Language,Identity,and Racialization: A Trio-Ethnography of Spanish Linguists

Adam: Sounds like a pandemia doble, really. On one hand, there is the viral pandemic. On the other hand, there is of course another long-standing pandemic of white supremacy that of systemic and institutional racism. Those often ordinary ways in which black and brown bodies, voices and minds have been racialized so relentlessly-- like the fabric of “orderly” society depends on it-- and that’s because it does. None of us have existed in a world in which that hasn’t been the case-- instead, we inherited that world.

And I think for many White folk in this country, the pandemic of racism has been an illness, if not a cancer with which we’ve lived and rarely acknowledge. I mention this because a few years back the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad remarked on this metaphor upon the election of Donald Trump. He says that he “did us a favor, because he shows us how active and significant white supremacy is in this country. I mean, we needed to know it. We needed to see it. We needed to punch a hole in the mythology of post-racialism, because we need to deal with it. I mean, we think about an oncologist — we don’t want our oncologist telling us a little lie that we don’t really have cancer.”

Muhammad continues that that moment cracked open a window, an X-ray into a malignant tumor in our society. Now, the tumor’s always been there, but it’s grown. And we’ve tried to address it in ways small and large, and we’ve won some of those battles. But ultimately, the patient is very sick, it is our nation, and we need to extract it once and for all.” (Moyers, 2020)

That was early 2017, of course, and perhaps that metaphor of illness feels less metaphorical and more visceral.

Michelle: I agree, the verdict on Breonna Taylor’s case, the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the discussion of her replacement in the ensuing days. Democracy was gutted. Not only we have to fight these two pandemics, but we, as women of color, also fear even more for our lives, our civil rights, our reproductive rights, access to health care... because the law can easily be (re-)interpreted for those in power to continue to remain in power.

Adam: Also, consider for a moment that these two pandemics aren’t mutually exclusive. They constitute each other through violence. Just as violence is justified by racist ideologies that construct nation-states and their institutions (like universities), inadequate health care and policy is a product of the systems that are fortified by those same ideologies. The viral pandemic ‘targets’ black and brown folks disproportionately in this country, and how? It is the social structures--meritocracy, racial capitalism, settler colonialism--that are active projects that are designed to oppress and restrict black and brown agency. These structures actively relegate black and brown bodies, voices and minds to be less valuable, less human. I don’t need to tell you both this, you’ve resisted these forces through experiences that I cannot claim. With this virus, violence simply persists in new ways. But the usual folks-- white people that look like, sound like, and move through the world like me--we don’t have to see or it experience that violence in the same ways. And so, this summer, it was time for folks to get loud. It is time for a reckoning.

Michelle: We see some members in society having conversations about racism, white supremacy, structural racism... I have been at meetings where normally these issues are mentioned by a faculty member of Color, and they would be called out for being uncivil, agitated, passionate, too opinionated or emotional. I hear these same terms: racism, white supremacy, structural racism mentioned now although I suspect it is probably performative allyship. I see this at my institution and from faculty at other campuses. I think this trio-ethnography is so timely because it allows us to create a space where we can name, share, explore and reflect on our daily experiences with language, race, and identity.

We are scholars of linguistics. In these roles, we need to interrogate the racial composition of our association at the same time that we do the work that we do. How many Black LASSOvians do we have? What about members of other marginalized groups? The answer provided: there are not that many in the pipeline … which is a problematic answer. It is a problematic answer because that pipeline is “riddled with clogs, leaks, and eroded sealant” (Brown and Bartee, 2000, p. 15) the result of the educational system’s challenges of a standardized, one-size-fits-all approach to education. How many of us are calling out white supremacy by its name? I immediately think of both of you to make “good trouble” with me. We need to be intentional with these choices as we continue with our conversations. We need to explore who has been left out and who we have been listening to all these years.

Adam: As Eva asks, how does one do work that meets this moment? I suppose we came together to sort out how we may address that important question collectively. At that core of that answer is whiteness-- I think that just as it manifests as a knee to the neck, or an oppressive weight against your chest, Eva, I think we can all agree that whiteness persists as an organizing principle throughout our shared and distinct identities as scholars and educators. I think being able to name that complexity, to articulate it, to be in conversation through and around it, is also what this type of methodology affords.

Adam via Google Doc: I was always taught to spell out “one” through “nine,” and then enumerate everything thereafter. Unless you think there’s a stylistic reason for otherwise?

Eva via Google Doc: Usually, I follow that same rule with respect to numbers. In this case, I want to leave the “8” as a numeral, so that the audience sees the 8 and the 46 together (although ... in the trial it came out that it was actually more than 9 minutes!). I am on board with using “11” and “22” as well.

Adam via Google Doc: I love it. And I agree with this choice-- I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not, but I’m all about it. Also-- more than 9 minutes! I thought I’d heard that wrong on NPR the other day. Wow.

Eva: My reaction to Adam’s comment and suggested edits came in phases. First, I thought, “Of course! I know that the convention is to write out numbers less than 10 and to use numerals for any number 10 or above.” It seemed so obvious, so indisputable. I actually felt a slight twinge of embarrassment for not following the convention from the beginning.

Adam: And here I have to confess that I felt my Whiteness emanating from the tips of my fingers, correcting Eva in a paragraph whose contents spoke to an impact on her livelihood, her well-being, her humanity. I was casting judgment on not just Eva’s language, but her voice. Of course she had made stylistic decisions to enumerate, to quantify violence. I mean, what’s up with me just jumping in and playing copy editor without a second thought? I needed to check myself.

Eva: You know what, when I first read the comment, it didn’t even feel like an overstep. For better or worse, it felt familiar. My academic and professional experience has always been defined by my ability to keep in step with the “standard”. So my initial reaction was, “Yes, let’s change the format now so that the copy editor doesn’t discover it later.” The Whiteness that Adam describes as emanating from his fingertips met no resistance because I had already internalized the same standards.

I mentioned that my reaction came in phases. The second phase was prompted by something that Adam said in his comment. He qualified his edits by raising the possibility of deference to style. Without that last bit —the question asking about my choices and motivations—I might have just followed convention. I might not have taken a moment to consider my own agency, and I might have missed an opportunity to give voice to the reasons why I wanted those numbers in particular to jump out of the text.

Adam: Absolutely. As (Hughes & Pennington, 2016) remind us, we use this variety of ethnography as a way to weave together our own biographies in order to build a new critical narrative. We do so in order to more deeply understand social phenomena through a type of triple hindsight, right?

Eva: Yeah, for sure. At the same time that this methodology allows us to explore the ways that academic programs, departments, and institutions maintain racialized power dynamics and exacerbate social inequities, the process of the trio-ethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013) has pushed me to consider my own positionality with respect to some of these oppressive ideologies and practices. For example, as we read “this is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you” by bell hooks (1995), I found myself reflecting on what I now understand as my own “complicity with a culture of domination”. Complicity through acceptance of the idea that I could (and should) educate myself out of African American English. Complicity in the way that even now, at the same time that I teach students in my linguistics classes to push back against linguistic value judgments, I still strategically wield academic English in my nonacademic life as “protection” from prejudice. So as I learn new ways of practicing resistance, I also find myself unlearning various forms of complicity.

Michelle: Our conversation is a call to action... Eva’s experience, the oppression of our racialized bodies remind me continuosly of the plight of our different members of the diaspora. The difference between Eva and I is a boat stop from Africa. Growing up in a white leaning family in the Caribbean as a negra jabá as my friends refer to me, I was taught to pass as white, but I was also reminded constantly that I was not white. So, I had to “behave”, act different(-ly), my body had to be corrected, my hair had to be modified, my language should not be the one from my hood. Thus, I moved through my schooling with mixed emotions towards all aspects of my identity. While in academia, I realized quickly that this realm is a very foreign space to me where linguistic varieties are corrected according to a white middle class standard, similar to the ideologies that dictate what counts as ways of knowing and researching. Whiteness/white supremacy is also structural. These are structures that perpetuate systems of power through their ideologies. The academy, and what I call now “colonial language departments” are agents in enacting these ideologies (Valdés, et al., 2003). In my department, we send heritage students to study abroad to Spain without any required course that prepares them to interrogate the different varieties spoken around them, and without any exploration of the differences and similarities in histories. Needless to say, our students continue with the ideology that the best Spanish is spoken in Spain.

Adam: This reminds me of an undergraduate class I taught on Spanish in the US a few years back. In that class, students are introduced to critical linguistics, but also are invited to understand Spanish in the US as a lived, bi- and multilingual reality that can viewed and studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We read a variety of texts, from poetry to academic articles, but we are always complicating notions of standardness and linguistic imperialism. We question whose wisdoms count in spaces of academic inquiry. Just as Flores and Rosa (2017) critique our understandings of listening and speaking subjects, we too dig deeply into the ways we have been socialized to speak, write, and hear Spanish-- and how we’ve been told not to. White-identified students for whom Spanish is a second language--they claim very different narratives than my students who do not fit this profile, as you can imagine. We discuss and sit with those distinctions. We also reflect on why we often haven’t done so before. But for all, there are dominant language ideologies that always seem to point back to Spain or Eurocentric--and largely urban--ways of speaking educated, monolingual codes.

Michelle: The difference in views relates to the ideologies about Spanish and who gets to claim the standard of the Real Academia Española. ¹

Adam: Absolutely-- and specifically, who benefits from it. So, a few weeks into this particular class, I asked my students for their feedback on the course. It provided a good opportunity to check in with students one-on-one who needed extra attention, or just a moment for more focused care and conversation. One student in the class, a young white woman, lamented about how this course felt so negative. She was puzzled, as it seemed like there was so much to celebrate about Spanish in the US. I asked her to tell me more. What was I missing? What were we missing? What she revealed was that she seemed interested in coming to understand Spanish in the US in ways that mirrored her own positive, additive relationship to the language while studying abroad in Spain the previous term.

Michelle: She did not understand that additive language learning is for monolingual white middle class students and subtractive/negative context is the Brown/Black reality (García, 2011), and that the history of Spanish in the United States is one of pitfalls and challenges for heritage speakers who are chastised for not knowing how to speak their inherited tongue. That monolingual white middle class students benefit from a bilingual program because they, in addition to their standard English, are learning another language in its standard form. That is, white middle class students first language skills and culture are valued as they learn the standard of another language. The same is not necessarily true for Brown and Black students as they learn Standard English, the learning of this variety requires the unlearning and devalue of their own first language skills and culture.

Adam: Well, she never had to. Language learning had never been presented in any other way. What’s more, it seemed previously inconceivable to her that language education could extend beyond scholarly treatments of literature or film. I didn’t fault her for this; This was an education she had been socialized into. As a White person who learned Spanish as a second language, I could identify with this. But I was very blunt with her-- it was time to acknowledge the ways in which her whiteness afforded her the ability to understand Spanish-English bilingualism through such a narrow lens. Her fellow classmates who identified as heritage learners of Spanish, for instance, did not share this perspective. It was easy for her not to see that--or rather, to not have to What she had interpreted as “negative”-- for instance, critical discussions about English Only politics in the US-- many other students found empowering.

Michelle: Exactly, Adam, that IS the problem, that the language/linguistics classrooms do not seem to be the space to interrogate concepts such as: privilege, whiteness, and white space. This lack of space seems to be both a problem of structural racism in the Ivory Tower and of horizontal linguicism, that is when we discriminate against each other based on the language variety we use, where even heritage/native speakers fight against the idea of questioning the problematic existence of Spanish in academia vs. the erasure of Spanish in mainstream society, other than, of course, when it is monolingual middle class, mostly white students, learning Spanish as a second language. It is an uneasy conversation, but one with which everyone must engage.

Adam: The irony here was that this young woman had professional goals of interpreting in medical and courtroom settings. She would be confronted with power dynamics that are so racialized, not to mention gendered and classed.

Michelle: We are also reminded of those power dynamics and the ideologies that govern how we behave linguistically and otherwise with the signs that surround us in our linguistic landscape. As we landscape the linguistic, signs tell us the language/linguistic variety that is privileged, that has capital. We also observed how other languages are commodified to attract customers. So, we see English predominantly displayed, and depending on the area, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean or <insert here the name of the language that is not English> might be used to attract customers to a gentrified area. Yet, any of these languages are also used within communities to inform speakers of that language of the products sold and services offered. So, when trying to engage students in linguistic landscape research on Spanish I observe how students push back against the idea of studying our own variety of Spanish because it is not the “correct” form or because it is not “pure”, or just simply because why we have to bother studying the variety spoken by the people who use it outside of academia. The influence that these ideologies on language correctness have not only affected our daily lives in our daily transmission of language, but also what and how we do research because we continue to see ourselves as deficientes.

Michelle: These experiences reflect how we have benefited from the privilege of knowing standard versions of languages. My relationship and experience with language resonates in different ways with the ones you shared. Although I am aware now of my privilege, upon reflecting on my upbringing, I see the different ways in which many of my friends and neighbors were othered. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood. The neighborhood children were my friends, and I speak like them. I went to a private school to learn the standard of my L1. I was aware I could code switch, but I expected everyone to do the same, slowly I became aware of my privilege because I was also able to learn English as a second language. I could understand neighbors who were Puerto Ricans returning from the US mainland. I judged them at times while also realizing that Puerto Ricans who return to the island sounded very much like como mi Papá speaking in Spanish. That privilege of learning Spanish in my home environment and in my community was not a privilege Papi, as a person raised in the diaspora had, and I was judging all of them based on my privilege, based on a different experience with the standard. The ideas of sticking to the standard and not mixing languages in the academic context, tho, were very ingrained, to the point that I believed for a while that the best Spanish variety was spoken in Spain. College meant using a different linguistic mask, that of the standard languages, to pass my classes, and continue in graduate school. In all the programs that I was part of, Spain was *the* country to study abroad if one wanted to major in Spanish. Mexico came a long distant second… With all the talk about the standard and correctness and the right way of speaking, we are missing out on all the resources (Yosso, 2005) of our heritage speakers, as we judge them as deficient (Valenzuela, 1999). This assumption that HL students are deficient neglects all the resources a su disposición that are used to convey a variety of meanings (Rosa & Flores, 2017). I see a parallel between “defending the standards of language correctness & the erasure of different language varieties” with the policing and erasure of Brown and Black bodies. Students are really struggling to breathe & speak their heritage, and we asphyxiate them with our rules of La Real Academia. Remember Anzaldúa? “Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia.” (35) and I have been complicit too in different settings, depending on the context.

Eva: This point really resonates with me, Michelle. I told you all about the colleague who said just a few weeks ago que los hablantes de herencia “no saben hablar y no saben escribir”. This perspective, unfortunately, permeates many of our language departments and informs the experience that heritage speakers have in Spanish programs. Many of our programs do not merely neglect the rich linguistic resources that heritage speakers have, but rather intentionally devalue those resources in the service of imposing narrow academic visions of language standards onto all speakers.

Michelle: Absolutely, as linguists, we tend to look at, study, describe, discuss and write about our Heritage Learners as deficient and in need of correcting and expanding. And, by doing so, we --in turn-- become the oppressors.

Adam: We all carry the weight of oppression, even if we inherited that weight upon birth. And it is our institutional power that tempts us to unload that weight onto others, reproducing this cycle.

For instance, I didn’t realize until fairly recently that my grandfather and his sister—immigrant kids whose parents were from Eastern Europe by way of 1910s Jewish Montreal--their first language is Yiddish? We know we’re Jews who use Yiddish phrases politely, if not unknowingly and in the company of each other, that’s never been in question. But we’ve forgotten to acknowledge our heritage language entirely!

It’s been erased from our cultural consciousness, within less than three generations. That’s how White we’ve become. That’s how we’ve invested in Whiteness as a structure. We’ve come to believe in ourselves as White, fail to acknowledge the privilege that ideology of racism affords us, and linguistically, we disappear through our claim to being “native” English speakers. And here I am, a third generation immigrant son, a professor of Spanish, a language I simultaneously chose to learn in school but also one that defines me as a child of Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s.

But my Whiteness did afford me all the benefits of my choice to enroll in Spanish as a foreign language at 7^th grade, years after I had begun to learn Spanish in spaces outside the classroom.

And I’ve now made an entire career off of benefitting from that choice, and I’m also assumed to then teach other people under the assumption that they too can benefit from that choice. That’s fundamentally messed up, because what I’m doing, if I’m not careful, is reproducing the same pain and dominance and hegemonic whiteness my family is still recovering from.

Eva: I have to admit that this was a blind spot for me. You know, we talked about how this conversation might facilitate a better understanding of how academic institutions must respond to the call to dismantle their own systems of oppression. Your point reminds me that I need to interrogate how even the things that I may see as innocuous (such as a default to study abroad for language learning) could be in lockstep with oppressive structures and ideologies.

Michelle: Our conversation today reminds me of Zentella (2003:53): “I am most concerned about the fact that given the hegemony of racializing discourses, there seems to be no way out— that is, no way to subvert these racist practices, to escape the strangle- hold imposed by white public space.” and the choke that these standards and expectations have on us as faculty members and, by extension, our students. The question is, then, what are our next steps? What needs to be done in the classrooms, in the departments, at the administrative levels?

Adam: What work must we continue to do within ourselves? The biggest trap that we can fall into—as individuals and as individuals within institutions—is thinking that we have it all figured out.

Eva: Absolutely. That calls to mind quotes by Angela Davis and Coretta Scott King, respectively—“Freedom is a constant struggle” and “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”

Adam: This is a conversation that, while recorded for the purposes of this publication, will be ongoing, continuously, between the three of us. And I expect that this conversation invites others in-- both those that read it, or those with whom we have the privilege to teach and work.

It should be said that we’re not the first to articulate our frustrations, our relationships with injustice, and to take this on in such a self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic manner. While our identities are unique, and our perspective as linguists in Spanish programs offers particular insight, our conversation does exist within a larger, longer tradition of resistance.

I mention this because recently my colleague Mariam Durrani recently published an incredibly courageous piece in American Anthropologist. It is her own testimonio, as it were, titled “Digital Structures of the Internet Outrage Machine: An Autoethnography of Targeted Faculty Harassment” (Durrani, 2021). In it, she uses her own narrative, a recounting of two particular lived events to spotlight how digital technologies assist right-wing techniques in manufacturing “outrage and gaslighting to scholars, scholarship, and teaching that critiques white supremacy.” (p. 1) For all the obvious reasons, I know we can all empathize with this, deeply. In Durrani’s case, she utilizes autoethnography to name her experiences as cases of anti-Muslim racism, but also to “emotionally safeguard [herself] from the anxiety and stress connected to these events.” (p. 1)

Before doing this, though, Durrani is clear about autoethnography as a tradition of Black feminist anthropology, pointing to Zora Neale Hurston, in particular. It is Hurston who clinched how the “personal is political,” and that as such the personal is endlessly data for ourselves. Brown-Vincent (2019) reminds that it was Hurston, while a university student studying anthropology in the 1920s, “is rarely given credit for her early theorizing of ethnographic methodology in which she deploys the spy-glass as a metaphor to offer insight into her decision to record the African-American folklore of her Southern childhood and the subsequent difficulty she encountered in attempting to do so” (p 110).

I must confess that this took me aback. After some time studying autoethnography, attending a few conferences and workshops on ethnographic research methodologies, inviting students to engage with and through autoethnography, reading countless examples of the work, and even having read Hurston’s work itself-- it was Durrani who made me aware of autoethnograhy’s origins. I claim responsibility for not knowing this, but also acknowledge the significance behind such ignorance. It’s almost as if I’ve been socialized to forget that research methodologies, particularly those so regularly dismissed as “not real research,” indeed take origins in social struggle. Especially significant is how these origins grow from Black Feminist scholarship that “charted impressive intellectual territory in calling attention to the multiple ways in which structures of inequality permeate every aspect of oppressed people’s lives.” (Brown-Vincent, 2019, p. 111, p. 111)

I hope that autoethnography continues to serve us as a means of holding ourselves accountable.

Eva: This conversation has been a true exercise in knowing. I have learned as much about myself as I have about our institutions and our discipline, a fact that underscores the reflexive nature of the autoethnographic process (e.g., Hughes & Pennington, 2016) and one that suggests that institutional change alone—while necessary—is insufficient to eradicate hegemonic whiteness and the persistent colonization of language, disciplines, and bodies in the academy (e.g., Rosa & Flores, 2017). We must also dismantle the oppressive ideologies, instincts, and impulses that reside within each one of us, the ones that have shaped us, the ones that—when left unchecked—prompt us to replicate the status quo in our classrooms, in our research, and in our daily lives.

In one of my Black Studies classes, we recently engaged texts on white privilege and white supremacy that yielded a discussion that I find relevant for our conversation here. In “The Color of Supremacy,” Zeus Leonardo argues that the analysis of white racial hegemony “must be complemented by an equally rigorous examination of ... white racial domination” (Leonardo, 2004: 137). This domination, Leonardo argues, is the result of “patterned and enduring treatment of social groups” (2004: 139). So, in addition to identifying current policies, practices, and pedagogies that do the work of white hegemony in Spanish Linguistics and in language departments more broadly, it is also imperative that we urge our institutions to examine the patterns, policies, and actors that laid the foundation for the current system of whiteness as an organizing principle. A dismantling of institutionalized systems of oppression will require us to do as much “what” work as “why” work, meaning that it is not enough to acknowledge white supremacy in our field or institutionalized racism at each of our schools (i.e., the “what”). Instead, we must also address the “why”: why does the institution send students abroad instead of engaging native speakers in our local communities, why do colleagues laugh off student concerns about language and racial ideologies, why does our curriculum allow students to complete a language major or minor without awareness of the African diaspora within a given language community, why do our programs privilege second language learners over heritage speakers, and why, overall, does hegemonic whiteness permeate our language programs and our language ideologies.

A lesson that I learned in this process was that none of us—not even those of us who are doing the work of anti-racism on campus and in our fields—are exempt from the long reach of white supremacist and white hegemonic ideologies in academia. Some of us are, or have been, complicit with these cultures of domination (bell hooks, 1995). With a nod to poet Caroline Randall Williams’ June 2020 New York Times piece entitled “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument”, I say, “You Want a Monument to Hegemonic Whitenesss in Academia? My Body is that Monument”. My experience in the academy is “a living monument to the rules, the practices, the causes” of white hegemony and white supremacy. As a student, I nursed at the teat of white hegemony in language classrooms that privileged European languages and ways of languaging over all others. As a professor, there have been times when I left the ideological status quo uninterrogated, and even as I make forward progress—with every stride that I take—there is another lingering lesson, another deeply ingrained form of complicity, that I must unlearn before the past fully loses its hold on me. The work that meets this moment is characterized by our resistance. So as our conversation continues, as we call our institutions to action at this critical juncture, we must also call ourselves—our presence, personhood, and praxis in the academy—to dismantle the oppressive ideologies that we have internalized and work to facilitate liberation for our students, for ourselves, and for our field. Otherwise, we will never fully eradicate the systems of oppression that we carry or the ones that carry us.