A Hollow Promise to Latinx Students?

Bilingual Education: A hollow promise to Latinx students?
by Laura Chávez Moreno

Hi CNY Latino, thank you so much for being interested in my book. My name is Laura Chavez Moreno. I am a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. I teach Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Education there. I just wanted to share a little bit about my book, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America. It’s coming out very soon, on October 1, and I’m very excited to share a little bit about it.

So, I am from Arizona, and I worked as a teacher of Spanish in a Philadelphia public school district. During my time as a teacher, I learned that my students had a lot of questions about race and racism, even though I was a Spanish teacher. When I say “even though,” it’s because I was supposed to focus on teaching them Spanish, right? But they had a lot of questions about how our society works and what race is (sometimes it was just implicit questions, or they joked about things, etc.).

I noticed these kinds of things when I was a teacher, and I also noticed that there were different opportunities based on someone’s racial group. I went to graduate school to study education, schooling, and also race and teaching. One of the things I decided to study was how a bilingual education program—a Spanish-English bilingual education program—taught about the concept or idea of Latinx. I use the word Latinx in order to challenge gender binaries, and I also use the X intentionally to cross out “Latin,” which is a colonizer word from Europe. So, I use the X to remind us that it is a word that still stems from Europe, and to problematize that.

I studied a bilingual education program in order to see what ideas they taught about race and what ideas they taught about Latinx. I looked at the teachers’ curriculum, their pedagogy (which means their practices), the policies of the bilingual program, and the district’s policies and how they allocated resources. I also looked at how they tracked students, tested students, and many other aspects of the program. The program was at the secondary level, which means middle school and high school. Even though the program was not explicitly about teaching race—their mission was more about bilingualism, biliteracy, biculturalism, and having students be more socio-politically aware of their global environment—because it was a Spanish-English bilingual program, and because it was also a very racially diverse program, a lot of questions came up about race and racial equity.

In the book, I detail how these conversations unfolded. What were the types of questions that students had? What I found was that they were very eager to learn more about what race is and how it affects our society. Unfortunately, some of the lessons the teachers did were really focused on understanding race at what I would term more of an elementary level—lessons like not discriminating based on people’s skin color and being inclusive, which are definitely very important. The problem is that when that’s the lesson throughout your schooling, even into high school, students get bored of it, and they started asking other types of questions. They noticed the contradictions in our society in terms of race, but the schooling didn’t advance their ideas in a way that would help them better understand how our society works and what race is.

Along with that, I also noticed that students were curious about whether the Latinx group was a race or not. They noticed contradictions, though sometimes they weren’t able to verbalize it. A lot of people focused on Latinx as having a similar culture and described it as an ethnicity, but they also described it as a group that suffered from racism. So, there’s this contradiction, right? They are an ethnic group, but they suffer from racism—so why wouldn’t they also be considered a racialized group? This contradiction was often left unacknowledged.

One of the things I argue in the book is that teachers should lean into these contradictions with their students in order to advance their understanding of what race is and how it is formed in our society. Race isn’t something that is natural; it’s something that our society constructs, and institutions like schooling continue to construct ideas about race, perpetuating different types of advantages for some groups over others. We need to support teachers to be well-prepared to address the questions students have and the contradictions in programs that aim to advance the academic outcomes of students. For example, in the Spanish-English bilingual program, the district, teachers, and community wanted to uplift Latinx students who were not achieving at the levels the community wanted. It’s crucial for communities to support teachers engaging in this type of work, teaching about racism and how to take action against racism.

Thank you so much for being interested in my book. I hope to hear from readers about what they take away from it, and I hope the work pushes folks to think about how they can support teachers in engaging in this type of work. When teachers work in an anti-racist way, one that is explicit about race, it really helps advance schools for students and determines whether schools serve their students in a way that supports anti-racism and, ultimately, our democracy in achieving justice. Thank you all.

Laura C. Chávez-Moreno is an award-winning researcher, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Departments of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Education. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education in Curriculum and Instruction. You can contact her at https://laurachavezmoreno.com/