Navigating Raciolinguistic Marginalization: The Juxtaposed Experiences of a Bilingual Educator-Researcher and a Fourth-Grade Dual Language Bilingual Student

Gladys Yacely Aponte

Abstract

This article critically examines raciolinguistic ideologies within dual language bilingual (DLB) education by weaving together the author’s autohistoria-teoría with a reflexive ethnographic case study of a fourth-grade student who also shares a Kiskayenx (Dominican) identity. Raciolinguistic ideologies are examined by juxtaposing the student’s and researcher’s experiences through personal reflections, photos, poems, rap lyrics, interviews, and schoolwork. This juxtaposition brings to light the choques—collisions, contradictions, and tensions that marginalized individuals often experience while navigating oppressive systems. Findings underscore the need to prevent and heal raciolinguistic wounds through anti-colonial, critically conscious DLB education and ongoing critical reflexive practices.

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.58117/kj68-8088

During a parent-teacher conference, my second year as a New York City dual language bilingual teacher, a parent who had recently moved from Venezuela thought she was complimenting me by letting me know that I spoke Spanish well. She explained that she was worried about me at the beginning of the school year because her other child’s Dominican teacher didn’t speak “el español correcto” (the correct Spanish). I chuckled and reassured her. Dominicans speak “bad” Spanish, I thought, so I should be proud… I was proud; and I let that pride overpower the discomfort I felt deep in my soul—the pain and humiliation that were too deep for me to acknowledge; the linguistic wound that I felt opening. Are we really gonna compete over who’s linguistically colonized best? (Aponte, 2024, p. 56)

The language and cultural identities of Black and Brown Spanish-speaking communities in the United States have long been marginalized, misrepresented, and degraded (Anzaldúa, 1987; Rosa & Flores, 2017; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008; Valenzuela, 1999). In particular, the Spanish language practices typically associated with Kiskeyanxs—a demographic that is widely perceived as more Black than other Spanish-speaking groups—are widely stigmatized “for lacking certain features of an idealized standard—the Castilian or ‘European’ variety” (Toribio, 2006, p. 10). Kiskeyanx is the gender-inclusive Taino Indigenous name of the people from Kiskeya–commonly known by its colonial name, "The Dominican Republic." The racialized linguistic stigmatization of Kiskeyanxs is so pervasive that many Kiskeyanxs—including myself—have internalized the belief that our ways of speaking are deficient and inferior (García et al., 1988; Toribio, 2000, 2006; Zentella, 1997). Oppressive language ideologies like these prevail even in dual language bilingual (DLB) programs—a model of bilingual education that aims to validate and sustain the home language practices of emergent bilingual students (Aponte, 2024).

This article stems from a larger ethnographic study in which I examined how fourth graders in a New York City Spanish/English DLB public school navigated hegemonic language ideologies about Spanish. The study drew from the scholarship of raciolinguistic ideologies, which position the language practices of people of color as inherently deficient (Flores & Rosa, 2015). I analyzed students’ discourse across interviews, schoolwork, and interactions throughout the school day to answer the research question: How do fourth graders in a DLB school understand and navigate raciolinguistic ideologies about Spanish?

Before examining the children’s perspectives, however, it was important for me to look inward. As a first-generation Kiskeyana-New Yorker, a bilingual teacher educator and researcher, and a former dual language bilingual public-school teacher, I recognize the need to center self-reflexivity in my research. I did so by allowing myself to be guided by my body and spirit throughout the research process, and by engaging in autohistoria-teoría—a qualitative method of decolonial inquiry that invites us to blend creative modes of storytelling to examine the self in relation to wider sociopolitical dynamics (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2009; Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018). By analyzing memories, photos, poems, and reflexive memos before, during, and after the ethnographic study, I was better able to understand my own raciolinguistic journey and how my biases and positionality could shape my interpretation of the students’ experiences. This reflexive approach to research, as Anzaldúa and Keating (2009) remind us, allows educators and researchers to “create new stories of healing, self-growth, cultural critique, and individual/collective transformation” (p. 319).

In this article, I share my reflexive research process and juxtapose my autohistoria-teoría with reflections and observations from the ethnographic case study of Kiskeyanx DLB fourth-grade students. In particular, I juxtapose my experiences with the discourse of one student, Jonathan (pseudonym), to analyze how raciolinguistic ideologies manifest in the lives of two different individuals. I chose to highlight Jonathan’s discourse because it reflects the main themes that emerged across all students’ discourse. Throughout the article, I include excerpts from my ethnographic fieldnotes and reflexive memos to openly share the thoughts, assumptions, and emotions that surfaced while I interacted with students and analyzed their discourse. The juxtaposition of Jonathan’s perspectives with my experiences and reflections brought to light the choques (Anzaldúa, 1987)—the collisions, contradictions, and complex dynamics–that are often brought on by trying to survive within oppressive systems. These choques were evident in the ways Jonathan and I both reproduced raciolinguistic ideologies about Kiskeyanxs while also rejecting and resisting them.

I begin by providing a brief overview of DLB education and the raciolinguistic marginalization of Kiskeyanxs. I then lay out the theoretical frameworks that informed my autohistoria-teoría and ethnographic case study. Next, I detail the methodological approach that guided my self-examination, data collection, and analysis. After sharing pieces of my autohistoria-teoría, I turn to share Jonathan’s perspectives. Throughout, I embed reflexive notes I took while collecting and analyzing the data. I conclude by outlining several implications of this work, emphasizing the need to dismantle raciolinguistic ideologies in DLB education by building teachers’ raciolinguistic consciousness^[1]; moving towards an anti-colonial bilingual education that actively fosters children’s critical consciousness; and centering embodied knowledge, relational/collective theorizing, and self-reflexivity in education research. For education practitioners, policymakers, and researchers of color, this raciolinguistic self-excavation is crucial because it serves as a means of healing and helps prevent us from perpetuating oppressive ideologies within our own communities.

Dual Language Bilingual Education

In recent years, DLB education has become an option for children in districts across the nation. This model of bilingual education emerged from the political struggle of historically marginalized communities seeking liberation and empowerment (Enck-Wanzer, 2010; Flores & García, 2017; García & Sung, 2018). Because the goal of DLB education is for students to sustain their home language practices as they develop bilingualism and biliteracy, the assumption is that this model of bilingual education provides equitable and culturally/linguistically sustaining schooling for emergent bilingual students. Nonetheless, as this study illustrates, the linguistically sustaining and anti-oppressive potential of DLB education remains largely unfulfilled, as ideologies rooted in anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity—such as the raciolinguistic marginalization of Kiskeyanx—continue to prevail.

The Raciolinguistic Marginalization of Kiskeyanxs

In Abya Yala (“Latin America”), colorism functions as a prevalent form of racism (Charles, 2021), where individuals whose skin tone and language practices align more closely with European standards are deemed superior, while individuals, cultures, and practices associated with Indigenous or Black people are considered inferior and less prestigious (Rosa & Flores, 2017). This racial hierarchy is reflected in the prestige assigned to different Spanish varieties. Argentine Spanishes, for example, are often considered more sophisticated due to Argentina’s predominantly White population, while the Spanishes spoken in communities with larger Black and Indigenous populations, such as Boriken and Kiskeya, are considered less prestigious (Alfaraz, 2002; García et al., 1988; Nieto, 2010; Zentella, 1997). Therefore, discrimination against Kiskeyanxs—and, as a result, our language practices—is rooted in racism. About 90% of Kiskeyanx are of mixed race, with the highest percentages being of Afro-descendant and Afro-Indigenous roots (Torres-Saillant, 2010). This racial diversity and our language practices are a result of over 500 years of Spanish colonization, which began with the genocide and enslavement of Indigenous Taino people and the enslavement of African people. Today, our Spanish language practices reflect our Taino and African ancestors’ resistance to shedding their identities and speaking a language that was violently forced onto them. Nonetheless, oppressive colonial ideologies, such as colorism and the idolization of Spaniards, continue to permeate amongst Kiskeyanxs (Mayes, 2015; Toribio, 2000, 2006).

Theoretical Foundations

Language Ideologies

Central to my theoretical framework is an understanding of language as ideological. Standard language ideology is one of the main tools used to sustain linguistic hegemony and uphold the power of the dominant group. This ideology, “which names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class” (Lippi-Green, 2012, p. 67), promotes the belief that there are correct ways of languaging^[2] and that “standard” forms of languages exist. This ideology sustains linguistic hegemony by devaluing the language practices of already marginalized groups and upholding the supremacy of privileged language varieties, such as “standard American English.”

Beliefs about what constitutes “good” languaging are shaped by social, historical, and political contexts, and are sustained through institutions, policies, individuals’ discourse, or everyday languaging (Brea-Spahn et al., 2025; Fairclough, 2001). People adapt their discourse to meet the demands of a society where greater privilege, or “linguistic capital,” is granted to those who language in ways that carry more legitimacy and authority (Bourdieu, 1991). Societal linguistic vigilance—carried out through language ideologies—serves to sustain language hierarchies and uphold systems of power. Language is, therefore, a medium for maintaining deep-rooted power dynamics. And any analysis of power must also examine racial dynamics.

The Intersection of Language, Race, and Power: A Raciolinguistic Perspective

While insightful, standard language ideology overlooks the central role racism plays in language subordination. A raciolinguistic perspective, however, highlights how language and race are co-constructed and thus intricately interrelated, helping to explain why ideas of correctness and prestige are regularly tied to the language practices of White, dominant groups (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Flores and Rosa explain that raciolinguistic ideologies conflate people of color with linguistic deficiency regardless of their language practices. As a result, Black and Brown people are linguistically stigmatized, even when they produce the linguistic norms of the dominant race (Baker-Bell, 2020; Rosa, 2019; Rosa & Flores, 2017).

Rosa and Flores move the focus from the languager (i.e., the speaker) to the perceiver (i.e., the listener)—noting that White and non-White individuals are widely socialized to perceive language through a dominant linguistic lens and become White perceiving subjects, or “racially hegemonic perceiving subjects” (Rosa & Flores, 2017, p. 8). Unfortunately, as seen with the Kiskeyanx children of color in this study, raciolinguistic ideologies are so pervasive that many Kiskeyanxs themselves develop white-perceiving subjectivities and unintentionally reproduce oppressive narratives about themselves (García et al., 1988; Toribio, 2000, 2006; Zentella, 1997).

Methods

“At this moment of our historical trajectory, it is a moral imperative to embrace decolonizing approaches when working with populations oppressed by colonial legacies.” (Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021, p. 1)

As a queer, mixed-Indigenous Kiskeyana on an ongoing decolonial journey, I am compelled to engage in research that not only supports my own healing from decades of navigating oppressive structures but also contributes to collective healing by disrupting traditional research methodologies (Smith, 1999), moving beyond white methods based on white logic (Bonilla-Silva & Zuberi, 2008), and refusing the Eurocentric split between spirit, body, and mind (Perez Huber, 2009) in my research. For this reason, I let myself be guided by my conocimiento del cuerpo as I engaged in autohistoria-teoría and documented my reflexivity throughout the ethnographic case study of Kiskeyanx DLB students. I detail this methodology below.

Conocimiento del cuerpo: Body and Spirit as My Guides

At the heart of my methodological approach is my ongoing endeavor to decolonize my mindset, to forefront what my body and spirit know and feel, to become better acquainted with my embodied knowledge—el conocimiento del cuerpo—“a language, or a knowledge system rooted in our bodies letting us know that our spirit has been impacted” (Juarez Mendoza & Aponte, 2021, p. 92). Because our intuitive and ancestral ways of knowing have long been illegitimized by the dominant gaze, we are often taught to ignore the voice of our embodied knowledge, especially when engaging in research. So, allowing my spirit and body to guide my research was part of my personal healing journey.

Autohistoria-teoría

Engaging in autohistoria-teoría was also an essential part of my research approach. Autohistoria-teoría is a decolonial inquiry method that invites us to merge creative modes of storytelling with critical reflection to analyze the self in relation to broader sociopolitical structures (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2009). Grounded in the understanding of the self as inherently social and relational, autohistoria-teoría serves as a means to gain perspectives on cultural experiences, challenge dominant ways of theorizing, unpack and confront trauma, and contribute to greater conocimiento (Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018). Through this process, autohistoria-teoristas “expose the limitations in the existing paradigms and create new stories of healing, self-growth, cultural critique, and individual/collective transformation” (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2009, p. 319). Two years before beginning the ethnographic case study described below, I began to revisit core memories to unpack the implicit and explicit ways in which I had learned to value white dominant ways of speaking and being, and I continued to engage in that self-excavation throughout the ethnographic case study of DLB students.

Ethnographic Case Study of Fourth Grade DLB Kiskeyanx Students

Research Site and Participants

Data for the ethnographic case study (Creswell, 2013; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) was collected across three fourth-grade classrooms in a New York City DLB public school located in a predominantly Kiskeyanx neighborhood. I have a longstanding relationship with this school, having previously collaborated with the educators and families through my work with The City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB.org). During the 2021-2022 school year, I visited the school about twice a week and interacted with students in different contexts throughout the school day. I observed students as they researched and reflected on their families’ language practices, and I analyzed students’ multimodal schoolwork (e.g., drawings, essays, rap lyrics). Towards the end of the school year, I held informal, open-ended interviews with fourteen students. Then, tuning into the discourse that felt significant, I invited seven Kiskeyanx students for a second interview.

Analyzing What Felt Significant

In addition to el conocimiento del cuerpo, my iterative process of collecting and analyzing the data was informed by critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001) and moment analysis (Li Wei, 2011)—a methodological approach from applied linguistics that encourages researchers to document everyday, naturally occurring “spur-of-the-moment” discourse that feels significant. This is the criteria I used to select which students to interview, which exchanges to transcribe, and which moments to analyze. After transcribing discourse that sparked a feeling of significance and shed light on my research questions, I looked at each student as the “case” (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) and conducted case-based and cross-case analyses to gain a deeper understanding of how they understood and navigated raciolinguistic ideologies.

In this article, I highlight the discourse of one student, Jonathan, to compare his experiences navigating the raciolinguistics marginalization of Kiskeyanx with mine. I chose to highlight Jonathan’s perspectives because his discourse reflects a composite of the main themes that emerged from the other students’ discourse.

Jonathan

Jonathan’s family moved to New York from Santo Domingo about two years before this study. After being homeschooled for a year as he recovered from a disease, Jonathan skipped a grade and became the youngest (and smallest) student in the fourth grade. Jonathan enjoys chatting with classmates and teachers, and described himself as “feliz y gracioso” (happy and humorous). He enjoys going to the playground, rapping (which we get a glimpse of in this article), and sitting in meditation, which I saw him do during a field trip at a park.

Documenting my Reflexivity

Because this research topic is very personal for me, I practiced maintaining mindfulness and reflexivity throughout the entire research process (Bhattacharya, 2017; Faulstich Orellana, 2020). I continuously examined how my biases shaped my analytical lens and paid close attention to how my body felt while observing, reflecting, and writing, constantly reminding myself that reflexivity is an ongoing practice that is never perfect and is practiced through relationality and vulnerability (Luttrell, 2010). I documented these observations in reflexive memos that I jotted down throughout the school year, and I share excerpts of them throughout this article. Documenting my feelings and thoughts throughout the process of collecting, transcribing, and analyzing data allowed me to continuously examine how my emotions, decisions, and emerging understandings informed my analytical lens.

Removing the Mask

I also aimed to show up as my full self in this study, rather than mask my “Dominican Spanish” like I used to do as a teacher. This is something I reflected on in between interviews, as seen in this excerpt:

Mi Autohistoria-Teoría: Learning to Tame and Untame My Kiskeyana Tongue

What follows is a compilation of snippets from my ongoing self-excavation; my testimonio. The anecdote that opens this article emerged from this reflexive writing process; from autohistoria-teorizing. I began this process several years ago because I wanted to understand how I had come to internalize oppressive language ideologies. I felt compelled to write to remind myself why this research mattered; to overpower the overwhelming presence of the white gaze within me; to help me maintain my identity at the center of my research. I didn’t know what my writing would become, but I felt compelled to write.

Below, I share pieces from my autohistoria-teoría. To maintain integrity to my process and who I was at the time of writing, I include several direct quotes from my autohistoria-teoría (Aponte, 2024). Throughout, I invoke the voices of bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other scholars whose insights provided critical support during this self-excavation journey.

My Raciolinguistic Journey

As a first-generation Kiskeyana-New Yorker, I’m grateful for all the advocates who have fought for linguistically sustaining schooling before me. Although I didn’t have access to DLB schooling, their advocacy made it possible for me to attend a bilingual Head Start and kindergarten. Nonetheless, it must have been then that I began to learn the “correct” way of naming the world around me. I learned that an orange was not a china but a naranja, which was also the word for the color, not mamey. Un cambumbo es una cubeta, un cubo, or a bucket. I must have caught on to dominant Spanish and English norms quickly, since I was placed in a monolingual English classroom for first grade.

I grew up in a predominantly Black and Brown neighborhood. Still, for most of my life, I believed White was right. Being Dominican was cool, but only within our inner circles. At a young age, I learned to act, speak, look, and even think accordingly in different contexts. It became second nature to wear different masks (Fanon, 1967). Some masks masked my queerness; others masked my ADHD; and others masked my linguistic identity. I didn’t have the words to explain why I hated school so much. I now see that I wore these masks so well that I needed a break from them often. I began to cut school in second grade. From elementary to high school, I went to school just enough to keep the social workers away. Pobre Mami sufrió tanto con eso.

We swim in pervasive waters of whiteness.

Most of the lessons we get on how to navigate these hegemonic waters are implicit... All the TV we watched at home centered what I now refer to as Whitestream Spanish— the imagined, ideological “standard” Spanish that’s positioned as superior by hegemonic whiteness—deviating from it only when mocking and further marginalizing characters like La India María. I also learned from watching my mom and grandma change the way they spoke around other Spanish speakers, making sure to pronounce all the s’s and exclude terms that were too “plebe” or “bien dominicano”… So, around others, I too tried my best to speak like noticiero anchors and novela actresses—like the White protagonistas, of course, not the Black and Brown sirvientas. (Aponte, 2024, p. 61)

My linguistic identity is a wound I haven’t fully healed. But it seemed easy to put a bandaid over it when I taught fourth grade right by the Queens neighborhood I grew up in. Most of my students were Central and South Americans, and they would get a kick out of my Dominican words whenever I shared that part of me–the true me. But for the most part, I thought, sure, Dominican Spanish is awesome, but these children need to hear the Spanish of power… Could one remain true to themselves while speaking for the colonizers’ gaze?... I wanted to rip the bandaid off my wound, to release the inner turmoil. But, for the most part, I learned to ignore the unease and discomfort…the internal choques. (Aponte, 2024, p. 57)

Seeing the margins as a space of radical possibilities requires understanding how our ancestors resisted and reinvented within those margins.

Our Indigenous and African ancestors live through us. They’re present in every aspect of our existence—our knowledge, food, art, spirituality, medicine, language… in our survival. They live through our tongues. Even after centuries of violence and oppression, we can hear their voices using some of the master’s words while resisting being fully stripped of their identities. (Aponte, 2024, p. 65)

Our languaging is a beautiful expression of resistance and remembrance. Mine is West-African Arawakan Spanish con un chin de Nueva Yol.

Choques de emociones—A reflection written before beginning the ethnographic study:My research evokes numerous emotions.

… joy… hopeful…confident…proud … Am I the right person to write about this?…sad … weird… good… annoyed… furious… enlightening… liberating.

[And] one I don’t stop to think about too much. Something I often feel deep down. Something that I’m sometimes embarrassed to even name. Something that I don’t entertain because I want so badly for it to go away. It is a voice saying: What… are you talking about? You know damn well that you still cringe at certain language practices. You still uphold linguistic hierarchies. You’re still that “White listening subject” ... [and] I feel upset and guilty for still having these thoughts. I know deeply ingrained beliefs take time to unpack and unlearn. Still, it is uncomfortable to have this inner turmoil emerge right when I think I’ve finally decolonized my white listening ear (Aponte, 2024, p. 70).

Healing is resisting.

Resisting is healing.

We resist by remembering,

and we remember by resisting.

Today, I resist through my research.

I resist by interrogating racist ideologies

that continue to harm our communities.

I resist by autohistoria-teorizing;

by healing my linguistic wounds;

by speaking mi e’pañol bien nuyolquino-kiskeyano.

I resist and I remember.

— To bell hooks, who first told me that theorizing was liberating, and

Gloria Anzaldúa, who helped me understand what hooks meant.

Arikoma bu / gracias

Witnessing Students’ Choques Throughout the Ethnographic Case Study

The ongoing self-excavation described above served as a critical, introspective foundation for ethnographically examining the raciolinguistic experiences of Kiskeyanx children within DLB education. Grounded in autohistoria-teoría, I engaged in self-reflection throughout the ethnographic study, documenting the thoughts and emotions that emerged during my interactions with students. In what follows, I share excerpts from my reflexive memos alongside the perspective of one student, Jonathan, whose insights reflect key themes that resonated across the discourse of all students.

Jonathan’s Enactment of Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Like most of the Kiskeyanx students in this study, Jonathan expressed an internalization of oppressive ideologies that conflate Kiskeyanxs with linguistic inferiority and deficiency. Instead of seeing our languaging as a beautiful reflection of our Taino and African ancestors’ resistance and survival, Jonathan enacted white perceiving subjectivities (Flores & Rosa, 2015) and perceived our language practices through a hegemonic lens. Jonathan’s discourse pointed to a standard language ideology, suggesting that a superior and correct Spanish exists, which Kiskeyanxs do not speak. This became evident during one of our conversations when Jonathan described the way he speaks Spanish:

Jonathan has learned to assess his language practices in relation to dominant standards, expressing an internalization of raciolinguistic narratives that stigmatize Caribbean Spanish speakers for deviating from the “standard” Castilian Spanish (García et al., 1988; Nieto, 2010; Toribio, 2000; Zentella, 1997). Through this hegemonic lens, a Caribbean accent is construed as being overly loud, excessively fast, and accented—as if all spoken language weren’t accented (Lippi-Green, 2012).

Since Jonathan had previously attended school in Kiskeya, I asked him whether he noticed any differences in how Spanish was spoken there compared to his current school. In response, he alludes to a presumed 'standard' Spanish, which he refers to as fino, and contrasts it with the Spanish he associates with Kiskeyanxs. The word fino, or fina, loosely translates to refined or fine, and it is used to describe someone or something that is perceived to be elegant, educated, fancy, or upper class. Unsurprisingly, this word is also used to describe physical features associated with whiteness (e.g., nariz fina; pelo fino [nose; hair]). Accordingly, speaking in a “refined” way entails speaking with linguistic features that the white listening ear deems fino, such as “pronouncing all the letters” in a word.

Notably, Jonathan’s sentiment about español fino echoed the perceptions of other Kiskeyanx children in the study, who described Kiskeyanxs as lacking “fancy” and “decent” ways of speaking, having limited vocabulary, and “inventing” words.

It is also quite telling that Jonathan does not perceive español fino in Mr. Mejía or his teachers in Kiskeya, but does perceive such correctness and prestige in Mr. Holtz–their White teacher who is a non-native Spanish speaker and teaches mainly in English. Mr. Mejía, who teaches in Spanish, is Mexican and, in my opinion, languages in standardized ways, especially when teaching. But because Mr. Mejía often references his time living in Puerto Rico, Jonathan hears in him the same inadequacy ascribed to Kiskeyanxs. This is a clear example of just how deeply entrenched raciolinguistic ideologies can become, and how these ideologies “produce racialized speaking subjects who are constructed as linguistically deviant even when engaging in linguistic practices positioned as normative or innovative when produced by privileged white subjects.” (Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 150).

Jonathan’s white perceiving subjectivities were also apparent when I asked him if he considered his Spanish to be “fino”:

Jonathan feels the need to wear a white mask (Fanon, 1967) in school and feels empowered to remove the mask at home. Even though the school is located in a predominantly Kiskeyanx neighborhood and a high percentage of the students and teachers are Kiskeyanxs, Jonathan, like many of the Kiskeyanx children in this study, expressed the need to self-surveil his speech (Martín Rojo & Márquez Reiter, 2019) based on discourses of appropriateness (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that designate his “Dominican Spanish” as appropriate for home and whitestream Spanish as appropriate for school. Because he speaks “Dominican”—not “fino”—Jonathan makes regular metapragmatic decisions to remediate his speech to conceal the linguistic patterns of omission he referenced above– patterns typically used to raciolinguistically belittle Kiskeyanxs.

Racist ideologies have been so normalized that many of us place the onus on ourselves and our communities. As Lippi-Green (2012) reminds us, language subordination functions by vilifying non-conformers, pushing them to think they are “willfully stupid, arrogant, unknowing, uninformed and/or deviant” (p. 70). This helps explain why Jonathan interprets these ideologies as our fault and negligence—a view that surfaced when I asked him why he thought his teachers in Kiskeya didn’t “pronounce all the letters”:

When Kiskeyanxs make mistakes, we don’t fix them. From a young age, Jonathan has internalized the belief that Kiskeyanxs exhibit wrongdoing and are responsible for our linguistic marginalization.

The frequent chuckles that emerged in my conversations with students became points of reflection, prompting me to consider how these moments mediated vulnerability, discomfort, and relationality within student discourse:

The Choques: Resisting Raciolinguistic Ideologies

While Jonathan inadvertently aligned with raciolinguistic ideologies about Kiskeyanxs, he also rejected and resisted them. For example, soon after implying that Kiskeyanx don’t speak fino and that we don’t fix our linguistic errors, Jonathan appears to have caught himself and said:

Within that same conversation, however, Jonathan expressed a negative perception of his mother’s, grandmother’s, and great-grandmother’s cibaeño speech–a heavily stigmatized Spanish from the Cibao region of Kiskeya, which he perceived as ugly:

But, immediately after, Jonathan seemed to retract his comment:

Jonathan’s wavering and seemingly contradictory opinions reflect the internal tension many of us feel while living and resisting within hegemonic structures; the choques (Anzaldúa, 1987)—the collisions, contradictions, and complicated dynamics brought on by trying to survive within oppressive systems. Like many of the raciolinguistically marginalized fourth graders I spoke to, Jonathan struggled to reconcile the conflicting messages he receives from multiple angles– his teachers, who explicitly discuss and celebrate linguistic diversity, and dominant ideologies that position him and his loved ones as deficient.

As I witnessed the choques in Jonathan and his classmates, I felt my own choques; and I later reflected on those feelings:

Witnessing the various ways students resisted the raciolinguistic marginalization of Kiskeyanx brought me so much joy. Jonathan and his classmates resisted both explicitly—by calling out negative perceptions of Kiskeyanxs—and implicitly, by proudly sharing their cultural and linguistic identities in the classroom. For example, Jonathan’s pride is evident in the following lyrics, which I transcribed from a video that he recorded of himself rapping about his family’s language practices for a school project:

Jonathan’s rap is an act of resistance. He resists by centering his Dominicanness and by using his authentic voice, unapologetically omitting the pronunciation of the s in words like somos and español—a linguistic pattern he had previously deemed “tira’o.” He uses popular Kiskeyanx colloquialisms like “Qué lo qué,” and proudly exclaims that he and his family are Dominican, “¡Somo’ dominicano! You know it!” Alongside Jonathan’s other discourse, this pride and resistance depict the complicated ways many of us navigate hegemonic ideologies that demean us and our loved ones. Such acts of resistance are crucial for affirming our conocimiento del cuerpo—for liberating our bodies, minds, and spirits from narratives that have long devalued our ways of speaking, being, and knowing.

Discussion & Conclusion

The juxtaposition of my experiences and Jonathan’s experiences revealed the choques– the tensions and complicated ways in which we both resist and reproduce the raciolinguistic stigmatization of Kiskeyanxs. Although Jonathan attends a DLB school—and one that celebrates the linguistic diversity of its predominantly Kiskeyanx population—and although I am a bilingual educator committed to linguistic liberation, we both struggle with the internalization of oppressive language ideologies rooted in anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. By highlighting the prevalence of raciolinguistic hierarchies among Spanish language varieties within DLB education, this study contributes a critical dimension to scholarship that illuminates how DLB education upholds oppressive ideologies through a neoliberal agenda and elitist conceptions of bilingualism (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Flores, 2016; Flores & García, 2017; McCollum, 1999). These findings highlight the need for the field of bilingual education to more actively counter prevailing raciolinguistic ideologies that continue to harm children and educators of color.

Reflexive Relational/Collective Theorizing for Healing and Liberation

The reflexive inquiry approach I took in this study offered meaningful insights that may serve as inspiration for education practitioners and decision-makers, including policy actors, teacher educators, school leaders, and teachers conducting research in their classrooms.

For one, engaging in autohistoria-teoría to examine my raciolinguistic experiences in juxtaposition with students’ experiences produced a relational/collective theorizing–one that leverages the relationality between the adult and the student; one that lives between the researcher’s lived experiences and the children’s lived experiences–in our individual/collective experiences. This relational/collective theorizing came to life through the voices of students like Jonathan and through my ongoing examination of my positionality, my body, and my spirit. This collective and relational theorizing emerged through our many choques. This type of relational and collective theorizing is necessary for collective healing of traumatic wounds (Anzaldúa, 1987; Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018).

Centering self-reflexivity and making my thought processes visible through reflexive memos were also essential components of this research approach. This practice supported both my personal growth and my ability to thoughtfully navigate the intricacies of ethnographic encounters and relationships. Continuously reflecting on the emotions, assumptions, and tensions that arose helped me maintain an awareness of my body and spirit so that I could be guided by my conocimiento del cuerpo. This process supported me in being open and honest about the continuous, non-linear struggle to decolonize; about the complexities of being a researcher; and about the ways in which my biases and personal experiences may shape my analytical lenses. It was a way for me to process the multiplicity of my position as an insider/outsider, oppressed/oppressor—a way for me to better understand myself in relation to my research, to the children in the study, and to larger social structures.

Most importantly, this process was healing. It served as a reminder that we must not try to separate ourselves from our conocimiento del cuerpo in our work—especially when engaging in instruction and/or research centered on the deeply embodied practice that is languaging (Brea-Spahn & Bauler, 2023). As we strive for liberatory schooling for multilingual students, we must continually practice self-reflexivity and challenge dominant ways of theorizing by engaging in educational research “in imaginative ways that integrate self-care and collective healing of traumatic wounds” (Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018, p. 345). We must feel, observe, and listen carefully when our bodies and spirits communicate with us. We must examine and work to heal our wounds, so that today’s harmful ideologies can one day cease to wound others. Because if we aren’t engaged in the ongoing process of excavating and healing ourselves, we are bound to perpetuate oppressive ideologies in our classrooms and research communities.

Towards an Anti-Colonial Bilingual Education

That Jonathan (and most of the Kiskeyanx children in this study) perceived deficiency in Kiskeyanxs, in himself, and in his loved ones is precisely the power of raciolinguistic ideologies. This study underscores the need to do more to dismantle pervasive colonial ideologies in bilingual education. Simply providing instruction in the home language is not enough. DLB education must take explicitly anti-racist/anti-colonial measures to move towards the liberatory schooling that civil rights activists envisioned—one that truly validates, celebrates, and sustains children’s culture and language practices.

The anti-colonial bilingual education I envision acknowledges the many ways deep-seated White settler colonial ideologies are embedded in school systems (Calderón, 2014; Flores & Chaparro, 2018). This includes interrogating the inequitable enrollment and staffing of DLB programs (Soto-Boykin et al., 2024), practices that contribute to the marginalization and erasure of children’s Black and Indigenous roots (e.g., centering whitestream Spanish, enforcing a strict separation of languages), and the implicit ways children are taught what “good” languaging is (Brea-Spahn et al., 2025). Moreover, an anti-colonial bilingual education ensures that pre- and in-service teachers develop raciolinguistic consciousness and a critical translanguaging stance (Martin et al., 2020) so that they are better equipped to foster critical consciousness in children beginning at a young age (Espinet et al., 2021; Husband & Escayg, 2022; Palmer et al., 2019).

Finally, an anti-colonial bilingual education re-centers the past and present experiences and epistemologies of marginalized communities (Barrales, 2023; Cuauhtin et al., 2019; García et al., 2021), celebrating and historicizing our identities, so that students learn the true, rich histories behind their language practices; so that DLB schools become places that dismantle, rather than reproduce, narratives of deficiency and inferiority that are imposed onto raciolinguistically marginalized children in a society that privileges colonial languages in standardized forms only.

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1. I use the term raciolinguistic consciousness to refer to the critical understanding of how racist colonial power structures privilege White [language] practices, and how those hierarchies shape self-perceptions and educational experiences. ↑

2. I use the term languaging to emphasize that language is not a fixed standardized structure, but a dynamic process of meaning-making continuously co-created by individuals and communities through interactions involving movement, symbols, touch, gestures, and other modalities, in addition to speech (Brea-Spahn & Bauler, 2023; Swain, 2006). ↑