Centering Latina/o Bilingual Teacher Candidates’ Experiences with Marginalizing Figures of Personhood

Abstract

This article examines 17 Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates’ experiences with ideologies conflating racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency: raciolinguistic ideologies. Drawing on data from a one-year critical ethnography conducted at a Hispanic-serving institution in Southwest Texas, this article analyzes these teacher candidates’ encounters with spontaneous, implicit/explicit ideological comments—what I call raciolinguistic metacommentary—that draw negative attention to their linguistic repertoires and practices in connection to their ethnoracial positioning. Findings show that instances of raciolinguistic metacommentary not only signal linguistic difference at the individual/interactional level but also mobilize indexical images of U.S. Latina/o bilinguals that reproduce their marginalization, particularly stereotypes of U.S. bilingual Latinas/os as pochas/os, gringas/os, and fresas. Analysis illustrates how these indexical images become ascribed to participating teacher candidates, what these images mean to these participants, and how they inform their sense of linguistic proficiency and identity. Findings have implications for bilingual teacher education, specifically regarding ways to help Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates critically engage these racially charged ideological commentary.

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