem as if it does not want them to thrive.

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Choosing textos that interrogate temas, issues and systems of injustice, that use translanguaging, and that delve deeply into questions of identity, racism, oppression, language and culture, can open up the possibility of a powerful approach to teaching and learning. Making space for translanguaging literacies as communicative practices and to make meaning of textos with critical temas allows the entire classroom and school community to examine the ways in which language and power operate in textos and in our lives. Translanguaging in Children’s Literature: Redefining Latinidad by Challenging the Use of Italics

Latinx children’s literature authors are increasingly engaging with translanguaging literacies. Their dynamic use of Spanish and English is coupled with complex bilingual Latinx characters, including Black and Indigenous Latinx, whose languaging does not explicitly consist of separate Spanish or English language features. These complex language practices are a visible part of Latinx identity. By doing so they are forging a more expansive view of Latinidad (Rosa, 2019). From a Dominican teen in Elizabeth Acevedo’s (2018) The Poet X, to David Bowles’ (2018) 12-year-old Mexican American protagonist in They Call Me Güero, to Aida Salazar’s (2019) Oakland-based story with a protagonist that identifies as Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican in The Moon Within, we see how Latinx identity and dynamic language practices are nurtured, contested and redefined at several intersections. Isabel Quintero’s (2019) award-winning book, My Papi Has a Motorcycle, begins with: ‘My papi has a motorcycle. From him I’ve learned words like carburetor and cariño, drill and dedication’ (Quintero, 2019: 1). Spanish words burst from the pages with signs on storefronts and speech bubbles with words in Spanish from Papi and the rest of the family. This dynamic use of language is a part of the characters’ lives, from family relationships to connections with a changing neighborhood. It is noteworthy that many of these Latinx children’s authors do not always italicize words in Spanish when writing in English. For example, Isabel Quintero does not use italics. Whether or not to use italics in writing is a recurring point of discussion in the world of children’s literature (this includes middle-grade and young adult [YA] novels). The decision to italicize or not impacts how a character’s Latinx identity and language practices are interpreted. Some authors who choose to italicize words in Spanish point to the primary school age range of their audience, and argue that younger readers need this signal. Others take a clear stance to not use italics in their writing unless it is for emphasis, which is, as they often point out, how any writer would generally use italics. Publishers and editors have a lot to do with this decision, and several authors are increasingly advocating for their bilingual writing to reflect

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their bilingual lives and intersecting Latinx identities. When asked, ‘How do your characters represent authentic language practices?’ at the Bank Street College 2019 ‘Diverse Voices in Latinx Children’s Literature MiniConference,’ award-winning middle-grade author, Pablo Cartaya, acknowledged the role that his editor played in this decision: ‘I told her, I don’t want to italicize the Spanish,’ to which she replied ‘Oh my God, I would never do that!’ (Gribble, 2019). Cartaya proceeded to advocate for more Latinx editors and publishers, and noted that these are needed, ‘if we are going to change the way we perceive language and use language, and make it okay; stop othering it’ (Gribble, 2019). Hilda Eunice Burgos, a middle-grade author, answered the same question about authentic language practices as Cartaya, and shared how her editor said that italicizing wasn’t a common practice anymore (Gribble, 2019). The examples of children’s literature below, from picture books for young readers to YA novels for older teens, reveal a varied use of italics. Author and illustrator Juana Medina (2016) italicized words in Spanish in Juana and Lucas. She wanted to support readers who are making their transition from picture books to this beginning chapter book, but she also decided that the italics helped her emphasize the main character’s connection to her language practices in Spanish and hesitation to learn English. The New York Times bestselling author and 2019 Newbery medalist, Meg Medina, writes texts for readers across primary, intermediate and secondary settings. Medina’s Mango, Abuela and Me (2017) and Tía Isa Wants a Car (2011), picture books for young readers, italicize words in Spanish, highlighting translanguaging in family communication. However, in Medina’s (2018a) Newbery Award-winning middle-grade text, Merci Suárez Changes Gears, expressions in Spanish such as ‘fulana de tal’ (Medina, 2018a: 15) ‘son la candela’ (Medina, 2018a: 21) and ‘Ave María’ (Medina, 2018a: 51) are not italicized, but embedded in rich dialogue and character description. At the 2018 National Council of Teachers of English Annual Meeting, Meg Medina (2018b) shared that by writing books bilingually without italics, authors show confidence and trust in their readers’ abilities to navigate a text and make meaning. Readers in schools do the same with these texts, developing their own translanguaging literacies. Daniel José Older, a middle-grade and YA New York Times bestselling author, regularly addresses this issue during conferences and school visits and to his nearly 50,000 Twitter followers. In a 2014 YouTube video with over 25,000 views, the author satirically re-enacts what it might sound like to readers when reading texts in English that include italics when using Spanish (Older, 2014). He changes his persona, toggling between his ‘normal’ self to a stereotypical version of himself (a fedorawearing, cigar-smoking, guitar-playing Latino with an exaggerated intonation when using Spanish). Older navigates his persona across named

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languages to convey a clear image of what happens when authors italicize, illustrating how othering it can be. He ends the video by returning to his ‘normal’ self and states: ‘That’s not what happens; that is not what we sound like; that’s not what anybody sounds like. But when we put italics in a sentence, that is what it looks like, and that is what it reads like’ (Older, 2014). Older (2014) is reminding us to use italics in the way that any writer would, which includes using italics for emphasis only, and not creating a false distinction between named languages when this separation does not reflect the languaging reality of bilingual Latinx speakers. Textos y Temas

Although we especially encourage the use of mentor texts in classrooms with Latinx children, these textos are very important for monolingual white children who need to understand the lives and practices of bilingual Latinxs and become better listeners. These books engage with temas that are of utmost importance for Latinx students – (im)migration, borders, colonial relations, documentation, family, important Latinx figures, culture, language. We begin with picture books that can be used with young children in lower elementary classrooms, but which can be embraced by educators across all grade levels (we highly encourage this!). We highlight: Yuyi Morales’ (2018a) Dreamers [Soñadores, in Spanish (2018b)]; Duncan Tonatiuh’s (2018) Undocumented: A Worker’s Struggle; and Anika Aldamuy Denise’s (2019a) Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré [Sembrando historias: Pura Belpré: bibliotecaria y narradora de cuentos, in Spanish (2019b)]. We then discuss texts that can be used with older children in upper elementary grades, starting with Sarai Gonzalez and Monica Brown’s (2018) Sarai series, Juana and Lucas by Juana Medina (2016), and Angela Dominguez’s (2018) Stella Díaz Has Something to Say. We continue by highlighting middle-grade novels that can be used with young adolescents: Meg Medina’s (2018a) Merci Suárez Changes Gears [also available in Spanish, Merci Suárez se pone las pilas (2020[2] [3] )]; David Bowles’ (2018) They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems [Me dicen güero: Poemas de un chavo de la frontera, in Spanish (2020)]; and Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring by Angela Cervantes (2018). Lastly, we discuss YA literature that can be used in secondary schools, and focus on three key texts: Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez’s (2018) comic book series, La Borinqueña; Isabel Quintero’s (2014) Gabi, a Girl in Pieces [Gabi, fragmentos de una adolescente, in Spanish (2020)]; and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (2018) [Poet X, in Spanish (2019)]. Readers can fi nd growing resources to learn about the latest Latinx reads through the various organizations dedicated to ‘diversifying’ the canon, most notably DisruptTexts, We Need Diverse, Latinx in Kidlit and Latinx in Publishing. There are also organizations like the American

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Library Association (ALA), which sponsors the Pura Belpré Award, and its affiliate, REFORMA. Another great resource is Texas State University’s Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award. Besides the websites and blogs named above, we recommend following the work of scholars who write about Latinx children’s literature such as Laura Jiménez and Marilisa Jiménez García. Especially Jiménez García’s recently published book, Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature (Jiménez García, 2021). Picture books for young children in lower elementary grades

In her widely celebrated picture book, Dreamers, Yuyi Morales (2018a) depicts her own immigration story. She tells the story of the power of public libraries and the impact that they had on her life and that of her young son as new immigrants in the United States. She shares a message of hope as she writes affirmations for those who might need to feel that they belong: ‘We are stories. We are two languages. We are lucha. We are resilience. We are hope. We are dreamers, soñadores of the world’ (Morales, 2018a: 27). In her book, Morales writes freely. She draws from features of Spanish and English between and within sentences, as bilinguals often do. Seeing fluid language practices reflected in this book can be affirming to bilingual children, their families and their communities. The content of the book along with the powerful message, and the language used to convey it, will resonate with many readers, especially with immigrant and Latinx families. Duncan Tonatiuh’s (2018) picture book, Undocumented: A Worker’s Fight, follows Juan, a Mixteco immigrant in the United States who is caught between wanting to provide for his growing family and calling out the injustices in his workplace. He joins his coworkers in demanding a fair wage, despite the threat that he faces as an undocumented worker. His tío, as Tonatiuh (2018) writes, reminds him that he’s an ‘idiota,’ that he’s about to have a child and is jeopardizing his ability to provide for him. With everyone organized in solidarity to demand a fair wage, they are fi nally successful in persuading the boss to pay back their owed wages and to pay them a fair wage moving forward. The book ends by showing Juan in his expanding role as a labor organizer and helping other workers similarly fight to get fair wages and decent working conditions. Inspired by Mixteco codices, the book opens and closes like an accordion. It has Tonatiuh’s signature illustration style – a style also seen in Mixteco codices. In his illustrations, Tonatiuh uses a mixed media design approach by scanning images of hair for the hair of his characters, and pieces of cloth for the characters’ clothes, giving it a textured appearance. It is noteworthy that he uses a Mixteco character for his book, given the vast underrepresentation of Indigenous people in children’s literature. In the story, Juan grew up in a village where people do not speak Spanish, only

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Mixteco, which highlights Mexico’s own multilingual identity. Tonatiuh does not use Mixteco in the narration of Juan’s story, but he does use features of Spanish which show up as italicized in the first mention in the book. Tonatiuh’s writing typically features Mexican stories, history and culture, and even though they are published mostly in English, he creates translanguaging spaces strategically through the use of key words in Spanish. In Anika Aldamuy Denise’s (2019a) Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré, readers are introduced to Belpré’s journey from Puerto Rico to New York City, where she became the first Puerto Rican librarian for the New York Public Library. Belpré wrote the stories she heard growing up, folk tales from Puerto Rico that were absent from books in the library. The ‘cuentos folklóricos’ (Denise, 2019a: 1), ‘cuentos she carries’ (Denise, 2019a: 2), from Puerto Rico to New York, continued to be a part of her ‘nueva vida’ (Denise, 2019a: 3). Denise repeats the word ‘cuentos’ in Spanish and, unlike Tonatiuh, Denise does not use italics in the English version of the book (the book is also available in a Spanish edition). With the repetition of ‘cuentos,’ we are reminded that stories and storytelling are key to Belpré’s life, sustaining her during the transition from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States. All three texts can be used to develop lessons on meaningful topics that center Latinx children and their communities. These books address issues of belonging, (im)migration and identity, as well as showing some of the struggles involved in the journey to the (mainland) United States and their lives afterward. The authors represent these characters’ experiences as bilingual Latinx people as they engage in translanguaging throughout the text. Books for children in upper elementary grades

In Juana and Lucas by Juana Medina (2016), we meet Juana and her dog Lucas while getting to know their city of Bogotá, Colombia. We follow along as Juana faces several challenges in school. One of these challenges is learning English, but Juana loves to read and is motivated to learn as she prepares to visit Florida with family. When her mother insists that it is time to go to bed and that the lights be turned off, Juana is not ready to stop reading; she continues: ‘Thank goodness my abuelo gave me a flashlight to use in case of an emergency. Having to turn the lights off and stop reading inmediatamente is defi nitely an emergency’ (Medina, 2016: 6). A favorite of teachers and students in late second grade and early third grade, Juana and Lucas not only supports readers as they transition from picture books to chapter books, but also integrates translanguaging throughout the story. Like Juana Medina, Angela Dominguez (2018) uses Spanish throughout her book, Stella Díaz Has Something to Say. Stella speaks Spanish with her family, her school’s librarian, and sometimes throughout her day

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in school, even when her speech teacher corrects her for this practice: ‘Once a week, I leave my regular class for speech class. Speech is where I learn to speak properly. This means how all the letters and words are supposed to sound in English’ (Dominguez, 2018: 36). The book continues, ‘“No Spanish right now, Stella.” She always says that when I accidentally say a word in Spanish’ (Dominguez, 2018: 38). This text not only shows translanguaging practices, as a child uses features of Spanish and English across home, school and gatherings with friends, but also does not shy away from presenting the tensions in how language practices are welcomed or shamed by people in authority in schools. How do children perceive their bilingual language practices? How do their families interpret their navigating of language spaces across different settings? How do teachers, administrators and school staff perceive children’s bilingualism? What language policies are implemented and how do these impact children? In Sarai Gonzalez and Monica Brown’s (2018) Sarai series, Sarai Gonzalez is a 4th grader with a big family and a big heart. In the first book in the series, Sarai and the Meaning of Awesome, her grandparents have to move, and Sarai comes up with ideas to help them buy their house. Sarai’s parents are from Perú and Costa Rica; they all live in New Jersey, and their bilingual identities shine through in family conversations and community events. Tata and Mama Rosi, Sarai’s grandparents, call their grandchildren (three girls) ‘nietas,’ and family conversations include sayings in Spanish. Spanish is completely integrated into the content across the different scenes. Readers sometimes see a translation of a saying within the text: ‘“Barriga llena, corazón contento,” Tata says. “Full stomach, happy heart.” That’s one of his favorite sayings. But how can I have a happy heart when Tata and Mama Rosi are going to have to move?’ (Gonzalez & Brown, 2018: 20). The author’s use of bilingual language practices also gives the reader a glimpse into other aspects of the characters’ identities. We learn more about Sarai’s Peruvian/Costa Rican/New Jersey family as Sarai and her cousin plan for their lemonade stand. We learn more about Perú, about how important it is to Sarai, and how this aspect of her identity even makes it onto the signs they create for their stand: ‘“Limonada,” Juju says. “We’ll make the signs in English and Spanish.” “Wait!” I say. “I just thought of something that rhymes with limonada – chicha morada!” Chicha morada is a special drink made out of purple corn from Peru. I love it, and I bet our neighbors will too’ (Gonzalez & Brown, 2018: 62). Sometimes, inclusion work in curriculum and pedagogy centers on holidays and foods, lacking a depth of understanding of children’s family, community and bilingual practices. In these texts, although we may read about life in Bogotá in Medina’s Juana and Lucas, we also read about the albóndigas in Stella Díaz Has Something to Say, and the alfajores and

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chicha morada in Sarai and the Meaning of Awesome. The authors’ purposeful use of translanguaging shows depth of family relationships and character identity formation as they navigate growing up as bilingual and bicultural beings. Books for young adolescents in middle school

Merci Suárez Changes Gears, Meg Medina’s (2018a) middle-grade novel, has received numerous awards and recognitions, such as the prestigious Newbery Medal. In this novel, Merci attends an affluent Florida private school on a scholarship and has to work extra hard to keep it. She is part of an intergenerational family household and gets worried that something seems odd about her grandfather, her Lolo, but no one seems to want to talk to her about it. In this excerpt, Merci narrates what happened when Lolo loses his wallet, but as it turns out, he had just dropped it while gardening, and has not been robbed as he had previously claimed: ‘When Abuela found his billfold in the bed of lantana he’d been weeding that afternoon – Ay-ay-ay! ¡Qué escándalo! Her volume button got stuck on high, and the whole block could hear her yelling about how he had to pay more attention’ (Medina, 2018a: 21). The author typically uses language fluidly in her books, and in Merci it is no different. She represents a US Latinx family with all of its nuances, linguistic and otherwise. Readers are not provided with translations for the words or phrases she uses in Spanish, and these are not otherized in any way. All of her words coexist harmoniously, again, genuinely reflecting how many bilingual families engage with translanguaging. David Bowles’ (2018) novel in verse, They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems, details Güero’s life as he navigates middle grade and his border identity. As he returns to the United States from visiting his family in Monterrey, Mexico, he remembers the affection from his grandparents and feeling ‘recharged’, not just by the love, but also ‘cultura’ (Bowles, 2018: 88). Like Meg Medina, Bowles uses features of English and Spanish throughout this book. Words are not italicized or relegated to a specific character’s dialogue – a common bilingual writing approach. As such, the author completely embraces his own border identity. The narrator shares his feelings toward Mexico – what it means to him, and how he feels after he leaves. It also reveals the emotional despedida from his grandparents, and even though he has to say goodbye to them, they are always with him in some way. Anyone who has various places to call home, or whose beloved family members live far away, can relate. The emotions are high, and the author languages freely, without the borders imposed by English or Spanish, to convey these deep feelings. These examples reflect varied translanguaging practices within the Latinx community. For many in the Latinx community, the language called Spanish comes in small ripples, and not waves. This has to do with

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oppressive societal practices or schooling that have never supported bilingual Latinx identities. Latinx children’s authors represent this reality. In Angela Cervantes’ (2018) Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring, we meet Paloma, who from the fi rst chapter is shown to have a Spanish vocabulary book as she practices saying phrases during her trip to Mexico City. Cervantes sets up this tension with speaking in Spanish and traveling to Mexico over her summer break, as Paloma tells her mother, ‘No quiero México. Tengo miedo de camarón’ (Cervantes, 2018: 8). Her mother is initially confused by hearing her daughter say that she is afraid of shrimp, but then Paloma clarifi es that she doesn’t like ‘change’ (Cervantes, 2018: 8). She tells her daughter that ‘change’ is ‘cambio’ and applauds Paloma for her efforts. Paloma was not raised speaking Spanish since her Mexican father passed away when she was very young. Yet, this trip connects her to this part of her identity, her past, and reshapes her present and future. The young adolescents’ literary texts that we have considered in this section offer a glimpse into the complex cultural and linguistic variability of US Latinx youth. We see Merci, whose identity is shaped and informed by her experiences with her extended family. We encounter Güero grappling with his border identity as he fully participates in both of these two worlds as one. And we also encounter Paloma, who yearns to reconnect with an important part of herself. Books for adolescents and young adults

YA literature is a genre that keeps growing in popularity, drawing the attention not only of young adults, but of adults as well. A market research study revealed that over half of YA readers are over 18, with the largest group being in the 30–44 age range (Book Business, 2012). The three texts that we highlight here have certainly drawn the attention of more than just teenagers. In Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez’s (2016) comic book series featuring the fi rst Afro-Latina superhero, La Borinqueña, Marisol Rios de la Luz leaves her studies at Columbia University in New York City for a semester of environmental studies in Puerto Rico. Marisol not only connects with family on the island, but also gains superpowers from Atabex, a Taíno goddess. Miranda-Rodriguez uses fluid language practices throughout Marisol’s encounters with family, friends, ancestors and the environment. In La Borinqueña #1, readers are introduced to Marisol’s family and home in Brooklyn, New York. When Marisol leaves home to go to her undergraduate campus, she yells ‘¡Bendición!’ and her parents respond in Spanish with ‘¡Que Dios te bendiga!’ (Miranda-Rodriguez, 2016: 9). When she finally prepares to leave for her studies in Puerto Rico, Marisol’s mother gifts her a ribbon from a frame that reads: ‘El Grito de Lares, el 23 de septiembre 1868.’ The mother tells Marisol: ‘It’s been framed since

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your father and I fi rst met, negrita. Pero sirve mejor ahora contigo’ (Miranda-Rodriguez, 2016: 14). In La Borinqueña #2, Marisol considers Puerto Rico her home and continues to see the injustices across Puerto Rican communities in New York and on the island of Puerto Rico. Spanish words are interspersed not only to show how people communicate but to also shed light on injustices. ‘Ay Pedrito, lo único que le pediría a Yemayá es que nos brinde un hogar seguro, ahora que FEMA nos ha abandonado en esta ciudad,’ Julio tells his partner, right before they flee from homophobic and xenophobic attacks (Miranda-Rodriguez, 2018: 2). Marisol then arrives in full superhero disguise having turned into La Borinqueña. She tells Pedro and Julio, ‘You can be Puerto Rican, American, and free to love. Love always wins. That’s your right.’ Julio responds: ‘Gracias por todo negrita, con todo mi corazón’ (Miranda-Rodriguez, 2018: 3). During a moment of tension, Marisol and her friend Lala meet students at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus, the day before a march. Puerto Rican identity, colonization, recovery and language practices are at the center of the conversation with Puerto Rican university students, with protest signs that read: ‘Puerto Rico No Se Vende’ and ‘Puerto Rico Se Levanta’ (Miranda-Rodriguez, 2018: 48). When Marisol introduces herself to the group, her accent is questioned by her peers: ‘Y ese acento, ustedes son Nuyorquinos, ¿verdad?’ and they then continue in English, assuming that Marisol and Lala will not understand Spanish very well: ‘Let me stop you right there, and I’ll tell you this in English so you understand me better’ (Miranda-Rodriguez, 2018: 40). In these examples, Miranda-Rodriguez shows that Latinidad is linguistically complex. Although the characters are all Puerto Rican university students, they use language differently depending on the context in which they have lived. Marisol is immediately faulted for having ‘that accent’ and viewed as not being authentically Puerto Rican but being Nuyorican. Language is used to highlight tensions having to do with identity, privilege, race, social class and colonization. In Gabi, a Girl in Pieces, Isabel Quintero beautifully writes the story of Gabi, a high school girl learning to love herself as she is, developing her gift of poetry writing, and fi nding the balance between her friendships and relationships with her family and with boys. Gabi negotiates her relationship with a drug-addicted father and a mother who constantly criticizes her weight and imposes her ideas of what it means to be a ‘good’ girl. In navigating her complex world, Gabi draws from her entire linguistic repertoire as she writes in her journal and letters to her Papi that she never sends. She misses her dad who disappears from their lives for days or weeks at a time, without knowing when or if he will be back, or if he will still be alive. We see how Gabi uses her language fluidly in her diary, letters, poetry, and her everyday dialogue with the important people in her life, especially her mother.

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In one scene, Gabi goes to Tijuana where she hopes she can get her prom dress made – it does not go well. The seamstress has made the dress too small and the design is nothing like she expected. Gabi thought she looked like a piñata. And when she was stressed, she thought about food: ‘I thought about all the food I would eat later as we drove back, straight past the juggling kids, the fruit vendors, covijas por veinte dólares, the crippled, mangled and poverty-stricken populace quien nos despedía de México lindo y querido’ (Quintero, 2014: 224). As she describes all the food that would make her feel better after a humiliating experience with the seamstress, she manages to critically reflect on her surroundings as she is leaving Tijuana. With a ‘México lindo y querido,’ Quintero gives a nod to a famous traditional song by that same name that Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike can widely recognize and sing along with. The song reflects a deep love and patriotism for Mexico – a Mexico that also has impoverished people, struggling day-to-day, and in this case selling their goods to those waiting in line to cross the border to the other side. Gabi uses her language fluidly as she describes her feelings and her surroundings, which anyone who has made this trip by car across the border will recognize. In an interview led by a high school student, Quintero says that Gabi has a lot of herself in her, and describes the book as being ‘semi-autobiographical’ (Teen 365 at PCPL, 2018). Quintero is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and lives in southern California. Finally, we highlight The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, a standout YA novel of 2018 that won numerous awards, including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Printz Award and the Pura Belpré Award. In her book, the author develops a complex character in Xiomara, with all the nuances of adolescence. We see Xiomara, the main character, navigate what it means to be a Dominican young woman growing up in New York City. Like the author herself, Xiomara is a poet, and in this novel written entirely in verse, she develops into a spoken word poet. Spoken word is Xiomara’s escape from her perceived reality. When Xiomara is going through some issues at home, her teacher notices that she is not being her usual self. Xiomara has been unusually quiet and distracted in school, and when her teacher wants to know what is going on, she says nothing because she believes ‘in keeping matters of the home at home’ (Acevedo, 2018: 252). Acevedo engages her entire linguistic repertoire in her writing, particularly when Xiomara emulates her mother and, as we can see in the excerpt above, when she negotiates lessons from her family. These three YA novels similarly present a strong female protagonist grappling with young adulthood in various ways. Their cultural and language practices are shaped by the past and present and these also inform their future.

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Conclusion

In this chapter we have highlighted the importance of developing Latinx children’s critical translanguaging literacies, that is, their ability to use their entire repertoire, regardless of the language of the written text, to critically examine their histories and lives in US society. We have argued that to do so, it is important to have textos that portray the temas that are important to Latinx communities, and the translanguaging that is prevalent in Latinx communities. This would then encourage teachers to develop what we have called a critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy. To assist teachers in this endeavor, we have highlighted here some of the three Ts that we consider important: the textos, written by Latinx authors, which reflect the temas and the translanguaging. Latinx children’s literature increasingly includes texts with translanguaging for a variety of purposes. Some Latinx authors use italics to denote when there is Spanish writing in the text; others do not. Some offer translation and interpretations in the lines that follow, and others do not. But, as we have seen, Latinx children’s authors are increasingly portraying bilingualism dynamically; that is, the texts portray translanguaging, much like many Latinx children and their families often do. Most of the books we have highlighted in this chapter were published between 2018 and 2019. It is significant that many of these recent books with characters that engage in translanguaging have received numerous high-profi le recognitions. Perhaps this says something about the ways in which we are affirming translanguaging practices, and how the publishing industry is recognizing and trusting the ways in which authors are expressing the varied linguistic practices of Latinx communities. However, most of the own voices Latinx books published are by white-presenting Latinx authors and have white-presenting Latinx characters. It is critical to also support Black and Indigenous Latinx authors to amplify the varied Latinx experiences. These representations have major implications for classroom instruction. What kinds of understandings of Latinx identities and issues are highlighted if mostly white-presenting Latinx characters in stories populate our curriculum and libraries? How does this lack of representation contribute to anti-Blackness across communities? These are questions that we all must confront when considering text selection, topics and translanguaging. From classroom teachers, to librarians, to editors and the publishing industry, we are all implicated. In the classroom, children’s books like the ones we have included here can be used as mentor texts, as the chispa that sparks a deeper conversation on meaningful topics that relate to family history and culture, immigration stories, separation, feeling a connection to various places, and coming of age, among other topics. They can also spark prompts for writing or serve as a mentor text for writing by engaging students’ entire linguistic repertoire.

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Integrating books that engage Latinx students’ translanguaging literacies in curriculum design and instruction can be liberating and transformative for all. Incorporating a critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy means that bilingual and multilingual Latinx children can express themselves without constraints, and without being regulated by teachers and administrators who view their identities and language as something that needs to be ‘fi xed.’ It can also be transformative in that Latinx people are able to forge their own spaces where they can express what is unique to them, to their distinctive experiences and their identity, without always having to see themselves, and read themselves, through the eyes of monolingual white writers. It can also be transformative for monolingual educators who have held deficit and raciolinguistic perspectives that make them unable to listen to Latinx children’s potential (Rosa & Flores, 2017). A critical translanguaging literacies pedagogy includes liberation from oppressive linguistic ideological frameworks that often inform curricular and pedagogical decisions, and that alienate Latinx children from their own realities. We posit that administrators, teachers, students and parents/ caregivers can be liberated from the strict named language separation process in which society and schools have engaged, so that Latinx children can be included as meaningful literate beings with translanguaging practices. Children’s literature that engages dynamic language practices plays a key role in this transformation. For school leaders who seek an equity-based vision for their schools, and who are overwhelmed with decision-making around monolingual scripted curricula, advocating for critical translanguaging literacies can enable the development of a nurturing environment for all teachers and students, and relationship building with family and community members. For teachers who are often asked to regulate students’ languages in order to conform to the school’s and district’s language allocation policy, welcoming translanguaging literacies even within the traditional monolingual space can provide authenticity in what are labeled as monolingual or dual language bilingual classrooms which ignore the language and cultural practices of students. Some school policies direct teachers to persuade their students to think that they (the teachers) are monolingual in order to force the students to ‘stick’ to what is considered the language of instruction. But even when there is a target language in instruction, Latinx readers and writers cannot engage fully and critically in literacy acts unless they enter into texts with all of themselves, including their own translanguaging literacies. We suggest that using translanguaging texts like the ones we describe here can create a liberating space for them, encouraging students to engage in translanguaging in classrooms, as they already do in their lives outside of the classroom walls. For students who are shut down for not using the expected language at the designated time or space, or who do not see their community and

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home language practices as valid forms of communication or reflected in classroom expectations, engaging with translanguaging literature can help them see their own and their families’ experiences reflected and sustained in the stories that they read. Supporting students’ varied Latinx identities includes Black Latinx realities and translanguaging practices. This helps expand the understandings of Latinx identities by all, Latinx and non-Latinx students. It is no longer simply about planning instruction with monolingual texts in Spanish, with bilingual texts that display English and Spanish separately, or only with texts with white-presenting Latinx characters, but about texts that reflect the dynamic bilingualism with which all Latinx bilingual students engage. Finally, for families and community members who have often been made to feel that they have nothing of value to offer their children’s schools, embracing translanguaging literacies is an important reminder that they can support their children by sustaining the home language practices. The stories they tell their children are important, especially as these reveal intergenerational knowledge and coraje in the face of struggle. To see the home as a space where translanguaging literacies live, where Latinx bilingual children’s translanguaging practices are accepted, and understanding that these may not be exactly like their parents’, are key for nurturing comunidad (España & Herrera, 2020). Embracing children’s translanguaging and understanding translanguaging literacies as bilingual practices are important expressions of resistance to racialized linguistic hierarchies. By implementing translanguaging literacies through texts and pedagogy, we can contribute to eradicating the reproduction of racist ideologies, practices and policies in schooling. Note (1) We want to acknowledge that Latinx children bring many other language practices besides those associated with English and Spanish. Many Latinx children also use language practices associated with the many Indigenous languages in Latin America. In this chapter, however, we are limiting ourselves to Spanish and English.

References Alamillo, L. (2017) Translanguaging con mi abuela: Chican@ children’s literature as a means to elevate language practices in our homes. In L. Alamillo, L.M. MercadoLopez and C. Herrera (eds) Voices of Resistance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chican@ Children’s Literature (pp. 151–162). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld. Book Business (2012) Young Adult Books Attract Growing Numbers of Adult Fans. See https://www.bookbusinessmag.com/article/young-adult-books-attract-growing-num bers-adult-fans/all/ Duyvis, C. (2015) #ownvoices, to recommend kidlit about diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group. Tweet from @corinneduyvis, 6 September. See https://twitter.com/corinneduyvis/status/640584099208503296?s=20.

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España, C. and Herrera, L.Y. (2020) En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. (2020) Translanguaging and Latinx bilingual readers. The Reading Teacher 73 (5), 557–562. doi:10.1002/trtr.1883 García, O. and Kleifgen, J.A. (2019) Translanguaging and literacies. Reading Research Quarterly 55 (4), 1–19. doi:10.1002/rrq.286 Gribble, J. (Producer) (2019) KidLit TV Bank Street Latinx Mini-conference: Diverse Voices in Latinx Children’s Literature. Video, 9 March. See https://kidlit.tv/2019/03/ diverse-voices-in-latinx-childrens-literature-live-stream/. Huyck, D. and Park Dahlen, S. (2019) Diversity in Children’s Books 2018. See https:// readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018infographic/. Huyck, D., Park Dahlen, S. and Griffi n, M.B. (2016) Diversity in Children’s Books 2015. See https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflecting-diversityin-childrens-book-publishing/. Jiménez García, M. (2021) Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Medina, M. (2018b) Merci Suárez changes gears. In C. España and L.Y. Herrera (Chairs) Latinx Experiences in Classrooms and Communities: Knowing our Students through Text-based Conversations across Picture Books, Middle Grade, and YA Book Clubs [Panel presentation]. 2018 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Meeting, Houston, TX, 15 November. Older, D.J. (2014) Why we don’t use italics. YouTube, 4 August. See https://youtu. be/24gCI3Ur7FM. Paris, D. and Alim, S.H. (2017) Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Social Justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press. Pérez Rosario, V. (2015) The CUNY-NYSIEB Guide to Translanguaging in Latino/a Literature. New York: CUNY-NYSIEB. See https://www.cuny-nysieb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/CUNY-NYSIEB-Latino-Literature-Guide-Final-January-2015. pdf. Rosa, J. (2019) Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017) Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46 (5), 621–647. doi:10.1017/S0047404517000562 Sims Bishop, R. (1990) Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives 1 (3), ix–xi. Teen 365 at PCPL (2018) A conversation with Isabel Quintero. YouTube, 30 July. See https://youtu.be/aB1Y1stPEGA.

Children’s and YA literature books cited Acevedo, E. (2018) The Poet X. London: HarperTeen. Acevedo, E. (2019) Poet X. Madrid: Puck. Bowles, D. (2018) They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press. Bowles, D. (2020) Me dicen Güero: Poemas de un chavo de la frontera. New York: Vintage Español. Cervantes, A. (2018) Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring. New York: Scholastic. Denise, A.A. (2019a) Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré. London: HarperCollins. Denise, A.A. (2019b) Sembrando historias: Pura Belpré: Bibliotecaria y narradora de cuentos. New York: HarperCollins Español.

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Dominguez, A. (2018) Stella Díaz Has Something to Say. New York: Roaring Book Press. Gonzalez, S. and Brown, M. (2018) Sarai and the Meaning of Awesome. New York: Scholastic. Medina, J. (2016) Juana and Lucas. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Medina, M. (2011) Tía Isa Wants a Car. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Medina, M. (2017) Mango, Abuela, and Me. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Medina, M. (2018a) Merci Suárez Changes Gears. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Medina, M. (2020) Merci Suárez se pone las pilas. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Miranda-Rodriguez, E. (2016) La Borinqueña #1. New York: Somos Arte. Miranda-Rodriguez, E. (2018) La Borinqueña #2. New York: Somos Arte. Morales, Y. (2018a) Dreamers. New York: Neal Porter Books. Morales, Y. (2018b) Soñadores. New York: Neal Porter Books. Quintero, I. (2014) Gabi, a Girl in Pieces. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press. Quintero, I. (2019) My Papi has a Motorcycle. New York: Kokila. Quintero, I. (2020) Gabi, fragmentos de una adolescente. New York: Vintage Español. Salazar, A. (2019) The Moon Within. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books. Tonatiuh, D. (2018) Undocumented: A Worker’s Struggle. New York: Abrams Books.

10 The US Latinx Deaf Communities: Situating and Envisioning the Transformative Potential of Translanguaging Maribel Gárate-Estes, Gloshanda L. Lawyer and Carla García-Fernández

Introduction

Within the US bilingual Deaf education context, translanguaging has been discussed as a bilingual strategy for using American Sign Language (ASL) and English in the classroom (Gárate, 2012). However, since its introduction to the field in the early 2000s, there has been little development in thinking about how translanguaging works in classrooms for Deaf students in the United States. That is to say, the way translanguaging is being conceptualized and implemented simply expects students to alternate the use of American Sign Language and written English depending on the task. Applied in that way, translanguaging is far from recognizing and eliciting students’ abilities to use and adapt their full linguistic repertoire to known and new academic tasks and in diverse communicative contexts. Thus, it is but a shadow of what its full application could afford bilingual and multilingual Deaf students. A number of factors impact the application of translanguaging with bilingual and multilingual Deaf students. Primary among them is the perceived superiority of English over all other languages which permeates the designs of the current educational approaches for Deaf children, including those with a bilingual approach. Within schools and in scholarly research, Deaf students are perpetually viewed and portrayed as being unable to achieve competencies in English at the same level as their monolingual hearing counterparts. Like hearing bilinguals, Deaf children and adults are compared to and evaluated against monolingual standards of English proficiency. Consequently, schools place intense emphasis on developing 223

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English skills, often at the expense of other academic content. The monolingual ideologies of the US schooling system are especially evident when considering Deaf students whose home language(s) are different from those used at school. The students’ home languages are consistently treated as barriers to the development of English, in the case of monolingual programs, and of ASL and English at bilingual schools. The limited conceptualization of translanguaging is also demonstrated in teacher training and preparation programs. To date, there is no Deaf Education teacher preparation program that prepares teacher candidates to work with multilingual Deaf students, and only nine out of 58 programs specifically prepare teachers to work in bilingual education settings (Deaf Education, 2017). This is unfortunate, given the high percentage of the US Deaf student population that come from homes with languages other than standard English. With these issues in mind, this chapter discusses the Latinx Deaf student population within the United States. Our goal is to advance the case of how translanguaging can be a transformative pedagogy for this population of students. We aim to do this by outlining barriers and addressing the historical and current contexts that impact the language development and use of Latinx Deaf students. We believe that by exploring the historical and current contexts within a frame of linguicism, audism, ableism, and racism, we can take steps toward envisioning translanguaging as the transformative pedagogy that bilingual Deaf education needs to truly serve Latinx Deaf students. In envisioning the transformative possibilities of translanguaging for Latinx Deaf students, we first introduce the readers to the specific population we aim to address and weave stories and vignettes of Deaf students1 we have come across. We outline the most prevalent educational options and philosophies currently available to Deaf children in the United States to highlight their limitations. We then describe a real classroom as a case study that illustrates how the school experience of Latinx Deaf students was enhanced by taking full advantage of the students’ translanguaging abilities. In addition to the vignettes and the classroom case study, we describe some of the historical and current barriers that Latinx Deaf students encounter in the US schooling system. We close the chapter with a summary of what we envision needs to happen within the field to realize translanguaging as the transformative pedagogy it can be for Latinx Deaf students. Authors’ Positionality

We are three scholars with different backgrounds who have been engaged with Deaf education for years, and who have a special interest in the education of Deaf Latinx students. Maribel Gárate-Estes, the first author, is a hearing multilingual of Mexican American descent who was born in the United States but was educated in México from the age of three to 18. Upon

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returning to the United States, she experienced first hand the ideology of the supremacy of English over any other language, the devaluing of her previous educational experience, and a ‘sink-or-swim approach’ to second language learning. She discovered she had an aptitude for languages when she was befriended by a group of Latinx Deaf peers who taught her American Sign Language and welcomed her into the Deaf community. The experience and contrast between learning English in a school setting and ASL in a social setting ignited her curiosity for language learning, linguistics, education, and bilingualism. Her interests became a passion which turned into a career in Deaf Bilingual Education and over the past 26 years she has taught K-12 immigrant Deaf students, educated future bilingual teachers of Deaf children, and provided training for in-service teachers in the United States and around the world on the rights of Deaf children to a bilingual education that includes and values the Signed language of their Deaf Community. The second author, Gloshanda Lawyer, is a multilingual, multimodal language user who grew up with fluctuating hearing loss. The experience of being surrounded by languages but not always having auditory access to those languages helped her to understand the importance of prioritizing language access over language modality. Witnessing how her language use was often judged or not valued because of her negatively racialized identity, she used her speaking, hearing and educational privileges to advocate for and with Deaf, DeafBlind, DeafDisabled and Hard of Hearing students to have access to their home languages and cultures in addition to Sign and Tactile Languages. She taught in a bilingual Deaf school as well as in an early intervention program in a public school before moving into higher education to train future teachers and educational interpreters for the Deaf. She has worked to bring Disability Justice and Language Justice to movement and educational spaces. As a Deaf-Chicana multicultural consultant and Deaf Studies teacher, Carla García-Fernández, the third author, has been encouraging parents and their children to preserve their home language since her hearing parents were told by the staff of the residential school for the Deaf to speak orally in English, not in Spanish, as they signed. She feels that losing her family’s Spanish language left a void in her racial identity, which is why she strongly believes that translanguaging is a part of culturally sustaining pedagogies. Currently, she teaches at the Department of Deaf Studies at California State University Northridge, where she challenges students to explore issues beyond hearing/Deaf and English/ASL dualism through an intersectional lens. Situating and Recognizing the US Latinx Deaf Communities as Bi-/Multilingual

We recognize that the heterogeneity in the Deaf, Hard of Hearing, DeafBlind and DeafDisabled communities is such that attempting to

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describe situations that are true representations of everyone’s experiences would immediately fall short of the mark. However, because in this chapter we are attending to a particular group, we must roughly delineate its members for the purpose of achieving a shared discourse. We usually feel validated and respected when people use our preferred terminology. However, when referring to a group or community further composed of sub-communities, this can be challenging. First, given the ongoing marginalization of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (and/or questioning) individuals, we use the gender-neutral term Latinx. Second, when referring to Deaf people who prefer access to communication and knowledge through a Signed language, we use signers or the Signing community. With the long history of forced assimilation that has been thrust upon the Signing community in general, collective solidarity as part of identity-based politics has been, and continues to be, one resilient method to fight against Signed language oppression and audism. As such, the Deaf Pride movement resists the use of the lowercase d for deaf used by the medical community to label anyone with a hearing loss, preferring instead an uppercase D to denote group membership and to promote awareness about Deaf history, Deaf culture, Deaf people, Signed languages, and Deaf communities. For this reason, we choose to capitalize the term Deaf in this chapter. We must admit that the Signing community is not free of oppression and discrimination of others. Historically, sighted and able-privileged signing Deaf people have excluded signers who differ in their identification, such as DeafBlind (tactile or pro-tactile signers), DeafDisabled, Hard of Hearing, and Late Deafened individuals. This also extends to minoritized Deaf people of color with intersectional identities. We also acknowledge that there are a large number of oral, non-signing Latinx Deaf individuals in the United States. However, in this chapter we focus on the signing Latinx Deaf communities currently living in the United States and highlight the educational and social contexts of the school-aged members of this particular group. The Latinx Deaf community consists of those who are US born and those who have moved to the United States for a variety of reasons at various ages and who bring with them diverse schooling and cultural backgrounds. More importantly, those who have come to the United States may bring varying degrees of familiarity with, and fluency in, the Signed, written and/or spoken languages of their home countries. Upon arrival in the United States, students who attend a general education program will be expected to learn English and those who attend a deaf education program that uses ASL are tasked with learning both English – spoken and/ or written – and ASL, making them at least trilingual and often multilingual. Cannon et  al. (2016) have grouped Latinx Deaf students among those they named d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners (DMLs). In 2013, the Gallaudet Research Institute published the last

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report of the Annual Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth, a comprehensive database of K-12 d/Deaf students. At that time, DMLs comprised roughly 19–35% of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing student population, with 25% of those students coming from Spanish speaking homes, making them one of the fastest growing groups in US schools (Gallaudet Research Institute, 2013; Paul, 2016). Latinx Deaf individuals engage in translanguaging, especially in homes and community settings, as they move across various modalities, languages and communication systems daily as their norm. Unfortunately, Latinx Deaf students may be one of the largest marginalized translanguaging groups in the United States. In the discussion of bilingual and multilingual learners, the Deaf and Hard of Hearing student population is often one that is not immediately included. There are many reasons why Latinx Deaf students are routinely excluded from discussions of bilingual and multilingual populations, among which is the incomplete information that exists about the complex multilingualism of these students. For all the useful information contained in the Annual Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth, it does not include whether Latinx Deaf students use any of the other Signed languages in the United States such as: Plains Indian Sign Language (McKay-Cody, 1997); Keresan Pueblo Sign Language (Kelley & McGregor, 2003); Hawai’i Sign Language (Woodward & Lambrecht, 2017); Black ASL (McCaskill et  al., 2011); Puerto Rican Sign Language (J. Belaval, Personal communication, 2014); Cuban Sign Language (Hidalgo & William, 2010); and Mexican Sign Language (Quinto-Pozos, 2008; Ramsey, 2000). The Annual Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth also does not account for non-US based Signed languages which are likely to be used by recent Latinx Deaf im/migrants and refugees. Language and communication between Latinx Deaf students and their families is known to include Signed languages from their home countries, home-signs2 and international gestures (García-Fernández, 2014; Gerner de García, 1995) and barrio signs (Garcia, 2017). Lastly, while Spanish is reported as the third most regularly used language in schools (17.2%) and homes (22%) among PreK-12 Latinx Deaf students, it is still unclear whether it is used in its spoken form, written form, or both (Gallaudet Research Institute, 2011). As a consequence of the aforementioned factors, we continue to lack a complete representation of the population at hand, and the language use and full translanguaging of the Latinx Deaf student population continue to remain elusive to the larger bilingual and multilingual communities. The case of a Mexican Deaf student, Yahir, provides a prime example of the complex multilingualism embodied by Deaf Latinx students, and elucidates the difficulties in capturing and documenting not only a profi le of the students as they arrive in the United States but the language, social and cultural adjustments they and their families are compelled to make once they enroll in school.

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Yahir arrived at the bilingual day school for the deaf at 11 years old as a student who days ago had moved from México to the United States with his mother and stepfather. Previously, students like Yahir would have been labeled as having ‘no language background.’ However, examining Yahir’s history one can easily identify that Yahir has had varied, though inconsistent, language exposure and use. In México, he grew up as the only Deaf child in his town. Though his mother did not know much about raising a Deaf child, she tried her best to seek out information and provide Yahir with access to the best education available at the time; unfortunately, no schools in the area provided services for Deaf children. At the recommendation of Yahir’s doctor, she had him fitted for hearing aids at the age of four. Yahir began speech therapy shortly afterwards. Living with his mother and grandmother, Yahir observed the use of spoken Spanish between them on a daily basis, though his hearing aids did not give him full access to the speech sounds. As a result, Yahir’s expressive communication at home was a combination of home-signs/ gestures that he invented with his mom and forming the mouth movements of some Spanish words both with and without vocalizations with his grandmother. At the suggestion of a school-teacher, Yahir’s mother sought people in a nearby city that could teach Yahir Lengua de Señas Mexicana (LSM or Mexican Sign Language) when Yahir was seven. His mother never learned LSM but continued to use home-signs with Yahir. Now four years later, they were in the United States at a bilingual American Sign Language (ASL)/English school where all of Yahir’s peers were also Deaf. This new move was also a new language transition for Yahir, his mother, and now his bilingual Spanish/English stepfather. In an ideal world, Yahir would now be acquiring ASL and English at school, developing Spanish literacy and oracy – mouthing Spanish words and making vocal approximations as he feels comfortable – for continued development of his mother’s and family’s language, and fi nding Mexican Deaf community members to continue support and development of LSM. His mother would now be learning ASL and English and his stepfather would now be learning ASL; all to be used in the home, community and school environments. The Roots and Lasting Effects of Oppression

Carla García-Fernández has used the framework of Deaf-Latinx Critical Theory to address the intersectionality and the complex experiences of Latinx Deaf students. She studied five Latinx Deaf high school students who were born in either Spanish/English or Spanish-only speaking homes (García-Fernández, 2014). During the interviews, one of the students, Tina, proudly stated that she could sign, speak English or speak some Spanish with her family members, but signed ASL at school. She also took a written Spanish class in hopes of improving her relationship with her family who spoke Spanish only. Another student, Donny, was aware that his family spoke both Spanish and English, but he preferred to sign ASL and communicated with his older sister who knew some sign. He also

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wrote things down in English if needed. Prior to moving to the United States, the other three students – Carlos, Barney, and Rock – were enrolled at a school in México. In the interview, they shared their educational experiences. Carlos said he just played during instruction; Barney remembered pronouncing some Spanish words by watching and copying; and Rock recalled copying every word in Spanish by writing them down. Rock signed, ‘I hated it. My teacher probably thinks I am learning, but my brain is still empty. It is like no signing and no words equal to no brain. I prefer being at home since I have a Deaf sister whom I could communicate with in LSM.’ After arriving in the United States, Carlos, Barney and Rock learned ASL and written English. Their language use shifted when entering different spaces. At home, both Carlos and Barney communicated with their family using home-signs. Carlos used written Spanish if needed, and Barney continued to use spoken Spanish. With his family, Rock communicated in ASL more than in LSM. The students above provide an example of how even though Latinx Deaf students language in a variety of ways, their language competencies and experiences that are not English are often secondary to written and spoken English in academic settings. Both Deaf Latinx students and their families are expected to prioritize English. The prioritization of English over other language practices in the United States falls within the scope of linguicism (which reinforces the importance of speaking orally and writing well in English only), and of raciolinguistic ideologies (which describes how language is negatively problematized in racialized populations, such as the Latinx communities). Both linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1989) and negative ideologies on bilingualism and multilingualism for racialized groups (Rosa & Flores, 2017) are products of colonialism (Macedo, 2000) that permeate the US school system. Latinx communities have historically engaged in resistance to these perceived threats to white national identity (Crawford, 1992) by fighting to protect and maintain their home language practices, involving Spanish and/or Indigenous languages, and to advocate for multilingualism in schools. For Latinx Deaf children, one must consider the effects of ableism which alongside linguicism become evident in the assault perpetrated against Sign Language and Deaf people in the United States and around the world. The most notable example of linguicism and ableism in the field of Deaf education can be seen in the actions of Alexander Graham Bell. At the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf known as the Milan Conference of 1880, Bell championed and voted in favor of banning the use of Signed language in Deaf education (Van Cleve & Crouch, 1989). During his presentation at the National Academy of Sciences, Bell claimed that because Signed language is not part of the norm, it is inferior (Bell, 1883). Prior to 1880, most teachers of Deaf children were Deaf and used Signed language. Following the Milan Conference, Deaf teachers were replaced by hearing non-signing teachers

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and spoken language became the only medium of instruction. This approach to Deaf education is known as oralism or the oral-only approach and it remained in place for nearly 100 years (for more about the history of linguicism in the US Deaf community within a 50-year period, see Burch, 2002). Bell’s actions have perpetuated discrimination by hearing people toward Signed language and Deaf people of all races. Beliefs like his continue to be deeply entrenched in Deaf education and are more readily enacted by the medical community when they recommend against the use of Signed Language for newborn Deaf babies (Hall et  al., 2019; Humphries et al., 2012, 2017). Similarly, many early childhood practitioners caution parents that the use of a Signed language will inhibit the development of a spoken language – a recommendation that lacks, and in fact is contradicted by, scientific evidence (Petitto, 2000). Lastly, while the benefits of early Signed language exposure to cognitive development and language acquisition are promoted for hearing infants, the same access is routinely denied to Deaf infants (Kushalnagar et al., 2010). Latinx Deaf children who immigrate to the United States fi nd themselves located at the intersection of linguicism, racialization and ableism. The resistance of our communities to intersecting systems that deprive Deaf Latinx children of their languages and cultures is represented in a variety of forms. Multilingualism, as opposed to bilingualism (English and ASL), needs to be the focus when thinking about Latinx Deaf students who have ties to, and experiences with, multiple ways of languaging because they are members of many communities. This means that Latinx Deaf individuals are always translanguaging, as they use the features and modes that work best for them and the people they want to communicate with. The little emphasis that has been placed on the multilingualism of the Latinx Deaf individuals and their translanguaging practices indicates that the intersection of multiple issues such as linguicism, racialization and ableism are not sufficiently acknowledged and addressed, leaving them at a disadvantage from the start. The Intersections of Placement Options and Educational Approaches

Keeping the profi les of the students we have shared in mind, and our focus on starting with the needs and wishes of the Deaf community, we now briefly describe the educational placements available to Deaf students in the United States. The education of Deaf students in the United States falls within the purview of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), passed in 1990. As a result, Deaf students are entitled to a ‘free appropriate public education’ with an ‘individualized education plan’ in what is ‘the least restrictive environment,’ meaning that students with disabilities should be educated with other children to the greatest extent possible. Many in Deaf education and the Deaf community disagree with the

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selection of placements for Deaf children using the criteria of ‘least restrictive environment,’ arguing that this does not consider the language and communication needs of the children who need to be educated in contexts where they have full access to ASL, ignored in many mainstream and inclusion settings (Siegel, 2000). There is thus disagreement about what type of educational placement gives Deaf students the greatest access to a ‘free appropriate education’ in the ‘least restrictive environment.’ Ranking placements in terms of language ACCESS, from most to least, would be as follows: • • • •

special schools: residential and day schools for the Deaf co-enrollment mainstream with support full inclusion

It is instructive to understand that if we ranked placements on the basis of level of integration of Deaf children with others, as dictated by IDEA, the order would be exactly the opposite. Although these types of placements are often thought about as separate categories, there is much variation among them. For example, some residential and Deaf schools pay more attention to the development of ASL and to the many ways of languaging of Deaf Latinx children than others (Educational Programs for Deaf Students, 2018). Likewise, coenrollment programs are supposed to be bimodal/bilingual programs, expecting all children to learn ASL as well as spoken/written English (Antia & Metz, 2014). However, in many of these co-enrollment programs that have become popular in the last few years, there may be less attention paid to ASL (Antia & Metz, 2014). Deaf students in mainstream programs are also given different types of support, with some being mainstreamed for some classes with an interpreter and others not. Others receive support in resource rooms (Fiedler, 2001). The amount of support Deaf students receive in all classrooms responds sometimes to their individual needs, but at other times to the needs of school districts and the resources available at the schools. For example, not all school districts provide interpreters for the children. Schools take into account the number of Deaf students and their characteristics, the number of teachers of the Deaf they have, the rural/suburban/urban context of the schools, and factors that sometimes have more to do with fiscal needs than with the educational needs of the Deaf children (Siegel, 2000). Besides separate residential and Deaf schools, some schools have separate programs for Deaf students within the same school (Fiedler, 2001). This gives educators opportunities to mainstream Deaf children for certain subjects and not others. It also provides opportunities for Deaf children to be with other children for lunch, recess time or physical education. And there are school districts where an itinerant teacher for the Deaf is the only support students receive. For example, among the many

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experiences of Gárate-Estes as an educator of the Deaf, she once served 35 Deaf children in eight different schools. The quality and intensity of services that these children received depended on their needs, with some seen once a month, others weekly, yet others every other day. Again, some of these children had interpreters; others did not. Within these placement options, three main educational approaches have prevailed: (1) the oral-only approach, most recently termed the listening and spoken language approach, which emphasizes the development of a spoken language; (2) the Total Communication approach, a multi-sensory approach that encourages educators to use signs, fi ngerspelling, gestures, speech, and speechreading; and (3) the ASL/English bilingual approach, also known as sign bilingualism. It focuses on the development of two languages and all their corresponding expressive and receptive abilities (for a detailed review of educational placement and approaches, see Gárate et al., 2016). It is not unusual for Deaf children to experience one or more of these placements and one or more of these approaches throughout their schooling. Historically, in the United States and other countries, a Signed language has not been prominently incorporated in the education of Deaf students (Grosjean, 2010; Humphries, 2013; Swanwick, 2010). Much like English-only programs, the oral-only approach focuses on the exclusive use and instruction of English. Its aim is to develop listening and speaking skills that will support literacy development by leveraging hearing technologies, such as hearing aids and cochlear implants, to augment a child’s auditory access. The oral-only approach does not support and actively prevents the use of a Signed language (Hall et  al., 2019). Total Communication was originally conceptualized by Roy Holcomb in 1967 as a philosophy of communication that encouraged the incorporation of manual, visual and written modes alongside the spoken modality, which had received primacy under the oral-only education approach for nearly a century (Gárate et  al., 2016; Rendel et  al., 2018). As such, Total Communication is credited with re-introducing signing into classrooms. We use the term signing and not a Signed language because in the 1960s a number of artificially created sign systems were invented by educators, parents and researchers. Collectively, these systems are known as Manually-Coded English, and while they differ in design, their aim remains the same: to manually encode the morphological, semantic and syntactic characteristics of English in order to provide Deaf students with visual access to these features alongside spoken English (for a complete description of each type of Manually-Coded English, see Rendel et al., 2018). While Total Communication was intended to encourage educators

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to select communication options beyond spoken language to meet the needs of their students, in practice, Total Communication became known as an approach to educating Deaf children in environments where educators speak and sign a Manually-Coded form of English at the same time. This practice is known as simultaneous communication, SimCom, or signed-supported speech. 3 Most people no longer make a distinction between Total Communication as a philosophy and the act of speaking and signing simultaneously (Rendel et al., 2018). However, there is general consensus that the simultaneous use of Manually-Coded English and spoken English does not ‘confer the same benefits of a natural sign language’ (Hall et al., 2019: 370). In situations where Deaf children who use ASL are placed in Total Communication settings, the children are expected to relinquish the use of ASL in favor of the sign system used at the school. As such, these programs resemble Transitional Bilingual Programs, where the goal is to achieve fluency in the majority language without regard for developing the minority language (Gárate, 2014). Lastly, the ASL-English Bilingual approach adheres to the principles of bilingualism and aims to develop receptive and expressive skills in the natural Signed language of the Deaf community and written and spoken skills – when the latter is accessible to the child – in the majority language (Gárate, 2014). Co-enrollment options also claim to provide access to a bimodalbilingual (Signed language and spoken/written English) environment where all students have equal access to language, academic content and social development (Antia & Metz, 2014), with the distinction that the classroom includes both hearing and Deaf students. Unfortunately, 88% of Deaf children continue to be educated in public schools in inclusion and mainstream settings with an oral or Total Communication approach (IES-NCES, 2019). Lawyer (2018) found that Deaf students of color, including Latinx Deaf students attending mainstream settings, were often forced to attend schools outside of their local/cultural communities due to the lack of Deaf education services at schools that predominantly serve students of color. The result of this has been an educational experience that oftentimes does not reflect Latinx Deaf students’ (and other Deaf students of color) home cultural and linguistic practices. Only about 20% of Deaf children attend one of the 68 day and charter schools or one of the 55 residential schools for the Deaf in the United States (Educational Programs for Deaf Students, 2018; Gallaudet Research Institute, 2013). Furthermore, there are two important considerations with the day schools and residential educational settings: (1) 90% of the teachers at these schools are white and hearing, a statistic that has not changed much in more than 25 years (Andrews & Jordan, 1993; Ausbrooks et al., 2012; Simms et al., 2008); and (2) only about half of these schools self-report supporting bilingual education, often in addition to using other

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approaches (Educational Programs for Deaf Students, 2018). Only one in five of these schools (around 20%) reported an exclusive focus on bilingualism (Educational Programs for Deaf Students, 2018). Translanguaging: A Core Act Not the Exception

Scholars in the field of sign language studies, Deaf studies, sign linguistics and Deaf education have been documenting, analyzing and reporting on the plethora of ‘languages’ used by Deaf people around the world (Kusters, 2017). In some cases, the reports describe the ‘languaging’ practices born out of the impoverished language conditions in which too many Deaf children and adults fi nd themselves (Moriarty Harrelson, 2017). Others report on the collection of practices and strategies used by Deaf people to cross and blend linguistic features and modalities beyond the boundaries that have been established by society and institutions (Holmström & Schönström, 2018). This work often spotlights the lived realities of Deaf people who coexist in contexts designed for hearing people. A common theme across the signing-Deaf experience worldwide is the constant navigation and mediation of at least two languages and the multiple abilities (signing, fi ngerspelling, reading, writing, mouthing, lipreading, speaking, gesturing) that are at their disposal, although some are more or less accessible depending on the individual. Interactions in Deaf bilingual classrooms are characterized by a ‘plurality of practices’ (see García & Sylvan, 2011, for a more detailed discussion of this term). In schools and programs that use a bilingual philosophy, translanguaging, whether named as such or not, is a core act that emanates from the students. Unlike bilingual schools for hearing children who are studying/learning two spoken languages and their corresponding written systems at different times or days, bilingual schools for Deaf children revolve around translanguaging because of the differences in modalities of their instructional languages. Deaf children who communicate using Signed language use a visualmanual modality to convey meaning. Spoken languages use an oral-aural modality for the same purpose. Additionally, because Signed languages have no written form, all literacy-related instruction depends on the written form of the spoken language. Lastly, because the auditory access to spoken language varies greatly among Deaf students, only some may be able to use this modality to access content and/or convey information. Given these variables, the strict separation of languages promoted by dual language bilingual education programs for hearing students is typically the exception rather than the norm in a Deaf bilingual classroom. Creese and Blackledge’s (2010) description of translanguaging as the use of two languages not as rigidly separated entities, but instead used in a flexible and parallel fashion, is a more accurate representation of what takes place in a Deaf bilingual classroom. However, whereas the students engage in

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translanguaging on a regular basis, not all teachers recognize this act as a vital part of the students’ bilingual/multilingual identities. As such, they may fail to see the students’ emergent bilingual abilities and their existing linguistic repertoire as a springboard to add more to their repertoire, while sustaining their development. Translanguaging in Deaf Bilingual Education Settings: A Caveat

As evidenced by the previous vignettes and discussion, translanguaging is a part of bilingual and multilingual Deaf people’s language practices at schools where two languages are the media of instruction, as well as in their homes and social lives where more than two languages may be used. Unfortunately, these practices are minimally considered or leveraged within the educational options available to Deaf students. As De Meulder et al. (2019: 4) have stated: ‘[t]he issue of “access” to semiotic resources is crucial when considering translanguaging in the context of deaf signers.’ Specifically, differences in auditory access to spoken language and in some cases to the written form of the language create what the authors refer to as sensorial asymmetries (De Meulder et al., 2019: 894). As Deaf, hearing, multilingual signing individuals, teachers of signing Deaf students, and current educators of future teachers of signing Deaf children, we acknowledge the responsibility we have in ensuring that these asymmetries are not perpetuated in classrooms under the guise of translanguaging. Specifically, we echo the concerns regarding the danger of equating translanguaging with Total Communication. As previously defi ned, this is a practice in deaf education that promotes the simultaneous mixing or blending of Manually-Coded English with spoken language without any attention to the development of a Signed language (Allard & Chen Pichler, 2018; Snoddon, 2017). In recent discussions of translanguaging in deaf education, much attention has been given to classrooms that appear to primarily educate bimodal-bilingual4 students, that is, students who have access to and use two languages in two different modalities, such as a spoken language (e.g. English, Spanish) and a Signed language (e.g. American Sign Language, Puerto Rican Sign Language) (see Swanwick, 2016, 2017). This research highlights instances of bimodal and multimodal translanguaging where: (1) teachers and students with access to a spoken language defer to the spoken modality for periods of times during a lesson; (2) students sequentially or simultaneously blend modalities as evidence of how they scaffold learning; and (3) sign-supported speech is positioned as a viable pedagogical practice. We emphasize these points not because we do not see the translanguaging practices of bimodal Deaf children as valid, but because, while these descriptions elucidate the linguistic repertoires of a particular group of Deaf children who possess access to the auditory channel via hearing devices, there is a danger in assuming that the practices that

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originate from these students represent, apply to and/or will benefit all Deaf children equally. To a Deaf person who has no auditory access, these descriptions bring back images of the type of marginalization, oppression and disenfranchisement they have experienced all their lives in educational settings when Signed language is not given appropriate attention for it to develop as the most important resource to make meaning in life and to learn. For this reason, we align with the perspective that we have much to learn about the visually oriented translanguaging practices enacted by skilled Deaf and hearing signers (Allard & Chen Pichler, 2018; Hoffman et al., 2017; Holmström & Schönström, 2018). Based on our personal and professional experiences, we believe that for translanguaging to be a transformative pedagogy in deaf education, the teachers themselves need to be at least bilingual and at best multilingual. Teachers of Deaf students must be able to use one or more Signed languages and one or more spoken/written languages, so that both can be appropriately developed. Exploring the Deaf Bilingual Classroom

The bilingual K-12 classroom interactions – be they expressive or receptive via lessons, discussions, presentations, group activities or reading and writing tasks – depend on and represent dynamic and flexible bilingualism (García, 2009). Teachers and students must not only access background information and prior world knowledge, but also activate multimodal metacognitive and metalinguistic skills in order to engage in activities all of which intertwine signing, attending to sign, fi ngerspelling, reading, writing, mouthing – and listening and speaking (when these abilities are accessible to the child). Thus, Deaf students (as well as adults) are constantly making use not only of these linguistic features and abilities but also of their entire semiotic repertoire to make sense of the academic as well as the social interactions in which they engage. Sign-mediated strategies are explicitly used by some teachers when introducing a lesson by means of a PowerPoint or from a text that is projected on a screen or smartboard. The teacher translates the meaning of a written passage in ASL to the class in order to ensure comprehension, elicit connections and set the stage for vocabulary and content instruction. As students read along while the teacher points to the text on the smartboard, they track the English text, mentally grasping the meaning, as they ask and answer questions in ASL. The specialized vocabulary is often fingerspelled and written separately from the text. It is defined, illustrated, analyzed for morphological markers that can help students decipher their meaning, and at times mouthed or verbalized for those students who benefit from that input. Students in turn practice fi ngerspelling the new term and discuss through signing the conceptually appropriate meaning of the

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English term before they are expected to interact directly with the remainder of the text. As they read, some students will outwardly sign sections of the text. Some may follow the teacher’s model of producing the meaning in ASL, and others may focus on signing more salient characteristics of English first as they work on understanding its meaning. A follow-up activity at this point may include students working in pairs or groups to discuss in ASL their understanding of the text while simultaneously writing their conclusions or notes which they will use to give a report back to the class using ASL. When technology is involved, students may be asked to video-record their summaries for class viewing or for the teacher to evaluate their comprehension. Similarly, students may be asked to create PowerPoint slides to present to the class, allowing them to refer back to the text and expand on it. Students are given choices to use concept maps to show the relationship they see in the information they read or to add photos alongside their text. Technological innovations have increased access to written language for social and academic purposes among Deaf children. In fact, children use their phones, computers and tablets to access and share written information far more often in their social environments than schools are willing to allow or take advantage of. Platforms like Moodle, Edmodo, Canvas, and Blackboard among others are ideal for teachers to share and receive written and video-based content. Video-based applications (e.g. iMovie, Glide, Marco Polo) allow opportunities for teachers and students to video-tape a message or the summary of a lesson and to share that information, allowing Deaf children to access, view, save, and review content and instruction through their most accessible language features or modes. Similar practices have been recorded and studied in Deaf-led higher education classes (Holmström & Schönström, 2018). Deaf bilingual education classrooms require intentional planning intended to allow dedicated time to: focus on learning about and using ASL for academic purposes; use written English-only for various communicative and academic purposes; and use and develop spoken language skills when appropriate (Gárate, 2014). In fact, even within these planned instances of language use, the rigid separation of ASL and English written language is difficult to achieve because, as mentioned above, English-print is the medium of all literacy-related instructions. Translanguaging for Deaf Latinx Students in ESL: A Case Study

Maribel Gárate-Estes taught English as a second language (ESL) to DMLs exclusively for five years at a day school for the Deaf. Approximately 50% of the students were Latinx. The students spent the majority of their school day in classrooms with their grade peers and attended the ESL class for one period a day where, unlike in a typical ESL class, the focus

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was on both ASL and English instruction. Gárate-Estes is fluent in Spanish, ASL and English, with conversational skills in LSM. The ESL class had been specifically created for immigrant Deaf students to learn ASL and English in order to support their transition into regular deaf education classes. This section is intended to give the reader a glimpse into what a classroom for Latinx Deaf students can be like when the translanguaging practices students bring with them are recognized, validated and capitalized on to further their linguistic competencies and performance. Before we describe the lesson, it is important for the reader to have a sense of the very different linguistic repertoires of Deaf students in the ESL classroom. Students’ complex linguistic profiles

Table 10.1 provides the profiles of seven typical Latinx Deaf ESL students – three in 3rd grade and four middle schoolers, focusing on: where they come from and how their parents identify; the parents’ language and how they communicate with them at home; the languages students brought with them; and the languages being acquired at school. The profi le also notes the access and use students had for each of the languages in various environments. In relation to the spoken languages at home and school, the nomenclatures are based on the students’ perceptual abilities, that is, the level of auditory access each had which allowed them to hear and speak a language. Similarly, access and use denote the amount of instruction and/or exposure to the written system of each language. These distinctions are relevant when discussing Deaf children because, while hearing aids and cochlear implants may allow some children to hear and comprehend a spoken language, this does not guarantee that they will develop intelligible speech that they can use to communicate. Additionally, many countries do not prioritize the literacy development of Deaf children. As we can see in Table 10.1, all the students were learning ASL and written English. The students came to the ESL classroom at different times based on their grade and were often accompanied by other DML students who were not Latinx. Among the 3rd graders, Kent and Marco had received speech and language therapy in El Salvador but had never attended a formal school, and only knew Spanish words for common items in their homes and communities. Eric had attended school in Honduras and had the ability to write basic sentences in Spanish. Eric had acquired spoken Spanish prior to his arrival. Eric’s auditory access was allowing him to learn spoken English from his environment. Eric primarily journaled in English but would routinely list words he had learned and ask the teacher for their Spanish translation. These lists were often the source of discussions about Spanish, English and ASL and how each language labeled a concept.

El Salvador

Kent

Marco

El Salvador

El Salvador

USA

Iris

Nelda

Yessica

Hearing

Hearing

Hearing

Hearing

Deaf

Hearing

Hearing

Spanish

Spanish & English

Spanish

Spanish

LSM & written Spanish

Spanish

Spanish

Spoken Spanish

Home-signs

Home-signs

Home-signs

LSM

Home-signs

Home-signs

–

–

–

–

–

–

✓

Spoken Spanish

–

✓ ✓

/ ✓

–

–

–

–

✓

✓

✓ –

✓

Spoken English

✓

ASL

✓

✓

/

✓

✓

✓

✓

Written English

Languages being acquired through school curriculum

/

–

✓

/

/

✓

Written Spanish

Notes: All names are pseudonyms. ✓= access and use for multiple purposes; / = some access and use; – = no access or use.

Mexico

Betty

Middle school students

Honduras

El Salvador

Eric

Third graders

Parents’ language

Student communication at home

Parent identity

Student

Country

Student language profile

Background information

Table 10.1 Characteristics of Latinx Deaf students in two of the ESL classes

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In the case of the middle-school students, Betty, whose parents were Deaf, was fluent in LSM and had skills in written Spanish acquired in México. When Betty began journaling, she wrote in Spanish and as she learned English, she integrated those words into her writing. The teacher would respond in a similar fashion, matching the level of Spanish and English she incorporated in her writing and modeling common sentences slightly above those she was already producing to push her development. Iris had never attended a school, nor had she socialized with a Deaf person prior to enrolling at this school. Upon her arrival, she did not know how to write her name and, since she had never been exposed to any Signed language, used home-signs and gestures to communicate. Iris had only been in the United States for six months prior to enrolling in school. Nelda had been at the school since 2nd grade. Yessica was the only US-born student, but because she had attended a mainstream program prior to moving to the deaf school, the admissions team had decided she could benefi t from additional instruction in ASL and English; therefore, she was assigned to the ESL class. Language profi le differences notwithstanding, these students attended the same ESL class period. Translanguaging and literacy in 3rd grade

The school had a strong emphasis on language and the development of students’ literacy skills. As such, they had adopted specific practices to create a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction and learning. These practices included: • • • • • • •

writing in dialogue journals, with teacher and students exchanging ideas and experiences; reading aloud to children; shared reading and shared writing, with teacher modeling and students joining; guided reading, with the teacher guiding the reading in a small group; independent reading, done on their own by students; language experience approach, using personal experiences and narratives to promote reading and writing; and writers’ workshop, emphasizing the process of brainstorming, drafting, revising, proofreading and publishing.

The teacher had autonomy over curriculum design. That flexibility allowed her to select and adapt materials, try different approaches, extend timelines and, most of all, follow the students’ lead. She also regularly consulted with the classroom teachers to gather information on what content students were learning in order to design lessons that could support the knowledge and language they needed to better participate in those lessons.

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At the beginning of the year, lessons were focused on the students and their immediate contexts. Lessons were centered around themes such as ‘all about me,’ ‘my family,’ ‘my school,’ ‘my neighborhood,’ and the like. This was especially true when the majority of the students were new to the school and to the class. These themes allowed the teacher and the students to share who they were, where they came from, what they liked, what they were good at, and what their families, cultures and communities looked like in their countries of origin and in the United States. It also allowed the students to showcase their knowledge and skills as authors, artists, fi lmmakers and storytellers. Elements of the literacy practices were selected and interwoven into the lessons. For example, a lesson about ‘my neighborhood’ that took place with the 3rd grade class began with a read-aloud activity, where the teacher projected a book on the topic on the smartboard, allowing everyone to see both the illustration and the text. The teacher translated the English text in ASL and took advantage of the depicting characteristics of some ASL signs to make them understandable to the new signers. We focus in this description on the 3rd graders that we introduced above. Eric, who liked to attend to the English print, would share with Kent and Marco the meanings of those words in Spanish. They would react with interest when they recognized a Spanish word and show pride when they recognized a word fi rst. Marco was skilled at fi ngerspelling and would enthusiastically practice fi ngerspelling new words as they were introduced during read-aloud. Eric, who could express himself in spoken English, liked to practice the pronunciation of new English words. Books for each theme were selected not only for their content, but also for the quality of their illustrations which allowed both teacher and students to discuss the signs and words for objects, concepts and activities depicted on the pages. During read-alouds, students were encouraged to make connections, share experiences and agree or disagree with the scenarios that matched or did not match their neighborhoods. Kent would often gesture or role-play his comments while pointing to the illustrations in the book that had sparked his interest. Eric would offer an ASL rendition of Kent’s comments, and the teacher would restate the message to ensure everyone was on the same page and could respond or add their own comments. For one lesson, the class decided to take a field trip around the neighborhood. The discussions and activities that ensued allowed for the design of a language experience unit. Each student became an active participant in the entire planning process which included: (1) writing a letter to ask the principal for permission to take the field trip; (2) filling out the form to request a school bus; (3) writing individual notes or fi lming a signed message informing their regular teachers that they would be absent one day; (4) mapping the route they should take, and selecting the sites they should visit; and (5) writing predictions and questions about what they

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might see and what they wanted to learn from the experience. Each student volunteered to lead or accepted leading one of the tasks. Kent, who loved accessing the internet, volunteered to investigate the area, fi nd a map and suggest a route. Marco, who had mentioned the need to inform their regular teacher that they would be absent, was asked to draft the letter. Eric wanted to request the school bus for the trip. The predictions and questions about the neighborhood were noted on a KWL chart (a chart to record what students Know about the neighborhood, what they Want to know, and fi nally what they Learn at the end). The students signed their predictions and questions, and the teacher wrote them down using back-translation to ensure she was capturing the students’ intended meaning. Each student then copied their questions into a small notebook in which they would be taking notes during the trip. Each of these tasks opened the door for the need to engage in journaling, shared writing and shared reading. During the trip, the class took photos, asked people questions, and wrote down notes to check against their predictions and to answer the questions they had. Students asked the teacher and each other for help with spelling certain words, but also copied environmental texts, and drew pictures to remember their observations. Eric wrote notes in Spanish and English and later asked the teacher for translations. After the trip, as part of writers’ workshop, the class wrote a book about their experiences based on the photographs and the notes they had collected. The book was then used for a guided reading session to review reading strategies, including referring to the photos, locating key words, re-reading, and questioning for understanding. With their experience and book at hand, the class gave presentations and led read-alouds with students in Kindergarten and 1st grade classes. Above all, the class was centered around the students as capable learners and users of multiple competencies who had the ability to initiate, contribute to and co-create all the discursive practices that took place in the class. From the student who had never been taught the alphabet, to the student who grew up with full access to Signed language at home and Spanish literacy instruction in school, every student had knowledge and skills to contribute to a discussion and an activity. Approximations, in writing and fi ngerspelling in any language, were welcomed. Drawings of signs and written Spanish were commonly used in journals, as were sentences with a dash mark, which they had all agreed they would use to indicate that they knew the concept, but not a word for it. One of the common class practices was the use of weekend journals. They demonstrate how children who had been deemed unable to partake in the school’s discursive practices simply need to feel welcomed into a space and seen for the skills they have and not for the ones they may not have yet adopted. When Kent joined the class, the school year was well on its way. The students were comfortable with the established class routines

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and also knew to expect the unexpected. Every Friday, the teacher would distribute composition notebooks where students were asked to share what they did over the weekend. Any and all forms of communicating their weekend activities were accepted. The teacher would collect the notebooks on Monday and, in turn, share what she did during her weekend. Throughout the week, the teacher would refer to or make connections with events and activities the students had shared in their journals. The teacher had explained to Kent the purpose of the weekend journals but had not assigned him one because she had noticed that Kent often withdrew from writing activities. Kent had observed the exchange of notebooks and the conversation in class that originated from them. Three weeks after he arrived, Kent asked if he could have his own journal. Kent’s fi rst journal entry was a grape bubble gum wrapper taped to the fi rst page of his journal. When he turned in his journal, he opened the notebook and began to retell in a combination of ASL, home-signs, gestures and role-play, everything that had led him to getting this one piece of gum from a store. He fi nished his story by stating that this was his favorite flavor and proceeded to hand the teacher a pencil so she could write what the flavor was called. This case study of students in a 3rd grade classroom exemplifies the many ways in which Latinx Deaf children with diverse experiences (linguistic, educational, personal) and varying levels of access (aural and/or visual) engage in translanguaging using their unique language practices to communicate, question, take the lead, support their peers, and disrupt the power dynamic of ‘teacher’ and ‘student.’ In this way, the teacher became a co-learner in the classroom. Enacting a translanguaging pedagogy allowed for students to also become producers of knowledge. Todavía en Camino: Building Toward a Transformative Pedagogy

The recognition and acceptance of translanguaging still has a long way to go in regard to Deaf bilingual education. Historically, there have been several barriers that have resulted in limiting Latinx Deaf students access to the full affordances of translanguaging in schools. These barriers can be classified into two groups: societal barriers, and barriers related to professionals in the field. Societal barriers relate to the monolingual ideologies, ableism, audism, classism and racism that are still characteristic of the United States and its schooling system. For signing Latinx Deaf students, the long history of oppression and discrimination against people with disabilities intersects with the repression of Signed language in Deaf education and the US history of dismissing the home languages of minoritized communities who have immigrated here. To date, policymakers who decide the type of education and services Deaf children should access, as well as educators who work directly with them, often do not accept Deaf

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people as a minoritized group with its own language and cultural practices. Instead, they view deafness as a problem inherent in the child that needs to be fi xed. Holcomb and Lawyer (2019) explain how these societal barriers manifest in policy regarding the schooling of bilingual Deaf students: [R]ather than presuming bilingualism as an inherent requirement (e.g. right-oriented lens) that should be socioculturally and clinically executed in Deaf education, Deaf and Hard of Hearing students are instead funneled through the Special education system. Simply put, professionals presume that ‘hearing loss’ and ‘sign language’ automatically mean a language deficiency that requires habilitation in English for Deaf and Hard of Hearing students. We propose that this is one reason Deaf education is housed under Special education as opposed to bilingual education. The Special education system focuses on increasing Deaf and Hard of Hearing students’ access to spoken English, resulting in a prioritization of spoken English habilitation for Deaf and Hard of Hearing students. Hearing status and/or use of languages other than English are often anecdotally cited by professionals as reasons why Deaf and Hard of Hearing students have not reached monolingual standards of reading and/or spoken English. (Holcomb & Lawyer, 2019: 432)

In spite of the strides made by linguists to legitimize Signed languages and the research advances in the area of neuroscience validating the brain’s acceptance of a Signed language as input for language acquisition (Petitto, 2009; Petitto et al., 2001), hearing professionals continue to believe that a Signed language is an obstacle that prevents Deaf children from achieving proficiency in a spoken language. The devastating result of this belief is evident in the number of Deaf students who suffer from Language Deprivation Syndrome (Gulati, 2014), placing them at a cognitive disadvantage which often results in the inability to perform competently in any language (Hall, 2017; Humphries et al., 2012). The manifestations of ableism, audism and linguicism have also had tangible ramifications for DMLs. There are apparent low expectations placed on Deaf students because of the belief that Deaf children are incapable of learning English and that they are unable to acquire a Signed and a spoken language. Deaf children are not acknowledged as capable multilinguals, able to use various modalities in languaging. Low expectations are but one of the reasons why professionals consciously or unconsciously limit or withhold opportunities from Latinx Deaf children. The other set of barriers preventing translanguaging from being fully actualized in the school context can be described as those related to professionals in the field. Bilingual and multilingual Latinx Deaf students encounter a range of professionals depending on their determined educational needs, with primary services provided by Teachers of the Deaf and Speech and Language Pathologists. The majority of these professionals are not proficient in Signed language or Spanish. Many grew up with

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monolingual schooling experiences and backgrounds. Those who have acquired or learned an additional language later did so in university while also completing their teaching or Speech and Language Pathology certification. In many ways, the majority of professionals’ ability to understand how Latinx Deaf students leverage translanguaging as part of their daily lives and to learn is largely limited by their own life experiences. This leaves them ill-prepared to work with bilingual Deaf students and even less so to teach DMLs. Of the 58 teacher preparation programs for the deaf in the United States that report their educational philosophy, only nine explicitly report having a bilingual philosophy that accepts Deaf children’s dynamic bilingual practices (Deaf Education, 2017). Furthermore, Deaf and hearing teachers who work at bilingual Deaf schools are not exempt from enacting the supremacy of ASL and English over other language(s) with which students communicate. Several key factors are required for the type of translanguaging pedagogy demonstrated in the Deaf ESL classroom described above to become more of the norm rather than the exception for Latinx Deaf students. First, teachers need to question their own monolingual ideologies and the perceived supremacy of English. Second and related to the fi rst point, teachers need to recognize that each child possesses a repertoire of linguistic skills that must be utilized to maximize their overall learning potential and not simply to achieve ‘standard English fluency.’ Third, we need more multilingual professionals to break into the monolingualdominated system at the policy, higher education, teacher preparation, research, and K-12 levels of the US Deaf schooling system (Lawyer, 2018). Like other areas of education, (Latinx) Deaf students are graduating and seeking ways to advance their communities, yet their numbers are not represented in teacher preparation programs nor in interpreter training programs. In 2013, only 13% of the Deaf education teachers were identified as ‘diverse,’ with 3% of them identified as Latino/a (Gallaudet Research Institute, 2013). Similarly, only 684 out of 10,354 certified sign language interpreters were identified as Latinx (Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, 2019), and only 21 hold an Advanced and Master’s trilingual (ASL, spoken English and Spanish) certificate across the country (Texas Health and Human Services, n.d.). Finally, we need to collectively acknowledge and address the persistent monolingual and white supremacist ideologies that still succeed at: (a) tracking Deaf students of color into vocational programs rather than academic areas where they could further their education (Lawyer, 2018); and (b) determining who has access to become a Teacher of the Deaf and/or Signed language interpreter by setting up English-dominated certification processes that often prevent multilingual Deaf and hearing applicants from entering those fields. The ableism inherent in the system is evident in the belief that many professionals (and

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society at large) have that a Deaf person cannot be a capable multilingual/ multimodal individual. Transformative Potential for Latinx Deaf Communities

The vignettes and case study we have presented highlight the characteristics of our student population. The case study of a Deaf ESL classroom provides an example of the liberating and arguably transformative educational possibilities when multilingual Latinx Deaf students are allowed to take advantage of translanguaging at school in the many ways they are able to in home and community settings. Home-signs and Spanish were not suppressed in the classroom for the sake of acquiring ASL and written English. Instead, they were considered affordances to developing linguistic competencies in named languages across two or more additional modalities. The teacher’s use of several languages and modalities validated the home linguistic practices by bringing home/community experiences into the classroom rather than attempting to create a separate classroom ‘culture.’ The translanguaging pedagogy in the case study classroom above resulted in the recognition and validation of all the languaging skills, communicative competencies and semiotic resources of the students in the class, and in centering ASL in all this endeavor. Deaf education for multilingual students that takes into account their semiotic resources would have an impact on both our students and the professionals in the field, as well as parents and families outside the classroom. Within the school setting, we would acknowledge Deaf children as emergent bilinguals/multilinguals. The experiences Deaf children have with languaging outside of the classroom would be welcomed into the classroom, and teachers would capitalize on them to support Deaf students’ ability to choose the appropriate features within their vast repertoire. As García and Lin (2016) suggest, only when bilingual educators decide to reject the view of students as two monolinguals would they be able to help students liberate their full linguistic potential, ‘along with their minds and imagination’ (García & Lin, 2016: 12). Furthermore, teachers would no longer negatively perceive having Deaf students with different home spoken language backgrounds in the same classroom. Teachers would shift their perception to one of valuing and celebrating the different worldviews, perspectives and languaging experiences of all students. Likewise, assessments would not be limited to assessing each of the Deaf students’ languages separately or comparing students to hearing monolinguals. Teachers would begin to assess Deaf students’ understandings of the world and of how to language, differentiating between their general linguistic performance which would reveal how they use their full linguistic repertoire to communicate and learn, as well as their language-specific performance (García et al., 2017), mindful that ASL and written English are important resources in the world in which they live. Teachers would then assess the whole student, rather

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than their ability to language based solely on their ability to suppress one language or more languages over others. When we open spaces for translanguaging, there is the possibility of greater connection between school, home and the community. As we know, professionals cannot be fully knowledgeable about all languages and all students’ communities. This connection would allow professionals to feel more ready to reach out to parents and community members to bring their languaging and cultural practices into the classroom. The connections between home and school would increase and be strengthened. The result would be that teachers would value students beyond the narrow performances of schoolwork. The translanguaging practices that emanate from bilingual and multilingual Latinx Deaf students and the multiple ways in which signing and bimodal Deaf people make sense of the world can provide us with a road map of what is possible. It is up to us, teachers and professionals, to ensure that we do not continue to suppress but rather embrace them to create the equitable education Latinx Deaf students deserve but have yet to experience. As Deaf, hearing, multilingual teachers, interpreters and researchers, we can appreciate and understand the value that translanguaging has had in our lives. It is often difficult to critique a field like bilingual deaf education that has opened so many educational opportunities for Deaf students in the United States. However, in any attempt to move forward and to provide the best quality education for all Deaf students, we must realize that we are missing the mark when it comes to attending to the fastest growing Deaf population in our schools, Latinx students. The field of Deaf education took a big leap in even acknowledging that DMLs have unique needs. Now it is time for us to reimagine how the field could better serve these students by unlocking and unlimiting their translanguaging in the educational context. Notes (1) To protect their identities, all students’ names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. (2) Home-signs are gestural communication systems that combine conventional gestures and invented signs that Deaf children use to negotiate meaning with their hearing family members who do not know a Signed language. The systems and their meaning are unique to each family unit and are generally not understood by individuals outside the family. (3) The term sign-supported speech was coined by Johnson et al. (1989) to emphasize that in all Total Communication settings spoken English is seen as the primary source of input for language acquisition and transmission of curricular content. It is more commonly used by ASL linguists, researchers and British authors. (4) The term bimodal-bilingual was fi rst coined to refer to hearing children who know both a signed and a spoken language. Typically, these children have Deaf parents. The term is now also used to describe Deaf children who achieve high levels of auditory access via hearing devices and also sign.

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References Allard, K. and Chen Pichler, D. (2018) Multi-modal visually-oriented translanguaging among Deaf signers. Translanguaging – Researchers and Practitioners in Dialogue 4 (3), 384–404. doi:10.1075/ttmc.00019.all Andrews, J.F. and Jordan, D.L. (1993) Minority and minority-Deaf professional: How many and where are they? American Annals of the Deaf 138 (5), 388–396. Antia, S.D. and Metz, K.K. (2014) Co-enrollment in the United States: A critical analysis of benefits and challenges. In M. Marschark, G. Tang and H. Knoors (eds) Bilingualism and Bilingual Deaf Education (pp. 424–443). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ausbrooks, M., Baker, S. and Daugaard, J. (2012) Recruiting deaf and diverse teachers: Priorities of preservice teachers in deaf education. Journal of the American Deafness & Rehabilitation Association 46 (1), 369–398. Bell, A.G. (1883) On the formation of a deaf variety of the human race. National Academy of Sciences 179–262. Burch, S. (2002) Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II. New York: New York University Press. Cannon, J.E., Guardino, C. and Gallimore, E. (2016) A new kind of heterogeneity: What we can learn from d/Deaf and hard of hearing multilingual learners. American Annals of the Deaf 161 (1), 8–16. doi:10.1353/aad.2016.0015 Crawford, J. (1992) Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of ‘English Only’. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2010) Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy for learning and teaching? The Modern Language Journal 94 (1), 103–115. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00986.x Deaf Education (2017) Deaf Education Teacher Preparation Programs. See http://deafed. net/Knowledge/PageText.asp?hdnPageId=120. De Meulder, M., Kusters, A., Moriarty, E. and Murray, J.J. (2019) Describe, don’t prescribe: The practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of Deaf signers. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 40 (10), 892–906. doi:10.10 80/01434632.2019.1592181 Educational Programs for Deaf Students (2018) Schools and programs in the United States. American Annals of the Deaf 163 (2), 116–208. See doi:10.1353/aad.2018.0015 Fiedler, B.C. (2001) Considering placement and educational approaches for students who are Deaf and hard of hearing. TEACHING Exceptional Children 34 (2), 54–59. doi:10.1177/004005990103400208 Gallaudet Research Institute (2011) Regional and National Summary Report of Data from the 2009–10 Annual Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University. Gallaudet Research Institute (2013) Regional and National Summary Report of Data from the 2011–2012 Annual Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University. Gárate, M. (2012) ASL/English Bilingual Education: Models, Method and Strategies. Research Brief No. 8. Washington, DC: Visual Language and Visual Learning Science of Learning Center, Gallaudet University. Gárate, M. (2014) Developing bilingual literacy in Deaf children. In M. Sasaki (ed.) Mainoritei No Shakaisanka: Shogaisha to Tayona Riterashi (Literacies of the Minorities: Constructing a Truly Inclusive Society) (pp. 180–196). Tokyo: Kurosio Publishers. Gárate, M., Batamula, C. and Kite, B.J. (2016) Deaf education. In L. Meyer (ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garcia, J. (2017) Deaf Chicano from the barrio: Experience of racism and linguicism. YouTube, 8 November. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnUXB_cPZl8.

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García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. and Lin, A.M. (2016) Translanguaging in bilingual education. In O. García, A. Lin and S. May (eds) Bilingual and Multilingual Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd edn) (pp. 1–14). Cham: Springer. García, O. and Sylvan, C.E. (2011) Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal 95 (3), 385–400. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01208.x García, O., Johnson, S.I. and Seltzer, K. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. García-Fernández, C. (2014) Deaf-Latina/Latino critical theory in education: The lived experiences and multiple intersecting identities of Deaf-Latina/o high school students. Doctoral dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin. See https://repositories.lib. utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/25088/garcia-fernandez-dissertation-2014.pdf?seq uence=1. Gerner de García, B. (1995) Communication and language use in Spanish-speaking families with Deaf children. In C. Lucas (ed.) Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (pp. 221–252). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Grosjean, F. (2010) Bilingualism, biculturalism, and deafness. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13 (2), 133–145. doi:10.1080/13670050903474051 Gulati, S. (2014) Language deprivation syndrome lecture. YouTube, 1 April. See https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yy_K6VtHJw. Hall, M.L., Hall, W.C. and Caselli, N.K. (2019) Deaf children need language, not (just) speech. First Language 39 (4), 367–395. doi:10.1177/0142723719834102 Hall, W.C. (2017) What you don’t know can hurt you: The risk of language deprivation by impairing Sign Language development in Deaf children. Maternal and Child Health Journal 21 (5), 961–965. doi:10.1007%2Fs10995-017-2287-y Hidalgo, L. and William, S. (2010) Counseling issues for Latino Deaf individuals and their families. In I. Leigh (ed.) Psychotherapy with Deaf Clients from Diverse Groups (pp. 237–257). Gallaudet University Press. Hoff man, D., Wolsey, J., Andrews, J. and Clark, D. (2017) Translanguaging supports reading with Deaf adult bilinguals: A qualitative approach. The Qualitative Report 22 (7), 1925–1944. See https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol22/iss7/12. Holcomb, L. and Lawyer, G. (2019) Assessments to evaluate bilinguals: The overdue discussion of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing student population in the United States. Psychology in the Schools 57 (3), 426–442. doi:10.1002/pits.22290 Holmström, I. and Schönström, K. (2018) Deaf lecturers’ translanguaging in a higher education setting: A multimodal multilingual perspective. Applied Linguistics Review 9 (1), 90–111. doi:10.1515/applirev-2017-0078 Humphries, T. (2013) Schooling in American Sign Language: A paradigm shift from a deficit model to a bilingual model in deaf education. Berkeley Review of Education 4 (1), 7–33. doi:10.5070/B84110031 Humphries, T., Kushalnagar, P., Mathur, G., Napoli, D.J., Padden, C., Rathmann, C. and Smith, S.R. (2012) Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches. Harm Reduction Journal 9 (16), 1–9. doi:10.1186/1477-7517-9-16 Humphries, T., Kushalnagar, P., Mathur, G., Napoli, D.J., Padden, C., Rathmann, C. and Smith, S. (2017) Discourses of prejudice in the professions: The case of sign languages. Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (9), 648–652. doi:10.1136/medethics2015-103242 IES-NCES (2019) Digest of Education Statistics, 2018 (NCES 2020-009). Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. See https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=59.

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Johnson, R., Liddell, S. and Erting, C. (1989) Unlocking the Curriculum: Principles for Achieving Access in Deaf Education. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University. Kelley, W.P. and McGregor, T.L. (2003) Keresan Pueblo Indian Sign Language. In J. Reyhner, O. Trujillo, R.L. Carrasco and L. Lockard (eds) Nurturing Native Languages (pp. 141–48). Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University. Kushalnagar, P., Mathur, G., Moreland, C.J., Napoli, D.J., Osterling, W., Padden, C. and Rathmann, C. (2010) Infants and children with hearing loss need early language access. Journal of Clinical Ethics 21 (2), 143–154. Kusters, A. (2017) Special issue: Deaf and hearing signers’ multimodal and translingual practices. Applied Linguistics Review 10 (1), 1–8. doi:10.1515/applirev-2017-0086 Lawyer, G. (2018) Removing the colonizer’s coat in Deaf Education: Exploring the curriculum of colonization and the fi eld of Deaf Education. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee. See https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5036. Macedo, D. (2000) The colonialism of the English Only movement. Educational Researcher 29 (3), 15–24. McCaskill, C., Lucas, C., Bayley, R. and Hill, J.C. (2011) The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. McKay-Cody, M.R. (1997) Plains Indian Sign Language: A comparative study of alternate and primary Signers. In Deaf Studies V: Toward 2000 – Unity and Diversity: Conference Proceedings, 17–20 April (pp. 17–77). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Moriarty Harrelson, E. (2017) Deaf people with ‘no language’: Mobility and flexible accumulation in languaging practices of deaf people in Cambodia. Applied Linguistics Review 10 (1), 55–72. doi:10.1515/applirev-2017-0081 Paul, P.V. (2016) d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing learners: DML, DLL, ELL, EL, ESL … or culturally and linguistically Diverse. American Annals of the Deaf 161 (1), 3–7. doi:10.1353/aad.2016.0013 Petitto, L.A. (2000) On the biological foundations of human language. In K. Emmorey and H. Lane (eds) The Signs of Language Revisited: An Anthology in Honor of Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima (pp. 449–471). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Petitto, L.A. (2009) New discoveries from the bilingual brain and mind across the life span: Implications for education. Mind, Brain and Education 3 (4), 185–197. doi:10.1111/j.1751-228X.2009.01069.x Petitto, L.A., Katerelos, M., Levy, B., Gauna, K., Tétrault, K. and Ferraro, V. (2001) Bilingual signed and spoken language acquisition from birth: Implications for mechanisms underlying bilingual language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 28 (2), 1–44. doi:10.1017/S0305000901004718 Quinto-Pozos, D. (2008) Sign language contact and interference: ASL and LSM. Language in Society 37 (2), 161–189. doi:10.1017/s0047404508080251 Ramsey, C.L. (2000) On the border: Cultures, families, and schooling in a transnational region. In K.L. Christensen and G.L. Delgado (eds) Deaf Plus: A Multicultural Perspective (pp. 121–147). San Diego, CA: Dawn Sign Press. Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (2019) RID FY19 Annual Report: On the Road to Success. See https://rid.org/2019-annual-report/. Rendel, K., Bargones, J., Blake, B., Luetke, B. and Stryker, D.S. (2018) Signing Exact English: A simultaneously spoken and signed communication option in deaf education. Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention 3 (2), 18–19. doi:10.26077/ gzdh-rp64 Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017) Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistics perspective. Language and Society 46 (5), 1–27. doi:10.1017/S0047404517000562 Siegel, L. (2000) The educational and communication needs of deaf and hard of hearing children: A statement of principle on fundamental educational change. American Annals of the Deaf 145 (2), 64–77.

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Simms, L., Rusher, M., Andrews, J.F. and Coryell, J. (2008) Apartheid in deaf education: Examining workforce diversity. American Annals of the Deaf 153 (4), 384–395. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1989) Multilingualism and the education of minority children. Estudios Fronterizos 8 (18–19), 36–67. Snoddon, K. (2017) Uncovering translingual practices in teaching parents classical ASL varieties. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 7 (3), 1–14. doi:1 0.1080/14790718.2017.1315812 Swanwick, R. (2010) Policy and practice in sign bilingual education: Development, challenges and directions. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13 (2), 147–158. doi:10.1080/13670050903474069 Swanwick, R. (2016) Scaffolding learning through classroom talk: The role of translanguaging. In M. Marschark and P.E. Spencer (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies in Language (pp. 420–430). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swanwick, R. (2017) Translanguaging, learning and teaching in deaf education. International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3), 233–249. doi:10.1080/14790718.20 17.1315808 Texas Health and Human Services (n.d.) Board for Evaluation of Interpreters Registry. See https://bei.hhsc.state.tx.us/PublicInterpreterSearch/Search. Van Cleve, J.V. and Crouch, B.A. (1989) A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Woodward, J. and Lambrecht, L. (2017) Hawai’i Sign Language: A critically endangered language isolate. The Power of ASL, Summer (6), 1, 7–9.

11 What We Experience is What We Value: Perceptions of Home Language Practices by Latinx Emergent Bilinguals Labeled as Disabled María Cioè-Peña and Rebecca E. Linares

Introduction

Deficit perspectives of emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled (EBLADs) keep them out of bilingual spaces while ignoring their actual linguistic practices and a large part of their educational needs. In creating and reinforcing linguistic divisions, schools do not create monolingual children, but rather remove the support that bilingual children need while instilling in them deficit perspectives of their home language practices. In other words, by placing EBLADs in monolingual English classrooms, schools do not facilitate faster adoptions of English; instead they communicate intrinsic ideas of how home language practices do not belong in the school and do not serve an educational purpose. How children experience language at school influences how they perceive their language practices at home. This is true even when students are placed in bilingual special education settings at school. The reason for this is that these lucky few are placed in dual language bilingual programs that maintain clear linguistic boundaries, or in transitional bilingual education programs that actively work toward erasing the student’s home language practices from their educational experience (i.e. the home language is used to facilitate the transition to English-only). As such, even when exposed to their home language at school, students internalize very regimented understandings of what that language is, when it is to be used, and how. Often, these practices are not consonant with the ways in which language is used and experienced at home. 252

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While most Latinx EBLADs are learning in English-only environments, they are often growing up in Spanish-mostly bilingual households. Latinx households are automatically translanguaging spaces where ‘the television might be tuned into an English-language channel, while the radio may be blasting a Spanish-language show’ (García, 2011: 1). However, because these practices are not replicated at school, this translanguaging space is contained to the home, deemed as informal and unintentional. Subsequently, this translanguaging space is absent from the formal school and therefore discounted by the students themselves. Translanguaging offers not only opportunities for EBLADs to make more holistic uses of their linguistic repertoires at school – critical for the processes of communication and meaning-making – but it also offers a way for students to understand the linguistic practices of the home through a strength-based perspective that legitimizes and celebrates those practices. As such, translanguaging has the power to transform not only learning but also how a child understands their own linguistic practices and the relationships that these practices facilitate. This is particularly important for EBLADs, who often rely on the support of their mothers in order to be successful. A translanguaging practice that is used both in the home and in the school would support mothers’ efforts and reduce frustration for the children who are trying to negotiate home language practices with those they are exposed to at school. Using interview data from three EBLADs in Grades 2–5, this chapter presents how multilingual children think about and discuss language. Given their participation in traditional monolingual, transitional bilingual education and dual language programs, the children’s use and perception of language reflect the distinct characteristics and embedded ideologies of each program model. While the children never spoke about language as a translanguaging practice or within a translanguaging space, they perceived their homes as inherently translanguaging spaces that existed in contrast to school spaces that upheld linguistic boundaries. Later, we imagine how these children’s perceptions and uses of language could be transformed had translanguaging been a part of their educational experiences. Thus, we imagine how explicit school translanguaging spaces could have upheld the practices they experience at home as valid and supportive of their academic development across spaces. Finally, we offer recommendations for how teachers can use a translanguaging approach to transform how EBLADs see themselves and other people, moving away from a deficit-framing of bilingualism and toward a more complex one. Traditional Framing of EBLADs and Their Parents

The scholarship concerning the needs of EBLADs is very much centered on improving the referral and evaluation processes in order to reduce

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the overrepresentation of emergent bilinguals within special education (Burr et al., 2015; Gonzalez et al., 2014; Sadowski et al., 2014; Sánchez et al., 2010). With regard to Latinx youth in particular, research shows that while they are underrepresented in special education broadly, they are overrepresented in certain disability categories such as learning disability and speech and language impairment (Zhang et al., 2014). This contributes to the disproportional presence of minoritized children in special education (Gonzalez et al., 2014; Sullivan, 2011; Sullivan & Bal, 2013). However, the scholarship’s focus on disproportionality leaves unanswered questions regarding how to best meet the academic and linguistic needs of emergent bilinguals once they have been identified as being in need of special education services (Artiles, 2019; Artiles & Kozleski, 2016). Continuation between the home and school language practices is crucial for the socio-emotional and academic success of all EBLADs, particularly regarding the relationships they build and maintain with their families and communities at large. Whereas the scholarship around EBLADs is starting to address the need to include their home language practices in their education (CioèPeña, 2017b; Kangas, 2014, 2017), there have been few studies of the role that their parents play in facilitating their children’s academic and socioemotional development. The funds of knowledge that the parents of EBLADs carry with them is blurred by discussions that focus solely on their lack of resources (Ijalba, 2015b; Kim, 2013; Lee & Park, 2016; Orozco, 2014). The most frequently discussed topic regarding the parents of EBLADs relates to the existence of a language barrier between the school and the family (Aceves, 2014; Cohen, 2013; L. Gonzalez et al., 2013; Ryan et al., 2010; Wolfe & Durán, 2013). Although there exists research that concerns itself with increasing parental involvement for parents who use languages other than English at home, the focus is on creating linguistic resources that will make it possible for parents to learn from the school, rather than for the school and parents to learn from each other. Our Critical Framing of EBLADs and Their Parents

We approach this work with a multidimensional framework, bringing together Freire’s conceptualization of traditional education as a mechanism for oppression and Bourdieu’s theory on capital. We extend Freire’s and Bourdieu’s frameworks through Crenshaw’s theory on intersectionality. Traditional education systems are grounded in oppression in the sense that teachers see themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge responsible for ‘depositing’ that knowledge into the ‘empty’ minds of students. This practice is often magnified for EBLADs, with deficit-framings positioning both their intellectual capacity and their linguistic practices as broken (Cioè-Peña, 2017a). This traditional model of education, which Freire (2012) called the banking model, upholds an oppressive system that

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seeks to maintain power structures that divide society between the educated haves – the oppressors – and the uneducated have-nots – the oppressed. Such a system, when embedded in the structure of schooling, dehumanizes EBLADs by devaluing their existing bodies of knowledge and alienating them from each other and from their communities. When this system is upheld in schools, the oppression students face seeps into their consciousness, affecting how they view themselves and their participation and role in the world. Many take on the idea that ‘to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor’ (Freire, 2012: 48, emphasis in original). This mirroring also extends to how students perceive and take up different language practices and linguistic identities. In other words, students themselves begin to devalue their own, and their communities’, bodies of knowledge and ways of being. Thus, they unconsciously perpetuate and replicate this system of oppression as they further distance themselves from their origins and the people connected to them with the goal of attaining success. As such, they see two options: remain ignorant and oppressed, or become educated and, thus, an oppressor. In order to dismantle this system of oppression perpetuated in schools, transformation through praxis and critical consciousness (see Chapters 2 and 7, this volume) is necessary. Through such transformation, education can become a practice grounded in freedom in which individuals have the ‘power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they fi nd themselves,’ thus coming to recognize that the world is not a static reality, but a ‘reality in process’ (Freire, 2012: 83, emphasis in original). Such an approach acknowledges that students, especially EBLADs and their mothers, do not exist independently, in isolation or unattached to the world, but rather that that they exist as integral members of rich and viable families, communities and worlds. Bourdieu’s theory on the forms of capital (Bourdieu, 2011) is critically important to understand how languages are positioned by, and for, EBLADs. Bourdieu stated that there are three forms of capital: social, cultural and economic. While distinct, there are elements of interrelatedness across the three, particularly when one considers the fact that one’s linguistic practice can be constituted as a form of social, cultural and economic capital. This is exemplified in the following ways: a student’s home language is social capital because it allows them to interact with members of their family and community; it is cultural capital because it is usually representative of a distinct cultural group or community; it also serves as economic capital because expansive language practices open up different markets and opportunities. However, the gains in capital are made when a person possesses multiple high-power languages, particularly English. Thus, while multilingualism can elevate one’s social, cultural and economic standing, that elevation is often proportional to the languages the user possesses. As such, all languages are not equal in society nor in the minds of multilingual people.

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In this chapter, we focus on the ways in which bilingualism for EBLADs is devalued in order to increase the use of English and to meet perceived needs. As a result, the relationships and markers that are grounded in the home language which are actively being erased, are also devalued or discounted. So, while able-bodied people are able to develop their bilingualism in order to be more competitive in varying fields, EBLADs are pushed into monolingualism, which not only reduces their ability to compete, but also teaches them to value English, users of English and monolinguals over bilinguals and users of languages other than English. This replicates the systemic power differentials that Freire warned about within their own households and interpersonal relationships. We extend Freire’s and Bourdieu’s work here by using Crenshaw’s theory on intersectionality, which is grounded in Black feminism (Crenshaw, 1991). One of the major critiques of Freire and Bourdieu is the ways in which their theories ignore, or at least do not explicitly address, issues of gender and race. This chapter focuses on the experiences of Latinx children in relation to their mothers. As such, we take up intersectionality to understand how, as Latinx children of immigrants, EBLADs lead lives that at times erase their intersectional identities, as well as the ways in which their educational experiences replicate and extend systems of oppressions. These systems are then introduced into the home through practice and ideology. In other words, through lived experiences in school, children learn to devalue certain linguistic practices, to attribute certain behaviors to particular races and genders and to foreground one identity at the expense of others. In most cases, EBLADs’ disabled identity is positioned as more important than their linguistic one (Kangas, 2014). As such, children inherit ideologies that reflect the ways in which they are classified and categorized at school, that they then project onto their mothers and the home. This work builds on Freire by considering how labels have intergenerational impact, particularly when considering how school-based decisions impact the entire family, not just the individual child. In this case, the school’s choice of monolingualism as an amelioration to disability impacts a child’s ability to communicate with their mother and their mother’s ability to participate in their child’s academic experience. Building on Bourdieu’s theory on capital, we explore how schools serve as mechanisms to teach children rules of the field that act to discredit their own homes and communities. Additionally, in teaching – and correcting – children through the maintenance of rigid linguistic boundaries that favor English-only, schools frame the practices students may see at home as inferior which then leads them to devalue individuals who enact those practices. We use this framework not only to explore the understandings EBLADs hold about language, but also to theorize the ways in which translanguaging is transformational in its ability to make space for a child’s multiple identities. It is important to note that in this chapter

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intersectionality is not meant to tease apart the multiple identities of a student (i.e. dis/abled,1 emergent bilingual, Latinx) but rather to put forth a wholistic perception of children that counters the dominant narrative that foregrounds disability at the expense of linguistic and cultural identity. Rather, we take an intersectional stance that views children as whole rather than as the sum of their parts. We also recognize how translanguaging values a range of linguistic practices, giving children a more holistic view of others while offering educators opportunities to enact a transformative pedagogy that recognizes and values the range of capital that EBLADs and their families possess. Re-viewing and Re-listening to EBLADs

We focus here on interview data from three children of Latinx Spanish speaking mothers – Ana, Maria and Paty – who are raising EBLADs in an immigrant community in New York City (the larger study and methods were previously described in Cioè-Peña, 2018, 2020a). •

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Ana’s daughter, María Teresa, was in a 2nd grade, Dual Language Integrated Co-Teaching (ICT) class where students with disabilities learned alongside able-bodied peers, led by two bilingual teachers (one general educator and one bilingual special educator). María Teresa is classified as having a speech and language impairment. Maria’s son, Justin, was in a 3rd grade, Transitional Bilingual selfcontained special education class, where students with disabilities are segregated from their able-bodied peers, led by one teacher and one classroom paraprofessional and additional student-assigned paraprofessionals as needed. Justin is classified as having autism. Paty’s son, Dan, was in a monolingual English 5th grade ICT class, led by two monolingual English teachers (one general educator and one special educator). Dan is classified as having a learning disability.

All three children also received pull-out special education services. While students’ disability labels heavily influence how children experience language access at school, these labels, like race, can be considered to be socially constructed, just like the parameters that delineate named languages. As such, these labels were not considered in the analysis of the data. To the contrary, disability was explicitly ignored for several reasons: (1) the disability labels primarily served the school and how the school approached the child but not the home; (2) the children made no mention of disability or any ‘limitations’ in their discourse; and (3) at home, these children were not known by their labels or ascribed limitations but by their names and their place in the family (i.e. son, daughter, sibling). Additionally, just like enabled students, all were studying in local community public schools in one New York City borough. Although we focus here on the data that emerged from the interviews, Cioè-Peña had spent

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much time observing their mothers in the home. Thus, she was deeply familiar with the children as she sat to have a conversation with them. The focus of the interviews was to explore each child’s perceptions of language as it related to their mothers, who served as primary caretakers and homemakers. Specifically, we focused on the following guiding questions: (1) How do EBLADs talk about their linguistic practices in relation to their mothers’ linguistic practices? (2) How, if at all, do translanguaging practices show through in the way children talk about language? Each participant was given the choice of which language to do the interview in: María Teresa chose to do the interview in Spanish, while Justin and Dan both chose to do the interview in English. Although this in and of itself cannot be reflective of the children’s linguistic practices, it does communicate something about their sense of agency determining in which language they prefer to have discussions. This choice may also be reflective of the level of comfort the children may have with one language over the other. For example, María Teresa – who was the only student in a bilingual program that aimed to develop her Spanish language and literacy – was the only one who chose Spanish as the interview language. She was also the youngest and had spent less time than the other two children away from the home. We synthesize here the three fi ndings regarding language that were derived from the extensive coding of the interview data. We organize the discussion here under three themes – language as functional, language as relational and language as hierarchical. Each theme is presented through individual vignettes as a way to illustrate the multiplicity of ideas within each child’s conceptualization of language and relationship with their mothers. These are presented in order of grade level, as we identified that ideas around language grew more complex, the older each child was, and the more time they had been classified as a student with a disability in the US public school system. Although all three children expressed deep love and respect for their mothers, they viewed language differently. We start with the 2nd grader’s understanding of language as simply functional, as she interprets her mother’s lack of English as unhelpful in her school tasks. We then view the 3rd grader’s understanding of language as relational, as room is made for English for homework even if interactions are in Spanish in order for child and mother to relate. We fi nally are introduced to the 5th grader’s understandings of language as hierarchical, as he views English as more important than Spanish. What is striking about all these views is that the translanguaging practices that are always present, even in homes that are said to be Spanish speaking homes, remain completely invisible from the children’s consciousness and that of the school. Yet, every day, as bilingual

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children doing tareas/homework with English texts interact with their Spanish speaking mothers and bring their bilingual selves into the text, translanguaging is present. Although the translanguaging space in the home is expanded as the children become more bilingual and go up the grades, the language practices in school make translanguaging less visible for the children, who then learn to validate exclusively an English-only space that excludes their own mothers. María Teresa: Language as Functional and Spanish as a Lack

María Teresa’s agency in determining her choice of Spanish for the interview did not easily translate to valuing Spanish as supporting her development as a student. María Teresa articulates the myriad ways in which her Spanish speaking mother supports her. She tells Cioè-Peña: ‘me abraza,’ ‘me acaricia,’ ‘siempre me quiere.’ Despite being able to explicitly express how her mother hugs her, caresses her and always loves her, she cannot see this as related to her work in school. María Teresa is proud of how her mother ‘se sienta conmigo,’ but this sitting with her does not translate to helping her with her schoolwork. When Cioè-Peña asks her directly if there are ways in which her mother helps her learn in school, María Teresa acknowledges that her mother helps her with homework: ‘Nomás ella me ayuda a hacer la tarea en la casa.’ But when Cioè-Peña insists and asks if there are some tareas with which her mother cannot help, María Teresa quickly replies: ‘Las tareas que ella no puede hacer son las de inglés. […] Porque ella no entiende inglés ahorita.’ María Teresa’s very positive feelings toward her mother and her loving resources disappear as she narrates that her mother cannot do homework in English because she lacks, she doesn’t understand English. When Cioè-Peña prods and asks how this makes her feel, María Teresa replies ‘triste.’ And yet this sadness does not obviate María Teresa’s sense that the future can be different. This is the situation now/‘ahorita,’ and she wishes for a different reality: ‘Quisiera para que yo haga toda la tarea.’ In using the subjunctive ‘quisiera,’ María Teresa is expressing what she feels. Right now she cannot do all the homework without her mother’s help. But she would wish it to be different in the future. We see how the academic support from her mother is, in María Teresa’s mind, tied to language. In saying, ‘Las tareas que ella no puede hacer son las de inglés,’ María Teresa frames her mother’s monolingualism as a limitation: ‘Porque ella no entiende inglés ahorita.’ As such, María Teresa is left wanting more support: ‘Quisiera para que yo haga toda la tarea,’ despite the fact that she had just articulated the myriad of ways in which Ana’s support actually transcends language: ‘me abraza,’ ‘me acaricia,’ ‘siempre me quiere,’ ‘se sienta conmigo.’ All of these actions help María Teresa feel cared for, but she does not relate that care to her academic development. As such, there is a separation of a whole and intact personhood and her academic categorization as disabled.

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Whereas at school there were discussions of moving María Teresa to a monolingual ICT class in order to abate any issues of ‘confusion’ (CioèPeña, 2020b), in the home and with Cioè-Peña, María Teresa feels comfortable using Spanish. Discussions like this further illustrate the command that different settings can have on language and language use. María Teresa does not evaluate her mother’s supports, which according to María Teresa are bound to Spanish and grounded in mothering and nurturing, as facilitating her ability to thrive as a learner. She does not cite these as academic supports, only as indicators of ‘una buena mamá.’ Despite acknowledging that her mother is ‘mi mejor amiga,’ María Teresa’s relationship with her mother as her best friend is still marked by language, noting that her mother ‘no entiende inglés ahorita,’ which makes her feel ‘triste.’ The relationship between María Teresa and her mother is impacted along linguistic lines. Even though she can express what a wonderful loving and nurturing mother she has, she is also made to see her mother’s Spanish language as a lack, as a limitation, something she wishes can change in the future. Justin: Language as Relational and Making Room for English

Like María Teresa, Justin expresses how his mother Maria is nice, loving, and a good mom who makes him happy: Justin:

She is nice. She is helpful. […] Because she can help make things that we need. […] Like, like papers, like books, like toys, like games – Cioè-Peña [C-P]: Your mom gets you all of those things? Justin: Yes. C-P: You also said that your mom was nice, why is your mom nice? Justin: Because she’s, because – My mama says she is nice because she can be my best mother. […] – I just guess because she gets things for me.

Here we see Justin listing the ways in which Maria is helpful as being grounded in making or procuring material items, all of which could be in support of his academic development. Similar to María Teresa, Justin also then relates emotional value to Maria’s care by reflecting that his mother makes him feel ‘happy […] because when I say I want the things that I did, my mother is happy.’ So not only do Maria’s actions make Justin happy, but he also attributes her actions to making her happy. Similarly, Justin frames Maria as a good mom because of the things she does, like ‘cook,’ ‘help’ and helping him ‘go to places.’ Justin also articulates the specific tasks and supports Maria offers that are directly tied to his learning: Justin: My mom help me to learn. C-P: How?

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Justin: By working my homework. C-P: She helps with your homework? How does she help you with your homework? Justin: Because if I don’t [under]stand that, my mommy help me. If I got it, then I do it by myself. C-P: That’s really great. How does your mommy help you? Justin: If something that is mistake, mommy will help me erase, and we’ll try again to write it. C-P: That’s great, so she’ll help you fi nd mistakes? Justin: Yes. C-P: She’ll help you fi x them? Justin: Yes.

In this snippet, Justin describes how Maria helps him identify and correct errors in his homework. Yet, when asked, ‘Does your mommy help you learn at school?’, he responds, ‘No, I do it by myself.’ While this may be tied to Maria’s physical absence at school, it may also reflect how Justin has internalized the division between school space and home space. As such, he does not attribute homework help to Maria’s ‘good-mother’ duties even though ‘she always wants to work with me.’ However, this division between home and school space is one-sided; whereas Maria is absent at school, school is very present at home: C-P: Justin: C-P: Justin: C-P: Justin:

Yes, what do you learn at home with your mom? I talk about my day in school. You do? Yes. Does she ask you every day? Yes.

When asked at the end of the interview if there was anything else he wanted to share about his mother, Justin stated, ‘You know, when we eat food when we come back from school, what we’ll eat, my mommy gets me food, food… and we go to sit and we eat.’ Justin’s decision to share this daily ritual potentially indicates that this was a literacy practice (Street, 1993) that carried socio-emotional value for him. It indicates how Justin carries his schooling experiences into the home through food and routines. For Justin, school exists in the realm of mostly English, whereas home, at first glance, exists in the realm of Spanish because that is Maria’s primary language. For Justin, the home was a translanguaging space because his mother made room for his English-bound experiences. This was evident in his mother’s decisions to acquire materials, help him complete his English-only homework or sit alongside him while he worked on his English assignments. Justin’s mother’s actions facilitated learning at home and at school. Having at-home support is tied to increased student achievement for

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emergent bilinguals, but it is of particular significance for students with disabilities (Burke, 2013; Ijalba, 2015a). For example, Justin, who is classified as autistic, would not be able to fulfill his academic duties if not for the socio-emotional space that Maria creates in sitting alongside him, asking him about his day even if in Spanish, and providing him with particular resources. Maria is also especially helpful in managing his academic frustration by helping him identify and fi x mistakes collaboratively. Dan: Language as Hierarchical and English for a Bright Future

The division that was inherent in María Teresa’s and Justin’s conceptualizations of home and school as two distinct spaces also contributes to a perception of each language as designated or relegated to particular spaces. This separation also resulted in conceptualizations of each language as distinctly valuable and powerful within their designated spaces – although not always in clean ways. Like the others, Dan also associated positive feelings to his mother and connected these to tangible actions: Dan: […] I feel like she’s like the best mom and I’m lucky to have her. C-P: What makes her the best mom? Dan: Because I know she just wants me to get a good future, she wants me to have a bright future, she also makes me go to school. And I should come to start the academy which is I chose by myself, and I said, ‘yes.’ She wants me to have a good future because she hasn’t go to school, she start to go, she stopped going to school on fi fth grade, and I thought and say, if I could go to middle school I could teach her stuff. C-P: Okay. So, what are the ways that your mom helps you learn? Dan: Sometimes she asks some questions and I understand the text. C-P: Okay. Are there other ways she helps you? Dan: Sometimes she tells me words, she asks me these words, if I understand them. So, then I could put them in a pad, in my notebook and put in my vocabulary. And that’s it.

Dan positions Paty as ‘the best mom’ because she ‘makes me go to school’ and ‘tells me words’ and ‘asks me these words.’ He also starts to mention the ways in which Paty motivates him by giving advice and serving as a model for pursuing an education. However, we start to see hints of power differentials when he mentions that once he supersedes the 5th grade, his current grade and Paty’s highest level of education, he will be able to ‘teach her stuff.’ He later goes on to attribute feelings of intelligence and superiority to his capacity to speak English: ‘I’m the only one that really working hard to get a bright future.’ In this interview, we see Dan parrot ideas of ‘good future,’ ‘bright future,’ without recognizing the ways in which Paty is facilitating that

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(e.g. translating homework, taking him to a weekend academic support program and hiring tutors). This results in the erasure of a mother’s actions to support learning. By being in an English-only setting, Dan is becoming a more Englishdominant person, which allows him to feel more ‘intelligent than everybody’ and more industrious. He also attributes Paty’s ‘little bit’ understanding of English to her role in helping him with his homework, not to her own desire to learn: C-P:

Do you think that [being bilingual] helps you with your mom or that makes things harder with your mom? Dan: Easier, because you could just explain it. Remember when I told a teenager in college? She actually helps for the papers too much so my mom could understand me easier. C-P: Oh, so the teenager helps your mom to understand your–? Dan: My homework. C-P: Your homework? Dan: And that’s how my mom understands a little bit more English.

Here Dan gives his homework and his tutor credit for Paty’s English development, while erasing the labor she put into fi nding the tutor, into working to afford the tutor, and making no mention of her multiple attempts to take adult ESL classes (Cioè-Peña, 2018). In this moment, we also see how Dan has learned to put people into hierarchies based on their bilingualism: at the top, the tutor because of her capacities to effortlessly communicate with both Dan and Paty; then Dan, because of his ability to communicate with his tutor well, but in limited ways with his mother; and fi nally Paty, because he sees her as having limited abilities in what he has deemed to be the most powerful language, English. In seeing himself move along a trajectory toward English dominance, much like the tutor who navigates both languages fluidly, Dan sees himself as further from his mother, who is perceived as being inferior and in a static position because of her supposed Spanish monolingualism. In Dan’s mind, the Spanish component of his bilingualism is secondary; it facilitates his relationship with Paty to some degree, but it is not what grants him access to ‘a good future,’ ‘a bright future.’ Dan’s placement in a monolingual English ICT class was a reflection of what happens when misconceptions about language confusion take hold within families of EBLADs (Cioè-Peña, 2020a). In seeing Spanish erased in the school setting, Dan projects the same ableist ideologies that denied him access to bilingualism onto Paty. These students are adopting a lot of the nuanced subtext around language and power – for them the power dynamics of language are clear. Every day Dan saw people whom he deemed as successful functioning in English and people whom he viewed as unsuccessful functioning only in Spanish. As such, Dan’s own linguistic development in English has led him to feel: ‘A little kind of

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intelligent than everybody in the family, only here, in the house. Because I’m the only one that really working hard to get a bright future.’ Embedded in this comment is the idea of English acquisition, or the pursuit of it, as a marker of success, and Spanish, or the sustainability of the home language, as a marker of familial relationships, reinforcing the division between home and school spaces. Once again children are seeing the home and school spaces as linguistically distinct, while erasing all of the translanguaging that their mothers support and facilitate and that they themselves engage in daily. Perhaps this is because they have not been formally taught to value a translanguaging approach to language. As such, the mothers’ efforts to support their children by creating translanguaging spaces are not reflected in the schools which continue to maintain boundaries around English and Spanish. In this way, these fi ndings showcase how these students’ linguistic practices and perceptions are no different from those of enabled emergent bilinguals, thus calling on us as educators to reconsider the linguistic access they are granted. This is where translanguaging can serve as a transformational tool. Translanguaging can not only transform how children learn at school, but also how they perceive themselves, their mothers and other multilingual people. Translanguaging Spaces Everywhere: What Would It Mean?

While the students themselves did not identify any of their homebased practices as translanguaging, it was evident both in the interviews themselves and in their discourse that their own language practices included translanguaging, and that they had been exposed to, and benefited from, translanguaging spaces at home. Embedded in their lack of acknowledgement or naming of these practices was an erasure of the ways in which they benefited from and thrived in the translanguaging spaces their mothers created and supported. This erasure may be more reflective of a lack of exposure to, or validation of, translanguaging in formal educational spaces than a personal or ideological opposition to translanguaging. If anything, the students were acutely aware of the ways in which they benefited from their multilingual practices and the opportunities those practices afforded them. This was clear in how they positioned themselves as more capable and competent than people who were not ‘bilingual,’ a positioning that contrasted to the one they had been assigned by school administrators which categorized them as having a disability and limited English. Here the students were able to act both in their linguistic production/fluidity and in their metacognitive discourse on language use, demonstrating their capacity to engage with complex themes that are often thought to cause them ‘confusion’ (Cioè-Peña, 2020b, 2021). This reinforces our decision to look beyond these children’s disability labels and toward their actual language practices.

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The issue with conceptualizing full language proficiency as a requirement for bilingualism is that many racialized bilinguals like María Teresa, Justin and Dan do not consider themselves or their families and communities as bilingual. This construction of additive full bilingualism and biliteracy also continues to impact bilingual education programs, which often demand that each language be maintained as strictly separate in order to protect the minoritized language and to ensure target language use (Flores & García, 2017; García & Kleifgen, 2018). As such, these students are unable to recognize their mothers’ translanguaging practices as valid because they do not view them as ‘fully’ bilingual. Still, these practices, framed always from a deficit perspective, are then not recognized as necessary components in the academic and social advancement of these children. This is why it is of critical importance that all educators take up a pedagogical practice that includes translanguaging spaces for themselves and their students. Such an approach offers opportunities for translanguaging to transform all learning as well as interpersonal relationships and ideologies. This might help shift the ways in which these students view their own linguistic practices and those of their mothers, shifting from a deficient-oriented perspective toward a more expansive and pluralistic one. In seeing their home language practices reflected at school in intentional and meaningful ways, students could transform how they understand and value the ways in which their mothers and families use language. Such a shift is fundamental to disrupting the reproduction of power inequities that have traditionally positioned teachers as more knowledgeable and, therefore, more powerful than parents. This role of teacher as expert then gets reduced to English as the source of expertise and power in the minds of children. Translanguaging facilitates room for the linguistic and cultural ‘reality in process’ (Freire, 2012: 83) that has not historically been mirrored in the formal school and in traditional dichotomous positionings of named languages. In making determinations regarding the supposed appropriateness of a bilingual education for children with disabilities, schools create systems of sorting and classifying that are taken up by the children themselves. Often, this is done in service of ameliorating the disability, while ignoring the fact that these children ‘in reality’ continue to lead bilingual lives. Instead, the children take up this sorting and ranking and apply it to the members of their families, thus reproducing the systems of oppression they experience at school by extending it to new spaces. Just as English is not restricted to school use, neither are the linguistic ideologies that the students are exposed to at school. Instead, we imagine that if these children had been granted an opportunity to enact and validate their full linguistic repertoires, they would extend this validation to their homes as well. How then could children’s stance about their own linguistic practices and identities, and those of their mothers, be shifted through

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translanguaging? In its focus on meaning-making rather than linguistic fidelity, translanguaging takes on a transformative framework of linguistic practice as expansive and in progress rather than static and (im)perfect. This allows children to see themselves and their mothers on a continuum of emergent bilingualism. Their own dynamic bilingual practices would then not be seen as something they must leave behind in order to succeed, nor would their bilingualism been positioned as something separate at best, and disposable at worst, from their identities and thus less worthy of being addressed and acknowledged by all teachers and administrators. Many of the fi ndings presented here are recognizable in the fields of bilingual education and English language acquisition, indicating that the values that the children hold did not arise from them internally, and more likely are reflections of school-based practices and implicit values. As such, it would behoove schools to shift their approaches to language education and to family engagement in order to both showcase students’ authentic linguistic practices and elevate their perceptions of their families’ home language practices. Ultimately, a translanguaging framework reframes the way EBLADs think about themselves and others – it transforms perceptions and relationships, not just practices – both at school and at home, serving as a sustainable bridge between both sites. Marginalized Latinx Mothers as Teachers

Discourse of teaching as caregiving and nurturing exists (Albrecht, 2019; Howes & Hamilton, 1992), but less prevalent is the positioning of marginalized mothers as teachers. Yet, as these children have indicated, their mothers are actively teaching them, not just life and social skills, but things that are academic, even if not always in English-only. Part of the reason why this role of mother-as-teacher is excluded from the discourse is rooted in the kinds of capital attributed to each role. In being excluded from their children’s education, assumptions are made that what the school has to offer is of greater significance than that of the home. As such, it is easier to place EBLADs in monolingual spaces that either erase a mother’s role or add labor to the individual family, as opposed to adapting the classroom in order to be linguistically supportive of each child and family. As a result, the already taxed family is given more to do with less. Additionally, as children internalize the ideologies embedded in these school-based decisions and programs, they project them onto their understanding of their own identities and the relationships they maintain with others outside of their classrooms, particularly those whom they now deem to be linguistically inferior, especially their mothers. This contributes to the active erasure of the supports their mothers offer and the powerful ways in which the mothers are leveraging their own linguistic repertoires in order to make meaning and scaffold EBLADs’ linguistic and academic development.

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In all three of the children’s narratives, we see mentions of the different forms of capital their mothers possess and enact. Yet, because these efforts take place primarily in Spanish, the children relegate them to motherly duties and qualities at best and, at worst, as evidence of inferior intellectual capacity. If these children had been exposed to a schooling experience that affirmed their translanguaging, and allowed them to learn in translanguaging spaces, we imagine many possibilities for transforming the mother-child relationship. If schools took up translanguaging, or at least recognized and affirmed the translanguaging spaces that exist in the home, they would dismantle the hierarchy of languages that is reproduced and promoted by the children’s educational experiences. It would also allow for students and educators to recognize the massive amount of parental labor that goes into supporting a student categorized as having a disability and also limited English. What Would Be Needed?

In order to support teachers taking up translanguaging in an effort to empower EBLADs and their families, parents must be positioned as experts of their children’s academic and linguistic needs and strengths. This can be done by inviting parents in, asking them the strategies they use to support EBLADs at home, and making space for these strategies in the classroom. Individual education plan (IEP) meetings can serve as a great space for educators not only to offer recommendations, but also to gather them. Through these small practices of parental inclusion, teachers can establish true collaborative partnerships, allowing parents to have their opinions, labor and contributions valued. In establishing this relationship, teachers can also acquire a more nuanced understanding of students’ linguistic identities and dis/abilities, as they are understood and/or experienced by families. For example, while a school may have a child listed as a Spanish speaker, that child may also use Central or South American Indigenous languages like Quiché, Mam or Garifuna – this would offer information not just about the student’s linguistic practices but also their cognitive capacity. Furthermore, as we have seen, there are rarely Latinx homes in which only Spanish is spoken or heard. Translanguaging is part of the everyday linguistic practices in all bilingual homes, regardless of any member classifications. One fi rst step in extending a true collaborative partnership with parents is allowing any and all homework to be completed with the child’s full linguistic repertoire, going beyond English-only. While monolingual ICT teachers may feel uncomfortable with this idea, particularly if they are not users of students’ home language(s), it is important to recognize that this kind of trust is necessary in allowing students to be agentive, supported at school and at home (Dávila & Linares, 2020). Inviting translanguaging into homework would also indicate to parents that they are

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trusted, equal stakeholders in their child’s academic development (Figueroa, 2011). This would also help eliminate any linguistic tension that children and mothers encounter when working together at home, while also honoring children’s whole-selves by making space for the multiplicity of lived experiences they encounter and allowing them to use their full linguistic and academic repertoires. Furthermore, it is important for all teachers, not just language teachers, to incorporate a translanguaging view of language and bilingualism into their instruction. For example, all teachers must understand that even if the text is in English-only, bilingual students must enter the text with their whole beings, which includes their histories, biographies and language practices. As García (2020) says about reading, when bilingual students interact with text, all monolingual texts become bilingual through the processual actions of bilingual students as they make sense of the text. Rather than risking development of English, the incorporation of translanguaging as a stance and in the instructional design can develop ways of using English or Spanish. EBLADs, in particular, would be able to learn content alongside language in ways that are constructive rather than silencing, making way for multiple means of expression across language(s). Additionally, through this practice, students will develop a linguistic ideology that is focused on linguistic pluralism rather than linguistic erasure. Oral discourse is most important in developing literate identities, thus allowing students to connect their oral linguistic practices with literacygrounded skills. This also makes space for the development of not only bilingual students but biliterate students who feel a sense of ownership over their linguistic repertoires and their voices as multilingual authors and storytellers. This also helps to position the parents as literate beings, giving over formal space to literacy practices students see and hear in their homes. As such, this offers an endorsement that children need in order to reposition their parents, in this case their mothers, as knowledgeable and supportive of their academic development. Such an approach also creates more opportunities for students to express themselves multimodally and dynamically, which is particularly important for EBLADs. For a true translanguaging design to help the education of EBLADs, it would be important to create as many opportunities for student autonomy and choice as possible. Autonomy and choice are significant because what students are allowed to do in the classroom is what they perceive as permissible in the world. In addition, many EBLADs encounter a great reduction in choice and autonomy as a result of their disability label (CioèPeña, 2017a). As such, being given power over their linguistic practice is a central way to allow students to feel trusted and empowered while offering recognition of their translanguaging selves. Students can then extend this flexibility to their understanding of the language and literacy practices they experience at home.

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To do all this requires teachers to also provide student resources that include different home language practices, as well as diverse modes. This is essential for students’ academic and socio-emotional growth and also for the development of their sense of self (Bishop, 1990). This may mean providing not just resources that allow EBLADs to access the meaning of a text, such as using glossaries or Google Translate, but also literature that is culturally and linguistically representative of students (Tschida et al., 2014; see also Chapters 8 and 9, this volume). Opportunities to access such resources may seem common for bilingual and English as a New Language settings; however, they are opportunities often withheld from students labeled as having a disability (Cioè-Peña, 2021). Such materials need to be made available to students, particularly EBLADs, often and regularly as part of the core curriculum for all students, and should be available during self-directed learning times year-round, not just during diversity month initiatives. Allowing students to take these materials outside of the classroom would also support the work mothers are doing at home. Finally, what is most important is that as EBLADs move through their school, they feel seen and heard in complex ways that mirror their complex identities. Such an environment also distributes the responsibility. It is no longer the special education teacher or the bilingual teacher who is responsible for promoting and supporting the students’ linguistic practices; it would be part of the school culture at large. The development of a true multilingual ecology would also allow parents to feel welcome in any part of the school. For example, having multilingual signage up in any classroom would allow parents to be able to make their own connections with what their children are doing at home and what they are exposed to at school. Recognizing that multiple stakeholders at the school – not just the special education teacher or just the bilingual teacher – are involved and invested in their child’s success would also support parents in recognizing the intersection and interrelated nature of their children’s linguistic identity and disability, which have historically been viewed as separate from one another. The aim of all these practices is to support EBLADs and parents and to draw connections between both the home and the school space. Without this drive for interconnectedness and true collaboration, transformation is unachievable. Without merging both educational spaces – the home and the school – it would be impossible to dismantle the hierarchies that have been produced by categories of named languages and disabilities. Instead, it would just serve as yet another way in which schools coopt home practices, passing them off as their own while devaluing the labor and capital parents invest. Conclusion

This chapter has highlighted the need to take up translanguaging not just for social justice and language learning, but in favor of social

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inclusion, particularly for multiply marginalized children like Latinx students labeled as disabled and as English learners. By highlighting translanguaging, and not just the use of a home language, we hope to make the labor of mothers, as they engage their children through translanguaging, visible and valued, especially to their own children. We have seen, however, how schools progressively take this possibility away from the children they are supposed to educate, leaving bilingual homes as empty deficient spaces, regardless of the efforts of many racialized mothers. When we talk about these practices as simply ‘using the home language,’ we make them sound as if they are just another accommodation attributed to a child’s disability needs, rather than a part of their sociocultural identity. It is important that educators recognize these acts as part of a legitimate practice that is reflective of real language use. We hope that this shift in stance will allow for the understanding that even the linguistic gains mothers make through their own engagement with translanguaging are not acknowledged because, as their linguistic capacity increases, so do the English-bound academic demands of their children’s schooling. This perception of home language practices as not academically valuable is evident in the children’s stance as they progress across different grade levels. María Teresa, who was the youngest student and the only one in a bilingual ICT classroom, sees language as only functional, as what it affords her – love from her mother in Spanish, but absence of help with English homework. Justin, who was in a 3rd grade, transitional bilingual classroom, was beginning to recognize the tensions between school expectations and his mother’s linguistic capacity, and yet was appreciative of the spaces his mother cultivated within their home and family for their relationship. However, Dan – the oldest student, experiencing the most linguistically restrictive education in a 5th grade monolingual ICT class – was least able to appreciate what his mother had to offer because it was not visible in his school setting. EBLADs are often placed in English-only spaces because of erroneous perceptions that they are confused by their bilingualism. Yet these students are experiencing a lot of the nuanced subtext around language and power. For them, there is no confusion; the power dynamics of language are progressively made clear. Relationships are tied to feelings, relationships are tied to language, language is tied to feelings, and so how a child feels about a language can also influence how they feel about the person who does or does not use that language. In similar ways, learning is tied to language and is reflective of the spaces in which each language appears. School as an English space does not include the mothers. Yet home is a translanguaging space where both the school and the mother coexist in linguistically expansive ways. There is a lack of recognition from school personnel of how at-home support contributes to learning and participation in school, and this is then transmitted and taken up by the children. Translanguaging’s

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transformative power must not be artificially restricted to the home or the school. Translanguaging is always happening because it is a part of the bilingual child’s life and experience. Educators must recognize the ways in which translanguaging transcends social spaces and is housed within the child. Translanguaging has always been about appreciating a child’s linguistic practices for the ways in which they serve the children’s meaningmaking, and the development of connections and relationships. It is for this reason that we call upon educators to create translanguaging spaces within all schools, and most especially for minoritized EBLADs. This would not only make space for language, but also for all people and the relationships that sustain them. Note (1) We use the term dis/abled to recognize the reality that people with disabilities are not just an amalgamation of needs but people with strengths and weaknesses just like all people (Connor & Valle, 2017).

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Cioè-Peña, M. (2020a) Raciolinguistics and the education of emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled. The Urban Review. doi:10.1007/s11256-020-00581-z Cioè-Peña, M. (2020b) Bilingualism for students with disabilities, deficit or advantage? Perspectives of Latinx mothers. Bilingual Research Journal 43 (3), 253–266. doi:10.1 080/15235882.2020.1799884 Cioè-Peña, M. (2021) Dual language and the erasure of emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled (EBLADs). In N. Flores, A. Tseng and N. Subtirelu (eds) Bilingualism for All? Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Dual Language Education in the United States (pp. 63–87). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cohen, S.R. (2013) Advocacy for the ‘Abandonados’: Harnessing cultural beliefs for Latino families and their children with intellectual disabilities. Journal of Policy and Practice in Intellectual Disabilities 10 (1), 71–78. doi:10.1111/jppi.12021 Connor, D.J. and Valle, J.W. (2017) Rescripting crips: Reclaiming disability history and a disability studies perspective within public school curriculum. In O. Musenberg (ed.) Kulture-Geschichte-Behinderug/Culture, History, Disability (pp. 201–220). Berlin: Humbolt University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1991) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6), 1241–1299. doi:10.2307/1229039 Dávila, L.T. and Linares, R.E. (2020) English as a second language teachers’ perceptions of care in an anti-immigrant climate. International Multilingual Research Journal 14 (4), 355–369. doi:10.1080/19313152.2020.1747164 Figueroa, A.M. (2011) Citizenship and education in the homework completion routine. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 42 (3), 263–280. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1492. 2011.01131.x Flores, N. and García, O. (2017) A critical review of bilingual education in the United States: From basements and pride to boutiques and profit. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 37, 14–29. doi:10.1017/S0267190517000162 Freire, P. (2012) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M.B. Ramos, trans.; 30th Anniversary edn). New York: Continuum International. García, O. (2011) Theorizing translanguaging for educators. In C. Celic and K. Seltzer (eds) Translanguaging: A CUNY-NYSIEB Guide for Educators. New York: CUNY-NYSIEB. See https://www.cuny-nysieb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/TranslanguagingGuide-March-2013.pdf. García, O. (2020) Translanguaging and Latinx bilingual readers. The Reading Teacher 73 (5), 557–562. doi:10.1002/trtr.1883 García, O. and Kleifgen, J.A. (2018) Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Learners (2nd edn). New York: Teachers College Press. Gonzalez, L., Borders, L.D., Hines, E., Villalba, J. and Henderson, A. (2013) Parental involvement in children’s education: Considerations for school counselors working with Latino immigrant families. Professional School Counseling 16 (3), 185–193. doi:10.5330/PSC.n.2013-16.183 Gonzalez, T., Tefera, A. and Artiles, A. (2014) The intersections of language differences and learning disabilities. In M. Bigelow and J. Ennser-Kananen (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Educational Linguistics (pp. 145–157). New York: Routledge. Howes, C. and Hamilton, C.E. (1992) Children’s relationships with caregivers: Mothers and child care teachers. Child Development 63 (4), 859–866. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1992. tb01666.x Ijalba, E. (2015a) Understanding parental engagement in Hispanic mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder: Application of a process-model of cultural competence. Journal of Multilingual Education Research 6 (1). See http://fordham.bepress. com/jmer/vol6/iss1/6. Ijalba, E. (2015b) Effectiveness of a parent-implemented language and literacy intervention in the home language. Child Language Teaching and Therapy 31 (2), 207–220. See http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/10.1177/0265659014548519.

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Kangas, S.E.N. (2014) When special education trumps ESL: An investigation of service delivery for ELLs with disabilities. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 11 (4), 273– 306. doi:10.1080/15427587.2014.968070 Kangas, S.E.N. (2017) ‘That’s where the rubber meets the road’: The intersection of special education and dual language education. Teachers College Record 119 (7). Kim, J. (2013) Unheard Voices: Korean Immigrant Mothers’ Experiences with the United States Special Education System. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest. Lee, Y.-J. and Park, H.J. (2016) Becoming a parent of a child with special needs: Perspectives from Korean mothers living in the United States. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education 63 (6), 593–607. doi:10.1080/10349 12X.2016.1154139 Orozco, B. (2014) Facilitating Hispanic monolingual parent participation during the IEP process. MEd thesis, California State University San Marcos. See http://scholarworks.calstate.edu/handle/10211.3/120426. Ryan, C.S., Casas, J.F., Kelly-Vance, L., Ryalls, B.O. and Nero, C. (2010) Parent involvement and views of school success: The role of parents’ Latino and White American cultural orientations. Psychology in the Schools 47 (4), 391–405. doi:10.1002/ pits.20477 Sadowski, G., O’Neill, R. and Bermingham, D. (2014) Assessment practices of multidisciplinary school team members in determining special education services for English language learners. Multicultural Learning and Teaching 9 (2), 121–141. doi:10.1515/mlt-2012-0010 Sánchez, M.T., Parker, C., Akbayin, B. and McTigue, A. (2010) Processes and Challenges in Identifying Learning Disabilities Among Students Who Are English Language Learners in Three New York State Districts. Issues & Answers Report, REL 2010, No. 085. Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands. See http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/ regions/northeast/pdf/REL_2010085.pdf. Street, B.V. (1993) Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, A.L. (2011) Disproportionality in special education identification and placement of English language learners. Exceptional Children 77 (3), 317–334. doi:10.1177/00144 0291107700304 Sullivan, A.L. and Bal, A. (2013) Disproportionality in special education: Effects of individual and school variables on disability risk. Exceptional Children 79 (4), 475–494. doi:10.1177/001440291307900406 Tschida, C.M., Ryan, C.L. and Ticknor, A.S. (2014) Building on windows and mirrors: Encouraging the disruption of ‘single stories’ through children’s literature. Journal of Children’s Literature 40 (1), 28–39. See https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1040235. Wolfe, K. and Durán, L.K. (2013) Culturally and linguistically diverse parents’ perceptions of the IEP process. Multiple Voices for Ethnically Diverse Exceptional Learners 13 (2), 4–18. Zhang, D., Katsiyannis, A., Ju, S. and Roberts, E. (2014) Minority representation in special education: 5-year trends. Journal of Child and Family Studies 23 (1), 118–127. See http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/socscicoll/docview/1473940387/ abstract/AC9AFCD9AC064A02PQ/2.

12 A Path Pa’lante! Amplifying Translanguaging Espacios Sin Miedo Maite T. Sánchez

The classrooms portrayed in this book show translanguaging in schools as a political act that centers Latinx students’ experiences, knowledge systems, and especially their languaging – the interweaving of tejidos/ waves – sin miedo. The teachers understand the need to organize their teaching by opening up spaces for their Latinx students’ translanguaging, rather than simply insisting on the use of named languages that have been assigned to them – Spanish and English. Despite teachers being governed by language education policies that protect the privilege of monolingualwhite students, in these classrooms Latinx students could be themselves sin miedo, with their different language and cultural practices. At the same time, they are able to continue developing critical understandings of themselves and others. The translanguaging educational spaces in this volume challenge the traditional narrative of Latinx failure, their ‘word gaps’ and ‘achievement gaps,’ centering the various and varied abled Latinx voices and bodies. These translanguaging educational spaces change the locus of enunciation (Mignolo, 2000) from the dominant institution to the minoritized bi/multilingual community, in this case that of Latinx students. As was discussed in several of the chapters, Latinx communities have been colonized, minoritized, racialized and Otherized. Part of this colonial project has been the discursive construction of named languages with norms that many times exclude Latinx bilinguals as being competent speakers of either ‘made’ language (Rosa, 2019). Translanguaging highlights that traditional understandings of named languages as discrete entities have been reified by countries, schools and prescriptive grammar books (García & Li, 2014; Li, 2011, 2018; Otheguy et al., 2015, 2019). And translanguaging asks us to look into minoritized bi/multilinguals’ languaging (Becker, 1995; Maturana & Varela, 1984). An education centered on translanguaging is able to ‘show the other world that already exists’ (Nelson Flores, Foreword) and allows for Latinx students to ‘look under 277

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the rug’ at their histories and linguistic and cultural practices that had been ‘left to rot’ (Cati de los Ríos & Kate Seltzer, Chapter 8). The teachers and their Latinx students in this volume have shown the transformative potential of translanguaging in the four purposes that we pointed out in the Introducción: (1) reconfiguring power (reinventando who can produce knowledge, who can name it and who can access it); (2) disrupting established knowledge (opening sitios of ideological contestation where decolonized lenguas – and bodies – can unfold); (3) developing Latinx students’ critical consciousness (unpacking good ¿para quién?); and (4) acting on a humanizing education for Latinx students (relacionándonos con cariño, confianza y convivencia). Translanguaging is NOT an ‘educational model’ or a ‘program’ that can be implemented in a particular way. The Latinx communities are diverse, ranging from recent immigrants to those who have been in the United States for generations and who are bilingual or speak English only; from people in La Frontera with borders that are only en papeles to superdiverse cities where within one family we fi nd multiple countries of origin and multiple immigrant generations. Latinx students have intersecting identities because they often simultaneously participate, even within the family, with people who have different linguistic practices, skin color, socio-economic characteristics, and physical and intellectual abilities. Latinx children and youth attend schools in neighborhoods that reflect different social contexts – rural, suburban, urban – and where residents have more or less socioeconomic power and different racial compositions. As such, educational contexts need to be mindful of differences, fitting their programs to the population that the school serves. Whereas this book has focused on translanguaging as a transformative endeavor, incorporating translanguaging in education alone will not be enough to combat structural racism. This work goes alongside larger culturally responsive and sustaining education approaches to understand how ‘teaching and learning always occur in a social-cultural-political context’ (Muhammad, 2020: 17). However, it is imperative that the dynamic language practices of Latinx communities, their translanguaging tejidos, be front and center in this anti-racist work. The classrooms, teachers and Latinx students in this volume are all real. While there are teachers and students engaged in similar practices in other US schools, these practices remain mostly escondidas. The educators in this book are moving sin miedo, although their actions may be risky and precarious because they are often seen as causing trouble and upsetting colleagues, educational authorities and policymakers. And yet, how can we fight racist ideologies in educational institutions if we don’t bring our transformative practices into the open? Therefore, for schools to become a transformative space for Latinx students, their translanguaging tejidos should be understood and leveraged. But as we show in these chapters, for translanguaging to help transform the educational

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experiences of Latinx communities, educators need to understand that ideologies of monolingualism in English or Spanish, or double monolingualism in bilingual programs, posit the language practices of white monolingual speakers as better than those of Latinx students, particularly if they are Brown and Black and from economically disadvantaged homes. These are some of the hegemonic ideologies that educators who understand the transformative potential of translanguaging try to fight or counterbalance at best, in humanizing classrooms for and with Latinx students. There are no magic solutions for making schools and classrooms transformative spaces for Latinx children and youth. Teachers, as we have seen in this volume, have various ways of centering the lives of Latinx students in their classrooms. In this concluding chapter, I will not provide recommendations for ‘best practices’ because it is school-based teachers and leaders who are in the best position to know their Latinx students and who need to consider their own unique situations to rethink their practices for educating Latinx students. These educators also need to negotiate larger educational policies, including standardized assessments in English, or programming options that support bilingual or English-only instruction. What I offer here are questions for reflection for those school-based leaders who are curious about incorporating translanguaging in education as a way to strengthen their practices in support of their Latinx students. These questions aim to help unpack how the hegemony of the language practices of white monolingual speakers are engrained in ideologies that we carry about bi/multilingualism, and about different groups of students’ language practices – and how these are implicated in the school and in classroom practices that we design and implement for these students. These questions also aim to help school-based educators reflect on the nuances and heterogeneity within the Latinx communities and the interplay of factors such as national origin, immigration status, economic status, ability and race in how these students understand themselves and their families and how others perceive them. Reflecting on these questions might be uncomfortable, but this is the work of translanguaging – to provide a space where uncomfortable conversations about language, race, sexuality, gender, deafness, dis/ability, nation and citizenship can be enacted so that we can weave new tejidos for ourselves and for our Latinx children and youth. As James Baldwin (1962: 38) famously wrote: ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ By considering the answers to these questions, school leaders could then identify concrete actions that would make sense in their own contexts, for the specific group of Latinx students with whom they work. In this way, school leaders can start building their own path pa’lante! sin miedo, amplifying the experiences of teachers and students in this book into their own schools and classrooms to join the fight for transforming US schooling for Latinx children and youth. I start with questions about

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language ideologies for school-based educators. I will then provide more specific questions for principals and then teachers about policies and practices in support of Latinx children and youth. Questioning Ideologies of Language and Bi/Multilingual Speakers

Educators are policymakers (de Jong, 2011; Menken & García, 2010) and their actions have consequences in their schools and classrooms. This book has focused on classroom practices enacted by teachers whose ideologies about language, race, class and dis/ability in society have enabled them to go beyond the schools’ official language policies to create spaces that resist the hierarchies of privilege established by the educational system (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017). Many of the teachers in this book are Latinx (primarily Latinas) with different life histories. They have drawn from their own oppressive experiences to connect with what their students are undergoing. White teachers in this book also understand how their race has provided them with privileges that their Latinx students do not have, and have worked to ensure a different education experience for their students. In order to critically educate Latinx students and other minoritized and racialized bi/multilinguals, and for the transformative potential of translanguaging to be expanded widely, not only teachers but also their school leaders need to reflect and question their own raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015). In this volume, some of the teachers were explicitly supported by their principals in their translanguaging work (Heiman, Cervantes-Soon & Hurie, Chapter 2; Sánchez, Espinet & Hunt, Chapter 6; García-Mateus, Henderson, Téllez-Arsté & Palmer, Chapter 7; de los Ríos & Seltzer, Chapter 8). In other chapters, school leaders did not explicitly support translanguaging but trusted their teachers to do the work they needed to do in their classrooms (Poza & Stites, Chapter 3; de la Piedra & Esquinca, Chapter 5; Gárate-Estes, Lawyer & GarcíaFernández, Chapter 10). Teachers and other school-based leaders need to reflect on their own raciolinguistic ideologies, and how these are reflected in how they perceive their students and ultimately in their work in the school and/or in their classroom. Below I offer some questions for principals and teachers to start with in this work. •

As you go around the neighborhood where your school is located, notice the signage of storefronts, offi ces and other buildings: What languages does the signage represent? How are they written? What is represented in English? What is represented in languages other than English? In what ways does the signage of your school and classroom refl ect that of the neighborhood? What messages do you get about

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bi/multilingualism from the linguistic landscapes of your school and that of the school’s neighborhood? Are there Latinx students in your school who speak languages other than English or Spanish? Who are these students? How do you view their multilingualism? Are there students in your school who you would not consider Latinx and who speak languages other than English or Spanish? What other labels do you also use to refer to these students? Think about these labels and ask: Who are these students? How do you view their bilingualism? How different are those views from those you hold about your bilingual Latinx students? Listen to the community as school is dismissed. What do you hear? Are languages other than English being spoken? By whom and with whom? Can you tell how this bi/multilingualism transforms interactions? What are your views about the language practices of the students in your school and/or classroom? In what ways have you internalized ideologies that posit that some students’ language practices (particularly those of students of color) need to be perfected/improved while others (mostly white students) need to be expanded? How would you describe the ways in which some of the Latinx students and their families have been minoritized in the school community, particularly darker skinned Latinx or those that are economically disadvantaged? How would you explain these processes of minoritization? How would you explain the privileges that white families have when compared to minoritized Latinx ones? In what ways have you internalized ideas that some families (particularly of students of color from economically disadvantaged homes) are not involved in their children’s education, whereas others (white students or other bi/multilinguals that are economically advantaged) are?

I hope that through the answers to these questions, teachers and other school leaders can observe their students’ communities and reflect on their ideas about language, bilingualism and race. It would be important to reflect on hegemonic ideologies that posit the language practices of white monolingual speakers as better than those of Latinx students, particularly those who are Brown and Black and/or come from economically disadvantaged homes. I hope that these questions also help educators reflect on how their own experiences with language contrast with those of the students and families in their schools. Ideologies are most important, but principals and teachers have to negotiate larger federal, state and district language educational policies for their school community. I consider next reflections for principals on

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policies and practices in their schools, followed by questions for teachers on the same issues. Principals: Reflecting on schools’ policies and practices in support of Latinx students

Principals are extremely influential in mediating English-only federal, state and district policies and shaping the quality of schooling that minoritized bi/multilinguals receive in their schools (DeMatthews & Izquierdo, 2016; Long et al., 2016; Menken, 2017). While principals receive many directives from their district administrators in order to comply with federal and state mandates, they negotiate these policies as they make schoolrelated decisions (Koyama, 2013; Menken & Solorza, 2014). Principals that develop a translanguaging stance, an ideology that students’ translanguaging is beneficial in education (García et al., 2017), are able to work together with teachers in bilingual education, and in English as a second language classrooms, and other teachers to change school and classroom practices in support of Latinx students and other minoritized bi/multilinguals (Ascenzi-Moreno et al., 2016; Menken & Sánchez, 2020; Sánchez & Menken, 2020). By understanding that current school policies are framed around monoglossic white supremacist views of bi/multilingualism, principals can reflect on how their own school-based decision making further reinforces these ideologies. They need to understand what they have been doing to mediate them, and what else they can do to support their Latinx students’ translanguaging in education. Below I pose some questions to help principals with these reflections. •

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Walk around your school, looking at the bulletin boards in the hallways and in the main offi ce: In what ways is the hegemony of the language practices of white monolingual speakers of English evident in the postings? In which ways do the posts reflect the language practices of Latinx communities and other minoritized bi/multilinguals’ community groups? What is the school’s formal language policy? What language ideologies does your language policy refl ect? What are the informal language policies in your school? Do the formal and informal policies match? To what extent do they primarily comply with what the school district mandates or have they been revised to reflect the needs of the school community? Which students are excluded and which ones benefit more from your language policies? How do these language policies reflect the language practices of the Latinx communities in your school? In what ways do the professional development offerings in which your teachers engage help them understand the connection between race and language, and of Latinx students’ histories and language

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practices? How is instruction adapted based on these understandings? Whose parents’ voices are listened to in the school’s decision making? How are white parents’ requests and interests treated in comparison with parents of Latinx students? What have you done to create spaces for Latinx parents to express their ideas? What discussions have you encouraged in the school so as to make the connection between the school and the surrounding community more explicit? If your school is in a gentrified neighborhood: What discussions have you encouraged in the school about how gentrification has affected the school’s practices toward white and Latinx students? How have these discussions resulted in changes to mediate the gentrification impact? What discussions have you encouraged among your staff about the different modalities and language practices that the students in your building leverage to learn? How have you supported your teachers in implementing these translanguaging pedagogical practices? Consider each of the programming options in which Latinx students participate (mainstream classrooms, bilingual program, English as a second language, special education settings). In what ways do these programs reflect the hegemony of English monolingual white students? What have you done to support your teachers in counterbalancing them in support of the dynamic language practices of Latinx families? If your school has a dual language bilingual program: What messages do you give teachers about the need for strict language separation in the bilingual program? What is the reason for that? What messages do you give about opening up spaces to center instruction on students’ dynamic bilingual practices, their translanguaging? What is the reason for that? If your school has a transitional bilingual program or an English as a second language program: What messages do you give teachers about success not being solely about moving students out of these programs? What messages do you give teachers about the importance of building on Latinx students’ bilingual practices?

I hope that reflections on these questions provide principals with ways to make room for the dynamic bilingual practice of Latinx communities in the school so as not perpetuate hegemonic practices of white speakers of English. The work moving forward is to clarify the school’s language policies and practices so that Latinx students’ translanguaging is leveraged in instruction, and the privileged position of white students and families in the school is critically interrogated. I now move on to share questions for teachers of Latinx students to reflect about their classroom practices and on ways in which they reflect the language practices of their Latinx students.

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Teachers: Reflecting on teaching and learning in the classroom in support of Latinx students

Teachers of Latinx students are impacted by larger educational policies that reflect the hegemony of white monolingual speakers of English through programming goals, curricula and materials, assessments, etc. Teachers in this volume were not in a bubble and exempt from this reality, but they made efforts to mediate these policies and to re-imagine – and enact – classroom spaces where they modeled a different reality. They centered their teaching and learning on the language and cultural practices of their Latinx students through humanizing education and they also created spaces where power issues and established knowledge were questioned. In doing so, they helped Latinx students to develop critical consciousness and to understand their translanguaging. These teachers were committed to implementing these transformative spaces sin miedo. They saw the humanity of their Latinx students ‘throughout their schooling across the school year, just as white children see theirs, since it’s presented as the norm in curriculum and text’ (España & Herrera, 2020: 78). Below are questions for teachers that I hope will help them consider ways to better understand the language practices of their Latinx students, and to reflect on how hegemonic ideologies get enacted, and mediated, in their classrooms. •

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In what ways do the curricular materials for language arts and social studies portray ‘academic language’ and ‘history’ as objective realities? In what ways do they center the experience of white English speaking communities and dismiss those of Latinx communities, and other minoritized bi/multilingual and other people of color? Have you told your students that they need to separate the ‘language of school’ and ‘the language of home’ in order to be successful in school? Think of the explanations that you have given them: How do they reflect hegemonic views of language and what message are you giving students about their family practices? In what ways do your lessons and classroom discussions encourage students’ reflections about the hegemony of the language practices of white monolingual speakers of English and of whiteness? How do you allow students to voice their ideologies and help challenge them if they reflect hegemonic understandings? Refl ect on the books that your students read (or that you read to them) or videos that they watch in your classes: In what ways do they reflect hegemonic views of language and of whiteness? In what ways do they refl ect the diversity of the Latinx communities and other minoritized groups? How have you engaged your Latinx students in discussing this hegemony and how it affects them? What have you done in your classroom so that your Latinx students (and other bilingual students) understand their translanguaging as

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the norm in bilingual communities, even when they seem to be acting as ‘monolinguals’? How have you leveraged your Latinx students’ translanguaging to help them deepen their understanding of English written texts or meet English Language Arts standards? And how have you leveraged your Latinx students’ translanguaging to help them deepen their understanding of Spanish written texts or meet standards in Spanish? Have you created instructional spaces where different students can leverage their individual communicative repertoires to interact and learn from each other? For example, students with different language practices, with different abilities, with access to different modalities? If you are a teacher in a dual language bilingual program: In what ways does your teaching reveal a monolingual view of bilingualism? In what ways does it support a translanguaging view? If you are a teacher in transitional bilingual classrooms, or English as a second language or mainstream English classrooms: How does your teaching support the ideology that the language practices of white monolingual speakers of English are the most important? In what ways do you show the diversity of language practices?

I hope these questions help teachers identify the extent to which the experiences of Latinx students are reflected in the teaching and learning in the classroom and generate inquiry into what they can do next to move pa’lante. In looking for these answers, educators of Latinx students need to consider ways in which the teaching of the English language is ‘a site of conflict and result of colonialism and global capitalism, rather than the solution’ (García, 2020). They also need to think of ways to ‘teach the difficult history of Spanish language imperialism and the effects it had in Latin America, as well as in those who have crossed the line into the imperial north’ (García, 2020). This translanguaging work needs to opens up spaces to look into Latinx bilingual students’ lives and realities, and with them, as they language with their entire network of meanings. These are powerful questions and the actions will have meaningful consequences. In this volume, educators can fi nd some examples of classroom practices where the translanguaging tejidos are at the center. These can inspire educators’ own practices, but there are other resources and books that can provide more ideas. The webpage of CUNY-NYSIEB (City University of New York – New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals) has videos, guides and other resources with examples of activities that support translanguaging in education (www.cuny-nysieb.org). The books Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments (García & Kleyn, 2016) and Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilingual Students: Lessons from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project (CUNY-NYSIEB, 2020) provide more

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opportunities to further the understanding of translanguaging in education with school- and classroom-based examples of educators in different types of programs who have engaged in this work. The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Bilingualism for Student Learning (García et al., 2017) illustrates translanguaging pedagogy in action in the classrooms of three teachers – a 5th grade dual language bilingual teacher, a 7th grade English as a second language teacher, and an 11th grade English-medium social studies teacher. Other books, such as En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students (España & Herrera, 2020) and Rooted in Strength: Using Translanguaging to Grow Multilingual Readers and Writers (Espinosa & Ascenzi-Moreno, 2021), have rich examples of lessons and resources for teachers so that Latinx students understand their language practices and identities and take an informed stance against injustice. Finally, while Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy (Muhammad, 2020) does not discuss translanguaging directly, it provides examples of how teachers can help students reflect on their histories and that of their families. All these books and resources may help teachers and principals with practical ideas. Discussing these resources in study groups or during professional development would advance teachers’ understandings and buy-in, provide spaces for collaborative and critical discussions, and help sustain the work and move it pa’lante! Translanguaging disrupts the externally given and assigned constructions of Latinx language, highlighting how Latinx families ‘do’ language critically and differently from the given language that they are expected to ‘have’ in school. However, educators working on translanguaging in education need to consider explicitly the constitutive relationship between language and race, socioeconomic status and historical and political forces, and question them. Principals and teachers need to work together to figure out the next steps toward a path pa’lante in support of Latinx students in their schools. This work, however, tiene que tejerse alongside Latinx students and their families, so that the translanguaging work is truly a transformative experience. Uncertain Times But Sin Miedo

As this book goes into press, two pandemics have hit the United States. The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 will be felt for years to come. The second pandemic, racism, has been ingrained in the structure of the United States since the formation of the country, although the colonial mentality, as we discuss in Chapter 1, hit the ‘American’ continent much earlier, starting in 1492, with European colonialization. As schools in the United States moved quickly to remote instruction with the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, educators experienced fi rst-hand how the two pandemics were connected, for the hardest hit by

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the virus were indeed racialized communities that were still experiencing the devastation produced by processes of colonization. Teachers of students of color realized that many of their students were not connecting to remote schooling because of lack of technology access. As a result, these students lost many weeks of school (Blume & Kohli, 2020). Nationwide, almost 30% of Latinx and Black students did not have computer access or internet at home at the beginning of remote instruction (USAFacts, 2020). In New York City, for example, 300,000 families requested internet-connected devices from the Department of Education (NYC DOE) (Bascome, 2020) but by the end of April 2020 almost 20,000 students had still not received one (Zimmerman & Gould, 2020). And once students received the devices, teachers had to take on the role of technology assistants as they explained to family members and students how to set up their devices or programs. Many other students from economically disadvantaged homes had only one device at home and had to share it with other people, making it very difficult to access remote instruction, complete homework and keep their engagement with school work (Barnum & Bryan, 2020). Educators also saw first-hand how their students were dealing with the economic effects of COVID-19 in their families. While wealthier families were able to shift to remote work (Gould & Shierholz, 2020), Latinx and other Black communities were disproportionately working in low-paid frontline or essential jobs. In New York City, Latinxs accounted for 60% of building cleaning services and 39% of grocery, convenience and drug store workers (NYC Office of the Comptroller, 2020), many of whom were left unemployed (Brown, 2020; Gould & Shierholz, 2020; Lopez et al., 2020). Latinx and non-Latinx Blacks were also more likely to get sick, and they had the highest rates of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 (CDC, 2021). Latinx schoolchildren often had to deal with grief alone without direct interaction with their peers, teachers or mental health providers (Coalition to Support Grieving Students, 2020). This grief was not only about family deaths, but also about more general health concerns, as well as food insecurity and rent payments (Mann, 2020; Wolfson & Leung, 2020). In addition, many students had to take care of their siblings while their caretakers needed to go out to work. Many Latinx had to become ‘teacher-assistants’ to their younger siblings, carrying a heavy burden of responsibility. In addition to issues of lack of accessibility to technology, the emotional scars of grief and fear, and the greater responsibility faced by Latinx schoolchildren, remote instruction does not match naturally to the educational needs and resources of emergent bilingual students. Remote instruction emphasizes individual practice, whereas research has shown that peer interaction is key, especially for language minoritized students who are developing conceptual and language knowledge simultaneously (Cole, 2013; Walqui & van Lier, 2010).

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Many immigrant parents and caretakers of minoritized bi/ multilingual students also had difficulties in supporting the demands of remote schooling because instruction and materials are primarily in English without appropriate translations (Napolitano, 2020; Rani, 2020). Without support from peers or families, teachers of Latinx bilingual students have had to become the source of socio-emotional and socioeducational support not only to their students, but in some cases to their family members as well. The challenges identified above have been more profound for minoritized bi/multilingual students labeled as disabled. Many services to which they are entitled as part of their Individualized Education Plans were not provided. Depending on the disability, if virtual services were provided, they were not appropriate substitutes for the in-person services they needed (Kemenetz, 2020). Parents and caretakers have scrambled to fi nd ways to help their children but have seen many of them regressing (Zimmerman et al., 2020). For Deaf and Hard of Hearing students, wearing masks does not allow them to read lips or recognize facial expressions, making communication and learning more difficult (McCarthy, 2020). One interesting result of remote teaching is that many teachers have started to witness fi rst-hand the translanguaging in their Latinx students’ homes and the learning opportunities that it opens up. Teachers have learned to establish strong collaborations with parents and caregivers in order to sustain remote schooling (Kleyn, 2020). They are seeing the complex translanguaging tejidos and perceiving that Latinx students and their families tienen capacidad e inteligencia. This work, where the home/ school collaboration is integral to learning, needs to be amplified. And this home/school path needs to be followed as students engage with remote instruction, as well as when they are back to their physical school buildings. The family/home connection needs to be recognized for its educational potential, not as a resource to supplement ‘school’ instruction, but as a most important part of la educación del niño, la niña y/o lxs niñx. The questions posted earlier to school leaders and teachers are aimed to reframe the deficit-based conversations about Latinx students and their families, and to highlight the connection between language, race and power and how schooling has continued to privilege white monolingual speakers of English. We need educators that work juntos y sin miedo to have difficult conversations with themselves and others, and plan instruction that allows Latinx students to learn about their histories, their bilingualism, and the role that the language of school has played in their minoritization. By amplifying this work sin miedo, translanguaging in education can help transform the educational experiences of Latinx bilingual children and youth. We need to move pa’lante SIN MIEDO!

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References Ascenzi-Moreno, L., Hesson, S. and Menken, K. (2016) School leadership along the trajectory from monolingual to multilingual. Language and Education 30 (3), 197–218. doi:10.1080/09500782.2015.1093499 Baldwin, J. (1962) As much truth as one can bear. The New York Times, 14 January, pp. 1, 38. Barnum, M. and Bryan, C. (2020) America’s great remote-learning experiment: What surveys of teachers and parents tell us about how it went. Chalkbeat, 26 June. See https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/6/26/21304405/surveys-remote-learning-corona virus-success-failure-teachers-parents. Bascome, E. (2020) 300K NYC students lack tech for online learning: Here’s the plan to distribute devices. Silive, 26 March. See https://www.silive.com/coronavirus/ 2020/ 03/300k-nyc-students-lack-tech-for-online-learning-heres-the-plan-to-distributedevices.html. Becker, A.L. (1995) Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philosophy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Blume, H. and Kohli, S. (2020) 15,000 L.A. high school students are AWOL online, 40,000 fail to check in daily amid coronavirus closures. Los Angeles Times, 30 March. See https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020 - 03-30/corona virus-los-angeles-schools-15000-high-school-students-absent. Brown, S. (2020) How COVID-19 is affecting Black and Latino families’ employment and fi nancial well-being. Urban Wire: The Blog of the Urban Institute, 6 May. See https:// www.urban.org/urban-wire/how-covid-19-affecting-black-and-latino-families-employ ment-and-fi nancial-well-being. CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) (2021) Health equity considerations in racial and ethnic minority groups. CDC, 19 April. See https://www.cdc.gov/ coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html/. Coalition to Support Grieving Students (2020) Supporting Grieving Students During a Pandemic. See https://www.schoolcrisiscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ 2861_0420-COVID-19-CRD-Supporting-Grieving-Students-Coalition_v4__April10-2020.pdf. Cole, M.W. (2013) Rompiendo el Silencio: Meta-analysis of the effectiveness of peermediated learning at improving language outcomes for ELLs. Bilingual Research Journal 36 (2), 146–166. doi:10.1080/15235882.2013.814609 CUNY-NYSIEB (eds) (2020) Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilingual Students: Lessons from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project. New York: Routledge. de Jong, E.J. (2011) Foundations of Multilingualism in Education: Principles to Practice. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. DeMatthews, D. and Izquierdo, E. (2016) School leadership for dual language education: A social justice approach. The Educational Forum 80 (3), 278–293. doi:10.1080/001 31725.2016.1173152 España, C. and Herrera, L.Y. (2020) En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Espinosa, C.M. and Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (2021) Rooted in Strength. Using Translanguaging to Grow Multilingual Readers and Writers. New York: Scholastic. Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015) Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Education Review 85 (2), 149–171. doi:10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 García, O. (2020) The education of Latinx bilingual children in times of isolation: Unlearning and relearning. MinneTESOL Journal 36 (1). See http://minnetesoljournal.org/current-issue/invited-article/the-education-of-latinx-bilingual-children-intimes-of-isolation-unlearning-and-relearning/.

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García, O. and Kleyn, T. (eds) (2016) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. New York: Routledge. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O., Johnson, S. and Seltzer, K. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. Gould, E. and Shierholz, H. (2020) Not everybody can work from home. Black and Hispanic workers are much less likely to be able to telework. Economic Policy Institute Working Economics blog, 19 March. See https://www.epi.org/blog/ black-and-hispanic-workers-are-much-less-likely-to-be-able-to-work-from-home/. Kemenetz, A. (2020) Families of children with special needs are suing in several states. Here’s why. NPR, 23 July. See https://www.npr.org/2020/07/23/893450709/ families-of-children-with-special-needs-are-suing-in-several-states-heres-why. Kleyn, T. (2020) Addressing the socioemotional well-being of bilingual & immigrant students: Educators rising to the Coronavirus call. The NYSABE Bilingual Times, Spring, 8–13. Koyama, J. (2013) Principals as bricoleurs: Making sense and making so in an era of accountability. Education Administration Quarterly 50 (2), 279–304. doi: 10.1177/0013161X13492796 Li, W. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5), 1222–1235. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035 Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 9–30. doi:10.1093/applin/amx039 Long, S., Suoto-Manning, M. and Vasquez, V.M. (2016) Courageous Leadership in Early Childhood Education: Taking a Stand for Social Justice. New York: Teachers College Press. Lopez, M.H., Rainie, L. and Budima, A. (2020) Financial and health impacts of COVID19 vary widely by race and ethnicity. Pew Research Center FactTank: News in the Numbers, 5 May. See https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/05/ fi nancial-and-health-impacts-of-covid-19-vary-widely-by-race-and-ethnicity/. Mann, B. (2020) In New York City, 2 million residents face food insecurity, officials say. NPR, 21 May. See https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/ 05/ 21/860312565/in-new-york-city-2-million-residents-face-food-insecurity-officials-say. Maturana, H. and Varela, F. (1984) El Árbol del conocimiento: Las bases biológicas del entendimiento humano. Santiago de Chile: Lumen, Editorial Universitaria. McCarthy, M. (2020) Lip reading, facial expressions: How masks make life harder for people with hearing difficulties. Healthline, 27 July. See https://www.healthline.com/ health-news/covid19-face-masks-difficulties-people-hearing-impairments. Menken, K. (2017) Leadership in Dual Language Bilingual Education. White Paper. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. See https://www.cal.org/ndlf/pdfs/ publications/NDLF-White-Paper-October-2017.pdf. Menken, K. and García, O. (2010) Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers. New York: Routledge. Menken, K. and Sánchez, M.T. (2020) Distributed leadership in schools with ‘Emergent Bilingual Leadership Teams’ for collaborative decision making. In E.R. Crawford and L.M. Dorner (eds) Educational Leadership of Immigrants: Case Studies in Times of Change. New York: Routledge. Menken, K. and Solorza, C. (2014) Principals as linchpins in bilingual education: The need for prepared school leaders. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 18 (6), 676–697. doi:10.1080/13670050.2014.937390 Mignolo, W. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Muhammad, G. (2020) Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. New York: Scholastic Teaching Resources. Napolitano, J. (2020) How teachers are trying to reach English language learners during pandemic. PBS, 29 April. See https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/ how-teachers-are-trying-to-reach-english-language-learners-during-pandemic. NYC Office of the Comptroller (2020) New York City’s frontline workers. City of New York, Bureau of Policy & Research, 20 March. See https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wpcontent/uploads/documents/Frontline_Workers_032020.pdf. Otheguy, R., García, O. and Reid, W. (2015) Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review 6 (3), 281–307. doi:10.1515/applirev-2015-0014 Otheguy, R., García, O. and Reid, W. (2019) A translanguaging view of the linguistic system of bilinguals. Applied Linguistics Review 10 (4), 625–651. doi:10.1515/ applirev-2018-0020 Rani, R.R. (2020) Imagine online school in a language you don’t understand. The New York Times, 22 April. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/coronavirusimmigrants-school.html. Rosa, J. (2019) Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017) Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46 (5), 621–647. doi:10.1017/S0047404517000562 Sánchez, M.T. and Menken, K. (2020) Emergent bilingual leadership teams: Distributed leadership in CUNY-NYSIEB schools. In CUNY-NYSIEB (eds) Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilingual Students: Lessons from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project. New York: Routledge. USAFacts (2020) More than 9 million children lack internet access at home for online learning. USAFacts, 6 April. See https://usafacts.org/articles/internet-access-stu dents-at-home/. Walqui, A. and van Lier, L. (2010) Scaffolding the Academic Success of Adolescent English Language Learners: A Pedagogy of Promise. San Francisco, CA: WestEd. Wolfson, J. and Leung, C. (2020) Coronavirus pandemic worsens food insecurity for lowincome adults. Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation, University of Michigan, 3 June. See https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/coronavirus-pandemic-worsens-foodinsecurity-low-income-adults. Zimmerman, A. and Gould, J. (2020) NYC still racing to get thousands of devices to students, five weeks into online learning. Gothamist, 25 April. See https://gothamist.com/ news/nyc-still-racing-get-thousands-devices-students-five-weeks-online-learning. Zimmerman, A., Costantino, L., Ward, R., Penney, V. and Gonen, Y. (2020) How remote learning upended NYC students with disabilities and their families. The City, 17 June. See https://www.thecity.nyc/education/2020/6/17/21295189/nyc-specialeducation-students-remote-learning-struggles.

Afterword – No Quiero Que Me Le Vayan A Hacer Burla: Issues to Ponder and Consider in the Context of Translanguaging Guadalupe Valdés

One of the special joys of being a senior scholar is that one is occasionally invited to write the Afterword for volumes such as these, volumes that push, change and raise questions and directly interrogate established policies and practices. It is a special pleasure to be invited to write such pieces for a number of reasons. First, these invitations bring with them an opportunity to read and learn from young scholars who are working ‘at the edge of the field.’ Second, they also push us to remember what we learned, to examine what we got wrong, or maybe almost right, and to consider what we believed that the world in which we lived allowed us to say and permitted us to do. Most importantly, however, as in this case, the writing of an Afterword sometimes invites us to imagine a just world and perhaps the possibility of, as Victor Zúñiga (2011) phrased it, la escuela incluyente y justa. Engaging with the chapters contained in this volume has been a unique treat. I recognize in these authors (some of whom I have never met) close allies and, what I often refer to as, compañeros en la lucha por la justicia. I thank them for their work, for their vision, and for offering to both researchers and educators a depiction of justice-oriented classroom contexts in which the full communicative resources of students are central. When Ofelia García invited me to write this Afterword, she suggested (perhaps in order to persuade me to accept her invitation) that I could once again provide a ‘cautionary note,’ if it seemed appropriate. I hesitated, of course, quite certain that los jóvenes no necesitan los consejos de los viejos. And yet, if Jaspers (2018) is accurate in his description of the proliferation of works on translanguaging and its multiple and possibly contradictory meanings when applied to many educational contexts in which 292

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the teaching and learning of named languages is central, it is essential that, following Ofelia and Maite’s lead, we seek to understand the complex needs of the many different groups of children that we refer to as ‘Latinx’ children. We need to be clear and conscious of the specific elements of their struggles as well as of possible pathways toward variously defi ned ‘life chances’ and ‘life results’ (Veenhoven, 2000) that might take them in directions we can only begin to envision. In this Afterword, then, I comment on a few issues surrounding the implementation of translanguaging pedagogical approaches that I believe merit consideration, and I express concern about possibly unforeseen directions and unintended complications surrounding translanguaging pedagogies. I focus on specificity both with regard to the population of children with whom we are concerned as well as with regard to the outcomes and possibilities that are presented as the evidence of successful implementation of these groundbreaking pedagogies. The Issue of Particularity in the Study of Translanguaging

As Leung and Valdés (2019) pointed out in their recent discussion, the ‘trans-’ turn in the field of applied linguistics (broadly conceived) has the potential both to trigger intense debates and at the same to provide researchers with novel insights and new answers to perennial questions. Since its introduction, translanguaging (a rapidly expanding theoretical, analytical and pedagogical construct) has provoked broad interest, intense discussion and sometimes impassioned disagreements. Importantly, the application of this construct to the design of educational implementations has made important practical strides as well. Research reports on the use of translanguaging pedagogies, for example, have provided concrete examples of alternative approaches to additional ‘language’ teaching– learning and have played a key role in shifting educators’ views about monoglossic approaches to instruction and about the importance of the problematizing conceptualizations of language itself for students who live using complex communicative repertoires. As investigadores comprometidos (socially committed researchers), however, I suggest that we have only just begun. We must continue to develop a theoretically informed practice that is accurate in terms of the realities of students’ experiences and that also takes into account the specifics of educational policy environments, instructional programs, geographical settings and the familial environments in which these children live. Educational policy environments and instructional programs and arrangements

In their examination of translanguaging across a variety of additionallanguage teaching arrangements, Leung and Valdés (2019) pointed out

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that the broad discussion taking place around the world about translanguaging has drawn from a variety of instructional arrangements, including those focusing on: (1) majority speakers of a societal language formally studying foreign/ world languages as school subjects with little attention to their use in real-world contexts; (2) new immigrants, refugees and indigenous minorities engaged in the acquisition/development of the established societal language for both school completion and everyday life; and (3) two-way instructional arrangements including both groups of students in the study of academic content and the development of the societal language. Given the important differences between these various contexts and populations, Leung and Valdés emphasized the need for specificity and pointed out the urgency of researchers’ taking into account and describing the characteristics and unique challenges and affordances present in particular linguistic and instructional contexts. They included an extensive table that contrasted the goals of instruction directed at both mainstream and minoritized learners, and argued that descriptions of translanguaging pedagogies need to report on and describe the particular characteristics of the interactional, local and societal contexts in which they are developed, implemented and documented. In the case of this volume, the teaching context is clearly specified. All studies are situated in the United States and focus on Latinx students and on ‘bilingual education’ programs in which content instruction has traditionally been offered through two named languages (students’ primary language and the societal language). A number of program ‘models’ are presented, referred to and critiqued, including, for example, one-way models (e.g. DLBE; García-Mateus et  al.) and two-way models (e.g. TWBE; Heiman, Cervantes-Soon & Hurie). Together, the chapters interrogate the politically ‘ideal’ goal of such programs, especially the assumption that, for minoritized, immigrant-origin children, such programs should have as a primary outcome the acquisition of an ideologically framed and policy-imposed competent/proficient English achieved exclusively or primarily through monolingual pedagogies. What is taken for granted and not described is the educational policy context in which these specific instructional contexts are embedded. There is little mention of the impact of well-established state and national school accountability environments on teachers and students or of the life-impacting consequences of both language assessment and performance measures on children’s lives. Unfortunately, as I pointed out recently (Valdés, 2017, 2020), accepted, expected, ‘standard,’ measurable outcomes matter. For many Latinx students, the inability to display ‘content knowledge’ and narrowly defined ‘English language proficiency’ leads

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to questionable student categorizations (e.g. long-term English Language Learner) and to restricted course-taking options across the elementary, middle school and high school experience (Estrada et al., 2019). Work on translanguaging pedagogies cannot ignore this reality. Geographical setting

While not specifically highlighted by most existing research on translanguaging, the particularity of geographical settings in which instruction takes place is consequential as well. It matters in the traditional sense in which language instruction has been examined (e.g. periphery versus center contexts for English), but it also matters in unique ways in specific communities and in areas of the world in which sources of stigmatization and exclusion derive from related but different constructions of membership and status. The salience of geographical settings is brought into focus by the chapters in this volume that examine gentrification. Poza and Stites (this volume), for example, make evident the value of linking the reality of a specific setting (i.e. rapidly shifting neighborhood landscapes, and instances of family displacement) with the curricular area of Westward Expansion. The setting in which they found themselves allowed the researchers to position learners ‘as subjects rather than objects in a dialogical and empowering educational journey, with an awareness of themselves as agents and historical actors in their circumstances’ (p. 76). Their work testifies to the importance of geographical locations and specific settings in the design and implementation of translanguaging pedagogies. In arguing for particularity and the possibilities and challenges associated with specific milieus in which these pedagogies are implemented, however, I want to bring additional attention to the noteworthiness of geographical setting, because two of the volume’s chapters report on work conducted on the US-Mexican border and contribute in very important ways to complexifying current constructions of the category of Latinx people. A recent description of these borderlands may help to emphasize the point I wish to make: La frontera terrestre entre México y Estados Unidos de 3,200 kilómetros de extensión en donde viven poco mas de 12 millones de personas que interactúan de manera cotidiana usando los 23 puntos de cruce entre los dos países nunca ha tenido un modelo de gestión flexible, sin embargo, localmente las comunidades se las han ingeniado para aprovechar ambos lados. La lista de posibles interacciones es larga, se vive de un lado y se trabaja, estudia, compra, consume o simplemente se socializa del otro. (Santibáñez, 2020)

This detailed description of daily interactions (living, shopping, working, studying) suggests a complexity in language use not yet studied extensively by what has been referred to as the sociolinguistics of superdiversity

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(Creese & Blackledge, 2010). Interactions that take place across international borders, however, and on this particular border between the United States and Mexico, are longstanding, well-established and almost predictable. Residents know how to exploit their communicative repertoires – with whom and where to stretch, how to feign lack of understanding, and how and with whom to call upon what I have referred to as a twelve-string guitar (Valdés, 1982) when speaking to skilled users of the two named national languages. As compared to other types of localities, moreover, international borders are unique zones where the reality of the nation-state itself is strongly evident. Passports and green cards are checked, cars are searched, drugsniffing dogs are deployed, and goods not allowed entry are confiscated. On the US-Mexico border, residents hear both the English of the State of the Union Address and the Spanish of the Informe Presidencial. While traditional mass media is readily available in both named national languages in both countries, on the Mexican side, Spanish is viewed as symbolic of nationhood and sovereignty, a lenguaje de conquista that became la ‘lengua patrimonial de 110 millones de Mexicanos’ (Aguilar Sosa, 2019). As de la Piedra and Esquinca (this volume) make clear, hegemonic views of Spanish and monoglossic ideas, moreover, are just as widespread as ideas about English are on the US side of the border. The particularity of this geographical reality cannot be minimized. The borderlands are and are not the United States. While the children who live on the border can be viewed as Latinx children by scholars and educators in the United States, they are often alluded to as Hispanic children by polite white citizens (referred to as Anglos) in American border communities and as niños mexicanos by Mexican nationals who live on the Mexican side of the border and possibly also by established Mexican-origin, US residents of the American city. Depending on which side of the border children may temporarily find themselves, the term used to construct/describe them may move from a neutral Latino/a, to a policy-informed term English learner, to a derogatory descriptor such as wet-back or pocho or to naco or other similar term. Ideologies of race, class and language that position both the children who live in Laredo and in El Paso and other US-Mexico border settings are related to but different from those familiar to policymakers, researchers and educators on the US side of the border. To date, discussions of translanguaging pedagogies have not dealt extensively with border contexts as locations in which a mere crossing of an international bridge takes children to a reality that we, as US-based scholars, may not know and possibly cannot address well. From one school year to another, from one week to another, moreover, children might well enter and then leave educational systems that are very different. As work by Kleyn (2017) and Zúñiga and Hamann (2006, 2015) has demonstrated, children that return to Mexican schools from the United States face a number of challenges in adjusting to

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different expectations and assumptions. Even though Mexican teachers on the border are much more familiar with American schooled children, overcrowded public school classrooms (enrolled in almost exclusively by children whose parents cannot afford escuelas particulares) limit their ability to respond to children whose educational trajectories and experiences are ‘non-standard.’ The scholarship on translanguaging must take into account movement, change and destabilization in children’s lives and the ways in which constructions of languaging and ‘language’ operate. On the border, class, ethnicity and color impact children’s lives in important ways as well. In spite of common proclamations that in Mexico todos somos mestizos, the reality is that in Mexico and on the border some people are considered more mestizo than others. While a discussion of these issues is beyond the scope of these brief remarks, I want to suggest that US-based analyses of race, in particular, do not capture the complexities of the Mexican social stratification system especially with regard to educational attainment.1 The Family Environment

The particularity of family environments is also fundamental to our examination of the ways in which we consider, design, implement and achieve support for translanguaging pedagogies from the parents of Latinx students in American schools. A key problem is that, as Mora (2014) contends in her book Making Hispanics, the group we now commonly refer to as Latinx is an ambiguous, pan-ethnic, census-bureau and media-created conceptualization whose members represent different national origins and immigration statuses, as well as educational, socioeconomic, racial, class and linguistic backgrounds. In terms of language, they range from monolingual in ‘English’ to monolingual in ‘Spanish’ (or monolingual in an Indigenous language of the Americas) to bilinguals whose use and experiences with their ‘additional’ language vary and whose communicative repertoires are used in different ways with other Latinx ‘bilingual’ interlocutors whose repertories also vary. In my experience of working in schools, I meet both the parents who are concerned about their children’s development of English and want to make sure that the school is ‘teaching’ them ‘English,’ as well as those who are deeply committed to the maintenance of ‘Spanish’ in their children’s lives. Deeply influenced by the ideologies we as scholars problematize, these latter parents often explain their focus on ‘good’ Spanish for their children (as a mother recently did to me), saying: ‘No quiero que me le vayan a hacer burla.’ For this parent, burla, mockery, is real. So too is her own perspective on its consequences, ably expressed with the dative of interest in her statement. What she means is that they (relatives, los primos, friends, ‘real’ speakers of ‘Spanish’) will mock her child, and this burla will affect her deeply. This particular parent (a powerful user of

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‘English’) has made a conscious effort to speak to her daughter only in ‘Spanish.’ She describes her struggles in implementing her home language policy and tells me about her younger brothers and sisters, all of whom no longer feel comfortable using ‘Spanish.’ ‘Se ríen de ellos cuando vamos a México,’ she tells me, ‘porque inventan palabras y quieren meter inglés cuando están hablando español.’ This particular young woman is Latina, a high school teacher who is deeply committed to her Latinx students and to social justice. I have seen her take on battles with her administration as she fights to secure opportunities for minoritized, low-income young people who know little about navigating a comprehensive American high school. Originally a MexicanAmerican studies major in college, she is a fighter and an idealist who teaches social studies informed by an anticolonial orientation. And yet, her views relating to ‘Spanish’ are based on hegemonic, deeply rooted ideologies of language that are a part of her family’s pre-migration understanding of the world. When matters are personal, it is difficult to be dispassionate and analytical, but I suspect that the fundamental issue involves what we do as scholars as well. Perhaps, as Norma González suggested: Discourses of critical pedagogy have often become circumscribed within academic circles, peripheral to the very people they purport to affect because of a turgid literary style and an apparent lack of connection to everyday life in classrooms. (González, 2005: 2)

In this case, with regard to translanguaging and its theoretical apparatus, perhaps we are lacking a connection to everyday life in homes and communities. In their first chapter, for example, García and Sánchez describe a bilingual family context, one in which both the adults and the children would have a difficult time identifying the home language. This is indeed a common condition in a number of geographical settings and family environments. But there are also other Latinx family environments – especially those located close to the border within reach of opinionated judgmental relatives – where home language use is much less fluid, where children are expected to address their parents in one or the other of two named languages. As my Stanford colleague Ramón Antonio Martínez (who also has a contribution in this volume) put it: they are socialized early into keeping their two named languages apart (personal communication). My point in this section on family environments is that in moving forward to implement translanguaging pedagogies, it will essential for us to take into account the perspectives of parents and to learn about the family environments to which students return at the end of the school day. As we invite students’ complex communicative repertoires into school spaces formerly reserved for only one named language, we need to be mindful of the work that needs to be done both with our students and

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with their families if we want to engage them in transformative processes and in working with us on the broader agenda of changing the world in which we live. Next Steps: An Agenda for Moving Forward

The chapters in this volume will undoubtedly both inspire and inform other researchers and practitioners. The examples presented are rich and detailed and inspiring. In considering the next steps for moving forward, I am very much encouraged by the idea of ‘disruption of multiple oppressions’ (Heiman, Cervantes-Soon & Hurie, this volume). I am persuaded that indeed transgressing language boundaries is an important step in disrupting systems of inequity that result in the miseducation of minoritized students of color. As I imagine the next steps, I suggest that, as researchers continue to design and examine new applications of the translanguaging stance, design and shifts, they: (1) Clearly define the personal outcomes expected for participating students. Several of the chapters in this volume mention specific benefits to students that the authors view as important for a ‘good life’ including, for example, socio-emotional well-being, self-fulfi llment and agency. Expanded discussions of the ways in which these outcomes matter for young people and why these can lead to broader support from other educators and concerned allies would be a useful next step. (2) Clearly define academic outcomes. A focus on specific academic outcomes of translanguaging pedagogies is important. Much can be learned by researchers, practitioners and policymakers about opportunities to learn and to engage with curricular content when a full range of language resources can be called upon in both teaching and learning. The examples presented here are excellent and will do much to inform educators in designing their own curricular approaches. (3) Clearly describe the ways in which translanguaging pedagogies can develop the productive resources required to display what has been learned in both classroom and standardized assessment contexts. In the current accountability context in which US systems function, students will continue to be disadvantaged if they are not coached/ prepared to display what they have learned on state-mandated standardized tests that offer few language accommodations. Coaching students in ways of using their full language repertoires to navigate such tests, for example, is an exciting possibility. The point here is that academic outcomes need to be focused on. They matter in children’s lives. The above steps are straightforward. They may help to neutralize initial knee-jerk criticism that positions the translanguaging focus as one more

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touchy-feely approach to Latinx education that does not attend to students’ educational achievement, care about standards or prepare students to be ‘college-ready.’ I am not optimistic, however, that this will be the case. Voices opposing the very idea of translanguaging – even if we focus only on those concerned with teaching and learning – will not be persuaded to take a different view either on ‘those’ students or on what are seen as their flawed instruments of expression. Alternatively, then, or possibly concurrently with continuing work on translanguaging pedagogies, those engaged en la lucha por la justicia should work directly to dismantle: (1) pobrecito compensatory policies; (2) assessment systems that only identify the lack of opportunity to learn by Latinx and other vulnerable, low-income students; (3) student categorizations that label and exclude; and (4) conceptualizations of language (e.g. academic language) and bilingualism (e.g. two-monolinguals-in-one defi nitions) that construct students’ full communicative as lacking, limited or inappropriate. I contend that, if the work on translanguaging is to be truly transformational, we must continue to develop a theory and practice that is accurate to the distinct realities of children’s experiences, to the various educational policy environments and instructional programs in which language teaching and learning takes place and to different particular geographical and familial settings in which Latinx children use and develop linguistic resources. We must take account of existing complexity and allow for change in our perspectives as we go forward. It is our task both to ‘describe’ and yet to allow for ‘seeing more.’ Our responsibility for some time to come is to describe the longstanding, language-in-education challenges experienced by our children resulting in their miseducation. We need to continue to describe them in detail and in context and to translate our descriptions to unsympathetic policymakers, standards and assessment developers, researchers and educators in such a way that what we say is not misheard. New experiences with translanguaging pedagogies coupled with a deeper understanding of various types of instructional, geographic and familial contexts, while they may compel us to rethink some of our original assumptions, will in the end lead to verdadera justicia for both Latinx children and other racialized, excluded youngsters whose linguistic strengths are misunderstood and made objects of mockery and derision by both the wider society and their own families. Note (1) For a discussion of this issue, readers are referred to Telles and Flores (2013) and Flores and Telles (2012).

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References Aguilar Sosa, Y. (2019) El español, de lengua de conquista a patrimonial. El Universal, 6 August. See https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/cultura/cinco-siglos-del-idiomaespanol-en-mexico. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2010) Towards a sociolinguistics of superdiversity. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 13 (4), 549–572. Estrada, P., Wang, H. and Farkas, T. (2019) Elementary English learner classroom composition and academic achievement: The role of classroom-level segregation, number of English profi ciency levels, and opportunity to learn. American Educational Research Journal 57 (4), 1741–1846. doi:10.3102/0002831219887137 Flores, R. and Telles, E. (2012) Social stratification in Mexico: Disentangling color, ethnicity, and class. American Sociological Review 77 (3), 486–494. doi:10.1177/0003122 412444720 González, N. (2005) The anthropologist’s view. In N. González, L. Moll and C. Amanti (eds) Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Jaspers, J. (2018) The transformative limits of translanguaging. Language & Communication 58, 1. Kleyn, T. (2017) Centering transborder students: Perspectives on identity, languaging and schooling between the US and Mexico. Multicultural Perspectives 19 (2), 76–84. doi: 10.1080/15210960.2017.1302336 Leung, C. and Valdés, G. (2019) Translanguaging and the transdisciplinary framework for language teaching and learning in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal 103 (2), 348–370. doi:10.1111/modl.12568 Mora, G.C. (2014) Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Santibánez, J. (2020) OPINIÓN: ¿El COVID-19 hará más rígida la frontera MéxicoEstados Unidos? Los Angeles Times, 17 August. See https://www.latimes.com/espa nol/eeuu/articulo/2020-08-17/opinion-el-covid-19-hara-mas-rigida-la-frontera-mexi co- estados-unidos. Telles, E. and Flores, R. (2013) Not just color: Whiteness, nation, and status in Latin America. Hispanic American Historical Review 93 (3), 411–449. doi:10.1215/0018 2168-2210858 Valdés, G. (1982) Social interaction and code switching patterns: A case study of Spanish/ English alternation. In J.P. Amastae and L. Elias-Olivares (eds) Spanish in the United States (pp. 209–229). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valdés, G. (2017) Entry visa denied: The construction of symbolic language borders in educational settings. In O. García, N. Flores and M. Spotti (eds) Oxford Handbook of Language & Society (pp. 321–348). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valdés, G. (2020) (Mis)educating the children of Mexican-origin people in the United States: The challenge of internal language borders. Intercultural Education 31 (5), 548–561. doi:10.1080/14675986.2020.1794122 Veenhoven, R. (2000) The four qualities of life. Journal of Happiness Studies 1 (1), 1–39. doi:10.1023/A:1010072010360 Zúñiga, V. (2011) La escuela incluyente y justa: Antología comentada al servicio de los maestros de México. Monterrey: Fondo Editorial de Nuevo León y UDEM. Zúñiga, V. and Hamann, E.T. (2006) Going home? Schooling in Mexico of transnational children. CONfines de Relaciones Internacionales y Ciencia Política 2 (4), 41–57. Zúñiga, V. and Hamann, E.T. (2015) Going to a home you have never been to: The return migration of Mexican and American-Mexican children. Children’s Geographies 13 (6), 643–655. doi:10.1080/14733285.2014.936364

Author Index

Agha, A., 26 Alim, H. S., 19, 129, 176, 184, 186, 202 Allard, K., 235, 236 Anzaldúa, G., 4, 6, 31, 37, 53, 116, 117, 161, 175 Araujo, B. E., 116, 121 Arias, M. B., 47, 48 Artiles, A. J., 147 Ascenzi-Moreno, L., 282, 286 Auer, P., 121

de Jong, E. J., 135, 280 de La Piedra, M. T., 113, 116, 121 de los Ríos, C., 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189 Delavan, M. G., 47, 48, 49, 136 Del Valle, J., 20, 21, 23 Delgado Bernal, D., 57, 116, 117, 118 Delgado Gaitan, C., 190 Dewey, J., 76 Durán, L., 111, 254 Ebe, A. E., 79 Erickson, F., 105 Escamilla, K., 175 España, C., 204, 217, 284, 286 Espinosa, C. M., 79, 286 Espinoza, M. L., 72 Esquinca, A., 114, 129, 135

Baker, C., 134 Baker-Bell, A., 186 Bakhtin, M., 189, 191 Bartlett, L., 175 Becker, A. L., 32, 277 Blackledge, A., 32, 234, 296 Block, D. 36, 72 Bourdieu, P., 255, 256 Bucholtz, M., 117

Fee, M., 47, 48 Fine, M., 191 Fitts, S., 97 Flores, N., 2, 9, 19, 24, 29, 32, 36, 48, 49, 52, 114, 119, 129, 132, 134, 135, 136, 153, 174, 175, 186, 190, 197, 172, 216, 229, 265, 280 Fránquiz, M. E., 79 Freire, P., 48, 51, 52, 54, 62, 72, 76, 79, 88, 110, 140, 158, 254, 255, 256, 265 Fu, D. 32

Canagarajah, S., 36, 176, 197 Carrillo, J. F., 114 Cervantes-Soon, C. G., 9, 34, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 114, 129, 136, 150, 151, 174, 175 Chaparro, S., 47 Chapman-Santiago, C., 79 Chávez-Moreno, L. C., 26, 150 Chen Pichler, D., 235, 236 Christian, D., 135 Cioè-Peña, M., 79, 254, 257, 260, 263, 254, 268, 269 Cloud, N., 135 Cochran-Smith, M., 3, 134, 190 Crawford, J., 229, Creese, A., 32, 234, 296 Crenshaw, K., 3, 256 Cummins, J., 28, 29, 157 CUNY-NYSIEB, 2, 153, 285

Gándara, P., 175 Gárate, M., 223, 233, 237 García, O., ix, 1, 2, 3, 6, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 72, 76, 77, 79, 88, 95, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 142, 143, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158, 159, 164, 167, 168, 175, 184, 185, 186, 202, 203, 234, 236, 246, 253, 265, 268, 277, 280, 282, 285, 286 302

Author Index

García-Mateus, S., 50, 78, 162, 175 Gerner de García, B., 227 Ghiso, M. P., 79 González, N., 141, 298 Gort, M., 50 Gutiérrez, K. D., 3, 32, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 88, 130 Hamman, L., 48, 50, 54, Heath, S. B., 170 Heiman, D., 47, 48, 55, 63, 174 Heller, M., 97 Henderson, K. I., 135, 159, 162, 176 Herrera, L. Y., 204, 217, 284, 286 Hesson, S., 82 Hornberger, N., 188 Howard, E. R., 3, 47, 48, 135, 136, 139, 142 Humphries, T., 230, 232, 244 Ijalba, E., 254, 262 Ingram, M., 135 Jaspers, J., 4, 36, 37, 48, 50, 53, 72, 78, 110, 292 Kleifgen, J. A., 3, 25, 135, 150, 202 Kleyn, T., ix, 33, 50, 52, 54, 285, 288, 296, Koyama, J., 282 Ladson-Billings, G., 72 Lee, T. 53 Leiva, C., 48, 51, 79 Leung, C., 36, 72, 78, 293, 287, 294 Lewis, G., 78, 185, Li, W., 1, 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 48, 50, 51, 52, 72, 77, 114, 115, 143, 152, 156, 158, 159, 167, 184, 186, 197, 214, 277 Lin, A. M. Y., 32, 246 Lindholm-Leary, K. J., 25, 135 Lippi-Green, R., 96 Long, S., 282 López, D., 168 Lytle, S. L., 190 Macedo, D., 229 MacSwan, J., 31 Makoni, S., 20 Martín-Beltrán, M., 50 Martínez-Álvarez, P., 79

303

Martinez, D.C., 184, 190 Martínez, R. A., 3, 48, 49, 50, 51, 79, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 109, 119, 111, 135 Maturana, H., 32, 277 McCarty, T., 53 Melamed, J., 2 Mena, M., 26 Menken, K., ix, 135, 280 Mignolo, W., 277 Moore, E., 32 Morrell, E., 186 Muhammad, G., 278, 286 Murakami, E., 47, 48, 55, 63 Otheguy, R., 21, 25, 31, 99, 125, 157, 184, 277 Palmer, D. K., 34, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 59, 78, 79, 135, 136, 150, 151, 159, 162, 175, 176 Paris, D., 183, 184, 202 Pennycook, A., 20, 125 Pérez Rosario, V., 201 Petitto, L. A., 230, 244 Pontier, R., 50, 135, Poplack, S., 31, 102 Poza, L. E., 48, 50, 72, 78, 79, 114, 129 Rosa, J., 9, 19, 24, 32, 38, 129, 136, 153, 174, 186, 190, 197, 205, 216, 229, 277, 280 Rymes, B., 187 Sánchez, M. T., 3, 32, 34, 35, 51, 54, 115, 135, 139, 142, 143, 152, 254, 282, 298 Santos, B. de S., 13 Sayer, P., 79, 157 Schleppegrell, M. J., 29 Seltzer, K., 79, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 197 Sembiante, S. F., 50 Shor, I., 186 Silverstein, M., 96 Skutnabb-Kangas, K., 229 Snoddon, K. 235 Solorza, C., 282 Solorzano, D. G., 51, 116 Soltero, S. W., 3, 135, 136, 139, 142 Street, B. V., 115, 261

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Sung, K. K., 2, 24, 134 Swanwick, R., 232, 235 Sylvan, C. E., 51, 79, 234

Vogel, S., ix, 1, 77, 184 Vossoughi, S., 72, 79, 80 Vygotsky, L. S., 76

Tuck, E., 53

Walqui, A., 287 Weinreich, U., 31 Wolfson, J., 287 Woodley, H. H., 79 Wright, W. E., 134

Urciuoli, B., 160 Valdés, G., 26, 27, 28, 31, 36, 72, 78, 114, 157, 175, 293, 294, 296 Valdez, V. E., 47, 48, 136, 174 Valenzuela, A., 157 van Lier, L., 287 Varela, F. J., 31, 32, 277 Varghese, M. M., 136 Velasco, P., 79

Yanes, M., 55 Yang, K. W., 53 Yosso, T. J., 35, 51, 114, 116, 117 Zentella, A. C., 31, 157, 175, 176

Subject Index

adolescence 214 adolescents 207 anti-blackness 26, 215 anti-immigrant rhetoric 119 anti-Mexican 119 anti-racist 1, 2, 37, 278 anticolonial theories 51, 52, 53, 54, 67, 298. See also decolonial theories

balanced xxi dynamic 86, 100, 105, 109, 157, 158, 172, 215, 236 sign 232 borderland/borderlands 37, 118, 122, 156, 160, 295, 296 identity 173 students / teachers 114

bilingual children/youth 27, 135, 137, 164, 166, 168, 172, 175, 202, 203, 208, 252 Latinx bilingual children/youth xxi, 4, 7, 34, 38, 162, 164, 166, 175, 202, 221, 288 bilingual education 2, 3, 24, 25, 28, 35, 48, 49, 53, 57, 99, 106, 113, 134, 136, 159, 160, 161, 162, 166, 176, 225, 233, 244, 265, 266. See also dual language bilingual education The Bilingual Education Act 24 Bilingual Education in the 21st Century xix, xx policy and/or practice xx, 24, 25 programs/classrooms/spaces/settings 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 24, 25, 26, 66, 96, 134, 135, 224, 265, 282, 294 Deaf 225, 235, 237, 243 developmental/maintenance 135 dual language 95, 113, 134, 136, 156, 234 transitional bilingual education 74, 134, 252, 253 bilingualism xix, xx, 3, 4, 8, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 48, 51, 54, 76, 77, 96, 97, 102, 106, 119, 129, 130, 136, 137, 160, 161, 167, 185, 188, 210, 217, 225, 229, 230, 232, 233, 234, 244, 253, 256, 263, 265, 266, 268, 270, 281, 285, 286, 288, 300. See also literacy, biliteracy additive 28, 29

cariño 6, 11, 113, 114, 121, 122, 130, 205, 278 City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB) 2, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 153 colonial 3, 9, 52, 53, 96, 207, 277, 286 coloniality 9, 38, 52, 54 colonialism 5, 9, 11, 13, 38, 52, 54, 73, 82, 189, 196, 229, 285 colonized 8, 20, 22, 24, 277 colonization 20, 21, 22, 27, 36, 53, 80, 117, 130, 157, 166, 213, 287 colonizing ideologies 126 language/discourses 53, 114 language policies 114 confianza 6, 11, 113, 114, 121, 122, 130, 278 community cultural wealth 6, 35, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 123, 129, 130, 131 convivencia 6, 11, 113, 114, 121, 122, 130, 278 counter-narratives 7, 184 COVID-19 1, 20, 30, 33, 286, 287 critical 5, 11, 33, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59, 62, 65, 66, 78, 119, 183, 186, 190, 197, 202, 205, 215, 253, 254, 265, 277, 286 educators 32, 109

305

306

Transformative Translanguaging Espacios

critical (continued) ethnography 54, 55 historical framework 4 language awareness 50, 183, 186, 204 literacy/literacies 183, 186 See also literacy pedagogy/pedagogies 37, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 67, 76, 77, 141, 202, 298 scholars 4, 49, 55 critical consciousness 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 33, 34, 47, 48, 49, 51, 55, 55, 62, 76, 136, 150, 151, 153, 175, 184, 189, 196, 202, 255, 278, 284 critical race theory (CRT)/theorist 3, 4, 116, 117 critical race feminist approach 116 Deaf-Latinx Critical Theory 228 Latinx critical race theory (LatCrit)/ theorist 4, 116, 117, 228 Deaf 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 239, 240, 245, 247 Deaf and Hard of Hearing 32, 225, 226, 227, 244, 288 DeafBlind 225 Deaf Chicana 225 DeafDisabled 225 Deaf im/migrants and refugees 227 Deaf children/youth/students 7, 8, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 237, 238, 239, 243, 244, 245, 247, 288 Latinx students 7, 8, 9, 13, 35, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 238, 245 students of color 245 Deaf education 23, 224, 229, 230, 233, 234, 235, 236, 243, 245, 246, 247 bilingual education/classrooms 234, 235, 236, 237, 243, 245 ESL classroom 245, 246 school 225, 228, 231, 237, 240, 245 Deaf family / community 225, 233, 246 Latinx family / communities 225, 226, 229 Deaf identity and/or experiences 8 Deaf Studies 225, 234 Deaf teachers 229 decolonial See also anticolonial project xxi theories 4

decolonialized discourse 118 lenguas 10, 118 dis/ability(lities)/disability(ies) 32, 33, 230, 243, 257, 262, 265, 267, 269, 271, 279, 280, 254, 256, 257, 258, 264, 265, 267, 269, 270, 288 dis/able(d) 257 Disability Justice 225 Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 230 learning disability(ies) 254, 257 disrupt/disrupting/disruption/disrupted 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 25, 34, 36, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 60, 61, 62, 66, 86, 95, 98, 99, 100, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 123, 128, 136, 138, 142, 145, 152, 159, 243, 265, 278, 299 dual language/dual language bilingual education 25, 26, 27, 32, 34, 35, 48, 49, 55, 59, 63, 64, 65, 74, 95, 96, 97, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 120, 121, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156, 150, 162, 171, 174, 175, 176, 202, 216, 234, 252, 253, 257, 283, 285, 286. See also Two-Way, Two-Way Immersion early childhood 160, 230 emergent bilingual(s)/emergent bi/ multilingual(s) 13, 31, 35, 74, 77, 78, 97, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 130, 131, 183, 187, 197, 235, 246, 252, 254, 257, 262, 264, 266, 285, 287 labeled as disabled 8 empower(s)/ing/ed/ment xix, 55, 76, 79, 114, 116, 143, 150, 158, 163, 164, 197, 267, 268, 295 ethnic studies 183, 188, 189, 197 families 63, 72, 74, 80, 120, 122, 128, 137, 141, 142, 148, 152, 163, 203, 217, 241, 281, 286, 287 bilingual 3, 5, 6, 8, 32, 49, 65, 152, 164, 208, 210, 211, 217, 265, 266, 267, 298 bilingual and disabled 254, 255, 257, 263, 267 color (of) 71, 281

Subject Index

Deaf/ with Deaf students/Latinx 227, 229, 246 Latinx families xx, 5, 8, 20, 27, 29, 30, 50, 56, 59, 63, 66, 88, 117, 143, 148, 152, 201, 208, 215, 279, 281, 283, 286, 287, 288, 300 middle-class/upper-class 105, 175, 287 neighborhood 63 poor 88 racialized 300 transfronterizxs families 124 white 55, 88, 136, 175, 281, 283 working-class 88 gentrification xx, 5, 9, 26, 34, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 71, 72 , 73, 75 , 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 138, 147, 174, 283, 295 grade-level 1st grade 74, 106, 210, 125, 161 2nd grade 240, 242, 257 3rd grade 8, 120, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 149, 151, 152, 238, 240, 241, 243, 257, 270 4th grade 120, 121, 125, 139 5th grade 47, 55, 138, 257, 262, 270, 286 6th grade 99, 103 7th grade 75, 286 8th grade 24, 73, 74, 75, 80, 286 11th grade 7, 187 home language(s) xxi, 298, 26, 29, 74, 96, 134, 135, 159, 176, 224, 225, 255, 256, 264, 267, 270 practices 10, 115, 217, 229, 252, 253, 254, 265, 266, 269, 270 policy 298 humanizing 33, 173, 174 dignity 11 education 284, 11, 12, 278 interaction(s), students 168, 171 pedagogy / pedagogical approaches / space / classroom 7, 11, 49, 79, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 163, 171, 173, 175, 176, 279 stance 168 ideologies 1, 10, 30, 32, 96, 150, 174, 224, 253, 256, 265, 266, 279, 284, 296, 297, 281, 282 ableist 263, 280

307

class 280, 296 colonial/izing 3, 126 counter-hegemonic 103, 109 hegemonic/dominant / white supremacist 56, 72, 103, 109, 110, 284, 129, 245, 279, 281 language xix, xxi, 6,7, 36, 96, 97, 103, 296, 298, 129, 130, 161, 191, 265, 280, 282 race 217, 278, 280, 296. See also raciolinguistic ideologies monolingual / monoglossic / linguistic purism 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 95, 96, 97, 103, 109, 115, 119, 125, 130, 131, 157, 159, 166, 175, 186, 224, 243, 245, 279 national 36 identity/identities; bilingual identity(ies) iv, 7, 8, 11, 20, 22, 28, 39, 48, 51, 52, 66, 67, 77, 78, 79, 88, 115, 117, 118, 119, 123, 130, 131, 147, 149, 150, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 185, 186, 194, 195, 196, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 225, 226, 229, 235, 239, 247, 255, 256, 257, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 278, 286 kinder/kindergarten 62, 74, 106, 107, 138, 242 languaging 7, 27, 30, 32, 33, 49, 51, 53, 56, 60, 67, 79, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 125, 129, 130, 131, 143, 145, 147, 152, 160, 162, 176, 185, 204, 205, 207, 230, 231, 234, 244, 246, 247, 277, 297. See also language practices Latinx(s)/Latino/a(s) xxi, 2, 5, 8, 9, 10, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 55, 71, 73, 74, 76, 87, 88, 115, 116, 117, 130, 137, 138, 175, 176, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 196, 197, 201, 203, 206, 207, 209, 216, 226, 277, 287, 295, 297 activist(s) 55 bilingual xxi, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 19, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 62, 66, 117, 162, 164, 170, 175, 183, 187, 197, 201, 202, 204, 207, 217, 277, 285, 288, 297 Black (Afro-Latinx) 1

308

Transformative Translanguaging Espacios

Latinx(s)/Latino/a(s) (Continued) children/youth xx, xxi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 19, 20, 28, 29, 33, 35, 36, 38, 157, 162, 166, 173, 194, 206, 209, 212, 215, 216, 217, 221, 254, 278, 279, 280, 287, 293, 295, 300 community(ies) xxi, xx, 2, 4, 5, 7, 13, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 49, 56, 66, 116, 119, 120, 153, 156, 159, 204, 209, 211, 215, 277, 278, 279, 282, 283, 284, 287 Deaf 8, 9, 13, 35, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 237, 238, 239, 243, 244, 246, 247 disabled, labeled (EBLADs) 252, 253, 270 education / educational practice(s) 34, 300. See also bilingual education experiences 8, 203, 206, 212, 215, 217, 277 families / parents / mothers / households / homes 5, 20, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 50, 55, 63, 66, 88, 143, 208, 211, 215, 253, 257, 266, 267, 281, 282, 283, 283, 286, 297, 298 identity(ies) 28, 205, 206, 212, 215, 217, 257 languaging/language 5, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 38, 39, 48, 153, 282, 283, 285, 286 scholars / authors / editors / publishers / speakers 3, 12, 36, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 212, 215 students / learners xix, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 49, 50, 51, 55, 62, 64, 66, 71, 77, 114, 117, 119, 120, 134, 136, 138, 145, 149, 152, 153, 157, 162, 168, 174, 175, 176, 183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 194, 206, 216, 217, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 294, 298, 300 Studies 7, 183, 187, 188, 193, 194, 196 teacher(s) 12, 65, 156, 176, 188, 280 transfronterizxs 6 literature (children/youth/adult/middle grades) 201, 205, 206, 208, 215, 217 Literacy/literacies 79, 82, 100, 109, 115, 134, 168, 170, 184, 186, 190, 202, 203, 228, 232, 238, 240, 258, 286 See also sociocritical literacies

biliteracy /biliterate 3, 35, 48, 96, 106, 119, 136, 138, 160, 172, 202, 265, 268 constructions 35 critical 186 instruction / pedagogy(ies) 139, 183, 185, 187, 202, 234, 237, 240, 242 New Literacy Studies 115 practices 29, 77, 79, 113, 128, 191, 203, 241, 261, 268 text(s) 212. See also Latinx literature racial 191 minoritized 1, 8, 24, 36, 53, 78, 226, 281, 298 bilinguals/multilinguals 1, 20, 135, 136, 141, 203, 271, 277, 280, 282, 284, 288 communities / population / groups 2, 3, 4, 7, 53, 54, 135, 148, 174, 184, 203, 226, 243, 244, 277, 284 language 50, 78, 183, 197, 203, 255, 287 Latinx 37, 281 students / children / learners 50, 116, 129, 134, 254, 271, 294 students of color 299 named languages xix, 4, 5, 6, 10, 13, 20, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 50, 53, 54, 59, 66, 74, 78, 83, 89, 99, 106, 115, 136, 140, 143, 152, 156, 157, 184, 185, 206, 207, 216, 246, 257, 265, 269, 277, 293, 294, 296, 298 nepantlera translanguaging pedagogy 6, 11, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 126, 129, 130, 131 power 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 37, 38, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 66, 67, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 88, 128, 131, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 149, 150, 151, 153, 158, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 195, 205, 208, 243, 253, 255, 256, 262, 263, 265, 268, 270, 271, 278, 284, 288 interrogate/ing 59, 62, 63, 136 pre-kindergarten 6, 57, 156 prefigurative spaces 95, 109, 110, 11 racialization / racialized 1, 8, 19, 35, 36, 71, 78, 88, 174, 184, 188, 217, 225, 230, 270, 277, 300

Subject Index

bilingual / multilingual communities xix, xx, xxi, 3, 36, 265, 280 bilingual / multilingual students xxi communities / groups / people 7, 229, 287 Latinx (bilingual) 22, 26, 28, 29, 32, 37 raciolinguistic ideologies 2, 10, 19, 24, 32, 36, 129, 136, 153, 183, 186, 191, 197, 229, 280. See also ideologies, hegemonic, race racism 1, 3, 10, 13, 19, 26, 37, 72, 114, 116, 117, 118, 189, 190, 192, 194, 195, 196, 203, 204, 224, 243, 278, 286 social studies 5, 58, 73, 74, 284, 286, 298, 75, 80, 89, 99, 128, 139, 140, 159 sociocritical literacies 72, 76. See also literacy / literacies solidarity 48, 55, 115, 118, 122, 186, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 204, 208, 226, special education 244, 252, 254, 257, 269, 283. See also dis/ability tejidos 19, 33, 34, 36, 38, 277, 278, 279, 285, 288 transformation(s)/transformational/ transformative xix, xx, xxi, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 68, 72, 77, 79, 105, 109, 111, 114, 118, 129, 130, 135, 139, 149, 152 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 172, 173, 174, 176, 184, 186, 197, 203, 216, 246, 255, 256, 264, 266, 269, 278, 286, 299, 300 pedagogy(ies) / teaching / instructional / classroom space 8, 145, 159, 161, 164, 174, 175, 176, 201, 224, 236, 243, 257, 279, 285. See also translanguaging, pedagogy potential/power (of translanguaging) 4, 9, 11, 12, 35, 50, 52, 58, 67, 76, 95, 96, 105, 110, 118, 223, 224, 246, 271, 278, 279, 280. See also translanguaging spaces/espacios (of translanguaging) xx, xxi, 6, 7, 12, 78, 136, 157, 160, 173, 175, 184, 278, 284. See also translanguaging, spaces transfronterizx(s/as) 6, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 123, 124, 125, 130

309

translanguaging xix, xx, xxi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 48, 50, 51, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 89, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 152, 153, 157, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 196, 197, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211, 215, 216, 217, 223, 224, 225, 227, 230, 234, 235, 236, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 253, 257, 258, 259, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 277, 278, 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298, 299, 300 pedagogy(ies) / pedagogical practices / strategies / approach xx, xxi, 5, 6, 7, 8, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 67, 77, 78, 82, 88, 96, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 126, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 139, 158, 160, 161, 166, 168, 174, 175, 176, 184, 185, 186, 203, 204, 215, 216, 243, 245, 246, 283, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300. See also nepantlera translanguaging space/espacios/literacies 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 19, 20, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 47, 48, 50, 54, 113, 121, 136, 140, 142, 143, 145, 150, 151, 152, 153, 157, 160, 162, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 196, 197, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 215, 216, 217, 253, 259, 261, 264, 265, 267, 277. See also transformation, spaces translingual 6, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 95, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 184, 186, 188, 195, 197 approach/approaches, critical 184, 186 visually oriented 236 writing 3, 7, 13, 78, 81, 82, 96, 114, 121, 140, 183, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 203, 204, 205, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215, 229, 234, 236, 237, 240, 241, 242, 243, 292