Teach in Spanglish: Affirming students’ bilingualism via Latino History
by Claudia Holguín Mendoza, Jorge Leal, Cristina Sánchez, and Julie M. Weise
Editor’s Note: We’re so lucky to have this guest post today about teaching Latino history en español y spanglish. I want to take the opportunity to remind you that I want to hear from you as well! If you’d like to write a guest post about anything related to the teaching of Latino history, email me at glcadava@gmail.com. Now for the main attraction!
As the dual immersion coordinator at a southern California high school with a 50% Latino student population and a Ph.D. candidate in Education at U.C. Riverside (UCR), Cristina, herself a bilingual student educated in California schools, felt frustrated at how the public education system punished Latino students for their “non-standard” Spanish. As a professor of Latino History at UCR, Jorge, a native speaker of Spanish, yearned to incorporate Spanish-language materials into his classes, but wondered how he could do so more effectively. Julie, a professor at the University of Oregon who speaks Spanish as a second language, felt silly: why was she presenting primary sources translated into English, when she knew nearly all of the students in her Latino History class could understand them in Spanish? And Claudia, a sociolinguist at UCR and an expert in pedagogy for Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) students, wished her vision of a world in which all varieties of Spanish—and thus, all varieties of Spanish speakers—were equally valued could find a wider audience.
The four of us, it turns out, were looking for each other, and for new ways of teaching about Latino histories and cultures. And we have now come together to make a proud interdisciplinary claim that has transformed our teaching: students who were raised in a bilingual environment (SHL), and/or who took Spanish for at least two years in high school or at least one year in college can, with proper support, engage in high-level analysis of Spanish and Spanglish primary sources and original texts in our classes. Further, we have seen that teaching in Spanglish is more than just intellectually rewarding for us and our students—it is a radical validation of Latino students’ identities. Professors need not consider themselves “fluent” Spanish speakers either. Unlike in nearly every other Spanish instructional space students have encountered, we as instructors do not perform “fluency”; we share our own points of pride and insecurity to model a more expansive approach to the Spanish language.
Insights from sociolinguistics shared by Claudia show that the bilingual approach to teaching Latino Studies works against racist narratives and class-based hierarchies that have expressed themselves linguistically in both the United States and Latin America. In other words, not only has the Spanish language been stigmatized within the United States, but the non-standard forms of the language that most Latino SHL students speak has been stigmatized in most K-16 Spanish classrooms in the United States. Furthermore, idealized notions of Spanish grammatical competence lead not only SHL students but most second-language (L2) Spanish learners to conclude that their Spanish “isn’t good enough” for academic application. Their typical refrain is, “I took Spanish in high school but my teacher was mostly the volleyball coach and I don’t remember anything.” Our critical bilingual teaching approach that emphasizes reading in context rather than forcing “fluent speech” begs to differ. Curricula placing a positive value on students’ Spanish strengths rather than ignoring or denigrating them enhances SHL students’ sense of belonging and competence in the academic environment while increasing L2 students’ self-confidence as global citizens and appreciation for the ways that language has functioned as an agent of power in history and in their own lives. All students come to appreciate how language has been not only a tool for human communication but also a mode of transmitting knowledge and social hierarchies, and expressing identities.
With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and OpenOregon Educational Resources, we have developed http://teachinspanglish.org, a gateway to free Latino history and cultural studies primary sources, lesson plans, worksheets, and even sample assessments alongside instructor-facing videos that delve more deeply into our bilingual pedagogical approach. Available bilingual lesson plans range from nineteenth-century entreaties against U.S imperialism to analysis of Manuel Gamio’s interviews with Mexican immigrants in the 1920s to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s-70s to a Cuban American sitcom from the 1970s to today’s icons of Latinx music. Further, Cristina and other K-12 educators who are also Ph.D. students at UCR developed a series of bilingual, content-driven lessons for elementary through high school students at https://crisollk18.wordpress.com/. Available K-12 bilingual lesson plans include histories of Cumbia and of Spanglish in Latinx popular culture. As Claudia and Jorge work with UCR colleagues to implement a large project infusing Latino and Latin American Studies curricula with critical bilingual approaches for higher education (learn more at https://pedagogiascriticas.ucr.edu/), we continue to add more resources to these sites.
To provide an example of how this interdisciplinary bilingual teaching can open up new levels of intellectual engagement and feelings of belonging for students, we can consider a sample History lesson on the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican youth movement in 1970s New York and Chicago. For homework, students read secondary literature and/or watch a documentary about the Young Lords in English. In class, this is followed by a lecture on the group that is mostly or entirely in English, depending on instructor preference. Presenting this background information in English rather than Spanish makes the course accessible to a vastly larger group of students than, for example, upper-division courses in Spanish departments that require all reading, writing, and discussion of academic topics to take place monolingually in Spanish.
However, once students have learned the general outlines of the Young Lords’ history, they are now ready to tackle a primary source in Spanish: “Existe el Racismo Puertorriqueño?” [Does Puerto Rican racism exist?] written by leader Iris Morales and published in the La Guardia bilingual newspaper in 1970. The professor guides student work groups through what is by now a familiar methodology: Look at visual clues to understanding what type of document you are reading. Then, read it through twice without looking up any words, to glean the overall idea. On the third reading, look up select words that are truly necessary for comprehension. Analyze the source as an historian: Who wrote this document? What do you know about the author, and how do you know it? What is the author’s attitude about the racial identities of Puerto Ricans, and what can historians learn from her writings?
Powerfully, and uniquely to this approach, students are trained to examine the form of the language itself in addition to the document’s content. They observe that Morales has a complex understanding of history and, therefore, likely had a high degree of formal education. But wait: one or two students now notice that the article is written in a particular style. Some students suggest some of these words may be misspelled, others point out grammatical “errors” in the phrasing. How to resolve these apparent contradictions? After a moment of silence in the classroom, a SHL student speaks up: “Iris Morales was a bilingual speaker. The ‘mistakes’ she makes are the same kinds I make.” The student has opened up a new level of historical analysis. If Iris Morales was an educated woman but primarily schooled in English, why would she write this article in Spanish? Who was her intended audience? Given our background understanding of the Young Lords, students can conclude that Morales may have been trying to write for an audience of immigrant elders, whose views on Puerto Ricans’ relationship to blackness were more conservative than her own generation’s. Students have now engaged in a multi-layered historical analysis of a source; deepened their engagement with the history of the Young Lords; analyzed the role of language itself in structuring social relations; and felt a sense of competence and accomplishment as they successfully utilized their Spanish skills, including their critical knowledge of bilingual styles of Spanish, for a higher-level academic purpose.
We hope you will check out our free resources and reach out to us (via jweise@uoregon.edu) with feedback and questions!