Desgarrandonos de Nuestra Lengua: Ripping Us from our Language

Using a testimonio methodology, this study provides insight on how language ideologies, family, and education in the Texas Borderlands impacted two Latina teachers’ view and understanding of their identity. Through our personal experiences as PK-16 students, classroom teachers, and doctoral students, we were able to understand the colonization of our language and the subsequent endangerment of our bilingualism, which upon reflecting, had an impact on how we see ourselves as individuals, bilinguals, teachers, and Latinas. Our experiences with our bilingualism affected the way in which we perceive ourselves and our community. The reflection and analysis of our experiences allowed us to adjust our mindset towards a culturally sustaining lens, to improve our instructional practices, and to accept ourselves for who we are and where we were raised. Findings reveal how others’ ideologies about language and education can have a lasting consequence on us as well as how we go about changing our mindset to one of acceptance and pride.

Where Our Paths Crossed

This chapter presents the case of two Latina teachers who worked with Latinx and emerging bilingual students. Their funds of identity are analyzed, and the professional development program is described, including ways it influenced the teachers' ideological clarity and sense of agency. While their experiences were different in many ways, Summer and Ximena's paths crossed through their shared experiences in the professional development program, and they became vocal advocates for language as resource and language as right perspectives in education. This chapter demonstrates the potential in professional development for teachers working with emerging bilinguals and immigrants, how teachers can move towards advocacy work and leadership by examining their own journeys and funds of identity.

Cultural Guardians

This chapter explains the concept of cultural guardians to elucidate the range of sanctioned and unsanctioned strategies Latina teachers consciously deploy in order to protect and help co-ethnic children. Latina teachers do not set out to become cultural guardians, but their interactions with poorer co-ethnic students and their families as well as their colleagues prompt them to adopt the role. Because of their own marginalization over the life course, including negative childhood experiences in K–12 schools and beyond, they soon realize how valuable they can be to their working-class Latino students and those students’ families. The process of serving as agents of ethnic mobility and giving back socially to the poor Latino families they serve, however, means they had to do so by stretching and bending institutional policies to provide “more-than-routine” service to Latino children as a result of school rules, policies, and administrative oversight that pervade their work. Latinas who grew up in English-speaking or middle-class families, are multiracial (Mexican and white), or of later generations can also play the role as well as Latinas from working-class backgrounds, especially in multiracial environments, because they all experience exclusion in spaces that privilege whiteness.

From “Americanization” to “Latinization”

While Mexican-origin children and other racial/ethnic and language-minority children were once forced to undergo Americanization programs that urged them to assimilate into a white mainstream, the remnants of these policies still influence the workplace culture that Latina teachers encounter daily, but “majority–minority” schools allow for a different scenario. This chapter situates the study in the literature from various disciplines, drawing from theories about workplace inequities and educational disenfranchisement. It relies on classical and contemporary educational theories to detail the history of segregation Latino youth faced in the U.S. educational system and in southern California schools. It connects cultural deficit and subtractive schooling theories to argue that these perspectives linger, influencing the measures Latina teachers take once in their jobs. It explains how Latino ethnic culture is a powerful asset that Latina teachers bring to their workplaces to promote educational attainment.