“No Había Bilingual Education:” Stories of Negotiation, Educación, y Sacrificios from South Texas Escuelitas

Degollado, Enrique David; Bell, Rebecca; Salinas, Cinthia

doi:10.1080/15348431.2019.1604351

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…To attend to the historical practices of las escuelitas, we do not aim to situate their practices within a specific paradigm but to highlight the competing paradigms. We have argued (Degollado, Bell, & Salinas, 2021) that las escuelitas, as described by the participants, imbued a sense of criticality because of the interstitial space they inhabited. Learning to read the world, therefore, was not the intent, but a by-product that helped the participants navigate the hegemony of English.…”

Section: Situating Biliteracy As Critical Literacy On the Bordermentioning

confidence: 98%

“I Learned How to Read in Spanish”: A Genealogical Analysis of Biliterate Subjective Possibilities in South Texas Escuelitas and Beyond

Degollado

Bell

Harvey‐Torres

2022

Teachers College Record

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Background/Context: Historically, the literature on access to quality education for Mexican Americans has been wrought with injustices committed on them because of the racist and deficit thinking of the time. This includes, but is not limited to, access to literacy in English and Spanish. This article focuses on las escuelitas, or little schools, as sites of resistance that fostered Spanish literacy as an extension of the home before official schooling in all English public schools. These little schools were community-based initiatives that taught Texas Mexican children Spanish literacy and Mexican culture from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s in the borderlands. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Drawing on nepantla and border thinking as theoretical frameworks, we argue that biliterate subjectivities emerge(d) from geographically contingent ideologies rooted in colonizing codes of power. We asked: (1) How do participants describe their early literacy experiences in las escuelitas? (2) How do the discursive characterizations of participants’ early literacy experiences inform our understanding of emerging discursive biliterate subjectivities? Research Design: Employing a Foucauldian genealogical analysis, this article examines the experiences of nine escuelitas attendees. Oral histories were collected form a group of Mexican Americans who attended las escuelitas in the 1940s and were from the same graduating high school class, though they did not attend the same escuelita. Alongside their narratives, we draw on historical accounts of las escuelitas and broader Mexican American history of education of the southwestern United States. Other data include poems and textbooks provided by the participants themselves. Foucauldian genealogical analysis offered a more nuanced story in which to situate their narratives. Findings/Results: The findings demonstrate how biliterate subjectivities were produced ideologically as the participants lived and made meaning in a time when official biliteracy was not only inconceivable, but effectively outlawed by English-only laws governing public schools. We go on to consider the clandestine biliteracy of escuelita attendees of the early 20th century, in contrast to the growing popularity of official forms of biliteracy for (some) contemporary students in schools today. To do so, we detail how participants engaged in complex and contradictory discursive characterizations that revealed their nepantla and border thinking as a way of reading and writing the world. Thus, las escuelitas provide historical insight into not only the ingenuity of communities to resist English hegemony, but also how present-day bilingual education often reinscribes marginalization. Conclusions/Recommendations: The discursive narratives demonstrate the complexity of forming subjectivities in relation to biliteracy. We reveal the ways in which their biliterate subjectivities of reading the word informed the ways in which they also read the world. Thus, their subjective formations emanated nepantla and border thinking as a facet of their biliteracy. We also find that their biliteracy stories echo present discursive formations of who is considered biliterate through official manifestations like the Seal of Biliteracy. Finally, their stories indicate that biliteracy as a subjective possibility has always been rooted in communities of color whose lives and knowledges often go unrecognized.

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Section: Situating Biliteracy As Critical Literacy On the Bordermentioning

confidence: 98%

“I Learned How to Read in Spanish”: A Genealogical Analysis of Biliterate Subjective Possibilities in South Texas Escuelitas and Beyond

Degollado

Bell

Harvey‐Torres

2022

Teachers College Record

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“…Partly in response to white supremacist educational policies such as English-only instruction, intentional segregation, disparate allocation of funding, and emphasis on industrial training, many Mexican origin communities across the U.S. Southwest have long sought private schooling to maintain religious practices, develop bilingualism and biliteracy, contest assimilationist 'Americanization,' and promote academic achievement (Degollado et al, 2019;San Miguel, 2013). Some of these multifaceted motivations for seeking private schooling have tenuous affinities with market-based approaches to education, which have historically emphasized freedom of choice and competition through a radical shrinkage of government (e.g.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling and resisting English-medium schooling on Milwaukee’s multilingual Near South Side: A typology of choice schools’ marketing strategies

Hurie

Palmer

2022

EPAA

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Extant research has emphasized the importance of information to help families of English learner-identified children to navigate school choice structures, and raised critical questions about the information that is made available through school marketing. At a time of increasing tension around school choice and the rapid expansion of certain forms of bilingual education, we argue for the importance of documenting language minoritized parents’ experiential knowledge as one means of combating choice-based exclusion. Drawing from theories of racial capitalism, language ideologies, and language policy, we analyze charter and voucher school websites and interview data from a nine-month critical bifocal ethnography on the intersections and tensions between bilingual education and school choice policy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our findings identify six marketing strategies that choice schools employed on Milwaukee’s Near South Side, a place with high concentrations of Spanish-speaking, low-income Latinx families. We also present one working-class Mexican father’s narrative of choosing a school for his child as an example of the ways in which parents actively resist the racializing logics embedded within choice-based, marketized school systems. The article provides policy agents with a typology to help generate additional, place-specific analyses of the marketization of language education in multilingual communities.

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“…Unfortunately, what has remained the same, as Escamilla [20] describes, is the scarcity of bilingual education and/or culturally responsive education programs which results in inequity for an overwhelming majority of bilingual students in our nation. Consequently, a half-century later, even with hundreds of studies under our belt, students entering schools with a language other than English persistently suffer under these pervasive inequities in public education and it requires immediate reparation [17].…”

Section: Need For Well Implemented Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Deficiently trained and unsupported teachers, a lack of culturally relevant curriculum, and underfunded programs continue to contribute to the lack of success and dehumanization of linguistic and cultural values of language minority groups [9]. The demands of the 1960s for a quality bilingual education that builds upon linguistic and cultural repertoires are still true today [17]. Funding is needed; resources are needed; an intentional focus on professional development is needed; motivation and empowerment of teachers is needed; strong leadership teams that encourage and also believe are needed.…”

Section: Need For Well Implemented Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Like with many legislative decisions, there were those in favor and those opposed to the decision. It could be argued that the serious consideration for dismantling bilingual education began in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan and other government officials attacked bilingual education through deregulation of previously implemented policies with the ultimate goal of dismantlement [17,25]. In 1983, the U.S. English organization claimed that to declare English as the official language was to expand English-learning opportunities for immigrants, but later openly questioned the effectiveness of bilingual education and instead hindered language minorities' access to society [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Political Turmoil Influencing Bilingual Education in the 1980s

Cárdenas¹

2021

IJLL

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“No Había Bilingual Education:” Stories of Negotiation, Educación, y Sacrificios from South Texas Escuelitas

Cited by 8 publications

References 18 publications

“I Learned How to Read in Spanish”: A Genealogical Analysis of Biliterate Subjective Possibilities in South Texas Escuelitas and Beyond

“I Learned How to Read in Spanish”: A Genealogical Analysis of Biliterate Subjective Possibilities in South Texas Escuelitas and Beyond

Selling and resisting English-medium schooling on Milwaukee’s multilingual Near South Side: A typology of choice schools’ marketing strategies

Political Turmoil Influencing Bilingual Education in the 1980s

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