How Schools Make Race

Megan and Carrie talk with Dr Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, assistant professor at UCLA in the Departments of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Education, about her book How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, coming out October 1.

Chapters

• 8:10 Interview with Laura

Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi. Welcome to The Vocal Fries Podcast. The podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan: I’m Megan Figueroa. Here we are in September, already. Can you believe it? Almost the end actually. We are more towards the end than we are at the beginning.

Carrie: The days are getting shorter, which is more significant here than it is where you are.

Megan: That's true. Well, I couldn't believe when I went to visit you that you are... that it stayed sunny until like 10 pm. That's wild.

Carrie: You weren't even there at the end of June when it's the longest, like on the 21st whatever. You were there at the beginning, but still it's very long days in the summer. I love it but then in the winter we pay for it because I go to work and it's dark. By the time I get there it's usually light, but the begin it's dark and then coming home, dark.

Megan: That's rough.

Carrie: It gets rough. 

Megan: It's rough.

Carrie: Anyway, today, we were talking about this, this is like a few days old now but like a week old but I just, I couldn't believe you hadn't even heard of this.

Megan: I know. I'm excited to hear.

Carrie: I don't know if excited is the right thing

Megan: Is it not the right thing. 

Carrie: You because you are going to be horrified. Laura Loomer who has attached herself, like a limpet, to Trump's side as racist, as I'm sure you know.

Megan: Yes, absolutely.

Carrie: Partially so racist that even Marjorie Taylor Greene was shitting on her on twitter.

Megan: She came out against her.

Carrie: It might be more to do with them fighting over Trump's affection I don't know. But whatever, she claimed to it because she was being too racist.

Megan: Which is just impossible to think that there is a line that Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn't cross. But apparently there is.

Carrie: Apparently there is. Here is a snippet... I only have this snippet. I dont have the larger thing, and I don't want to.

Laura Loomer: Fani Willis was constantly saying, "Well, ain't nobody above the law ", you know. I'm one of this strong independent black woman. I don't need no man and I'm going to get whitey. I'm going to get whitey and I'm going to lock Donald Trump up just like Latisha James. She goes, "Now you're going to elect me and I'm going to lock him up. We're going to get Trump". The way they talk in their little Dei Shaniqua voices and it's just very piercing, very irritating sound. They all have the same voice. I'm talking about Kamala Harris, Latisha James and Fani Willis. All of the meritorious Dei Shaniqua's talk the same way. It's very obnoxious the way that they talk.

Carrie: Is that like the most horrific thing?

Megan: Oh my God. You were right. I shouldn't have been excited for that. I should have been like, oh my God. What in the world? That is horrifying and she was talking to some podcast host or something? Was this on a podcast?
 
Carrie: Actually, I don't know. It was something like that. Either she was talking to a podcaster, or she was doing her own podcast or video cast. She was just talking directly to the audience as far as I could tell. It didn't look like there was another person, but it was possible that she was responding to the question. I don't know. 
 
Megan: Well, I guess it should go without saying but you shouldn't do that.

Carrie: The layers of this are so bad.

Megan: Shit

Carrie: First of all, why? Why would you say any of this? But, secondly, it's all factually incorrect.
 
Megan: The way you said it of course is ...

Carrie: Then the pseudo black American accent is just, it's fun times.

Megan: This is the racism that we are stiped in at this time of our lives, and this is in the US.

Carrie: This is extra. This is extra.

Megan: It is extra

Carrie: This is not the regular level of racism that we are all stiped in, this is like, I don't know...

Megan: Next level?

Carrie: ... the far corners of 4chan or something. This is really...but it is being brought up to the surface by people like her. 

Megan: It's just like the whole Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs thing. It only takes someone mentioning these things to get other people on board. 

Carrie: It's interesting because I obviously only see the opposite reaction to that. All I see is people either making fun of it or saying, like, this is really extremely racist. I don't see the people being like, yes, they do eat cats. 

Megan: Oh, but they exist. 

Carrie: Oh, I know they do. I definitely know they do. There have been bomb threats as a result of it. 

Megan: At local schools even. Why would you attack schools? I don't know what's wrong with people. 

Carrie: There's a lot wrong with people. The idea that your first response is to bomb or pretend to bomb a school is bizarre. Even if you thought that people were eating dogs and cats, how is that the response to that as opposed to maybe we should have a conversation about what's appropriate, why we choose these animals as pets versus animals that we eat. Of course, that's not what's happening. Of course, that conversation wouldn't even make any sense. 

Megan: No. It wouldn't. Oh my God. You guys must think we're just bonkers up there in Canada. You must think we're just, like, going...

Carrie: Everybody and the other rest of the world just stares at America in horror and awe. Like, what? How? We all have our own problems too. Our mini-Trump, I guess, you could call him, is also terrible, but at least at this moment...

Megan: He's not in power.

Carrie: ... he's not power. He's an MP. He's a member of parliament, but he's not the prime minister.

Megan: At least. 

Carrie: No.

Megan: Good people in the US are hoping he won't be president again, Donald Trump. 

Carrie: No. It can't happen. It just can't. 

Megan: No. 

Carrie: It can't. He caused so much chaos at both within the United States and outside of it. I was like, honestly, I know it's not entirely his fault, but I do think that COVID was made worse by him.

Megan: Oh, definitely.

Carrie: Because he shut down the pandemic response, and I do think that that made it spread around the world and the United States more than it would have otherwise.

Megan: Absolutely. 

Carrie: Then afterward, when it actually was already there, just every decision just made it worse or almost every decision. Anyway, good times.  I'm not traumatized by those four years at all. 

Megan: No. Not at all.

Carrie: I wanted to mention, I turned on the fan mail for our host, which is Buzz Sprout, a long time ago and actually, we did get a response back in July and I keep forgetting to say, hey. MC from Woodland, California says, "Hi, is this thing on? I just listened to the episode with Tim Brooks, and it was so interesting". Smiley face XO from MC. Thank you. It is on and I apologize for not mentioning it before because I always get distracted when we're recording. 

Megan: That's awesome. I love that. More people should do that. It makes us happy. I'd like to know that you're out there listening. 

Carrie: Please do. Today's episode is also very interesting. 

Megan: Yes, it is. We talk about bilingual education and how it upholds white supremacy in the US. 

Carrie: Or how it can. 

Megan: How it can.  

Carrie: I guess it is but doesn't have to. 

Megan:  Absolutely.

Carrie: Enjoy. 

Megan: Enjoy.

Megan: Today, we are so excited to have Laura C. Chvez Moreno, who is an award-winning researcher, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles in the departments of Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies and Education. She is the author of How Schools Make Race Teaching Latinx Racialization in America. Thank you so much for being with us. 

Laura C. Chavez-Moreno: Thank you so much for inviting me. 

Megan: Let's just start with, I think, is an easy question, or maybe it's a hard one. Why did you want to write this book and why now? 

Laura: I wanted to write this book because I had a story to tell about how people were making sense of the category Latinx. I use Latinx as other people may use, for example, Latino, to challenge gender binaries and patriarchy and to be inclusive of Latino, Latina, and Latine. I wanted to write the story about how a bilingual education program was teaching about the concept of Latinx in order to demonstrate that there were some contradictions that would be beneficial for us to pay attention to. 

Megan: Very good. Is there a reason why you wanted to write it now?

Laura: Yes. Definitely. There's a conversation now nationally about whether to teach about race or not, and there's this attack about critical race theory right now, which I put in square quotes CRT because it's not really CRT. 

Megan: Thank you. 

Laura: But, really, this national conversation is the wrong one to have. We should really be talking about how to support teachers in their work to teach about race and racial ideologies in our racialized society. We're attacking teachers, all these horrible things. We're not having the conversation about how to support them and really taking us back in the type of work that we actually should be doing. So, in terms of why write it right now, it's really because there is this national conversation about whether or not to teach about race, and I wanted to show that actually even in lessons that are not racial in terms of the purpose of the teacher, students bring up race all the time. Students want to talk about it, want to understand our society, and race is a big part of our society, so they really want to engage in it, with it. Sometimes even teachers who are really hesitant to discuss these types of ideas, students were in ways sometimes that were just having side conversations, et cetera. There's a lot of risk talk going on. We might as well think about how to support it and how to engage students. 

Something that I found in the book, which was very interesting, was that although students were very interested in engaging in concepts about race and thinking about race, some of the lessons that were being taught were presenting race in a very simplistic way. We're presenting race in multicultural ideas. Like, oh, we should not judge people based on their color, and we should all get along. That's fine, we should not judge people based on how they look, obviously. But what I'm saying is that these are good lessons for students when they're in elementary school, but not necessarily when they're in high school already. I think we advance the ideas about what they're learning about race in other ways so that they're not bored with the same type of lessons, which is what I observed in this bilingual program. 

Megan: So, patronizing. 

Laura: That would be incredibly boring, and it would feel very patronizing. Just like you're saying, when you're a teen, you understand things are a little bit more complicated already by that point. 

Laura: Definitely.

Carrie: What did you mean or what do you mean by make race? 

Laura: What I mean by make race, I want to come across the idea that our society is racialized and our institutions, for example, our schooling institutions are a very important part of contributing to making our society racialized. Schools make race in the sense of they form ideas about what race is, and they help contribute to what we think are the racialized groups. That's really what I mean by make race.

Carrie: What is racialization? 

Laura: Racialization is the process of forming racialized groups, and it involves racism. Racism is the process that creates racialized groups by, for example, distributing resources inequitably or unjustly to different groups based on their arbitrary assignment to the specific racial group. Racialization is this process. It's a historical process. It's a legal process. It's a systemic process. 

Megan: How do schools interact or do this project? 

Laura: Schools do this because they're a major part of our society. They're a big institution. A lot of people engage with public schools, and they do this through their pedagogy. They do this through the curriculum. Pedagogy is the teaching practices and the ideas behind the teaching practices. They do that through the curriculum, through policies, through having programs like bilingual education, actually.

Carrie: Can you explain that? 

Laura: Yes. Like I mentioned, racialization and racism are very tied. People who are racialized in our society really don't have an option to not be racialized. We're all racialized. This is where we racialize society, having to deal with this per se. People who are racialized fight against racism through, for example, enacting programs that help them combat racism. In the case of the Latinx group, a lot of the racism that the group has experienced has had to do with assimilating and having their language stripped from them in schools, for example. Not having curriculum, program schooling that really values their language, their heritage languages, for example. It could be more than one obviously. It has been a historical trend in the US to not value the languages of racialized, minoritized folks. Racialized, minoritized folks have fought against that. Through that process, they're also in ways that sometimes are contradictory because the race forces these type of contradictions, then they reinforce the boundaries of these groups. This is actually what I think bilingual education does for the Latinx group. But it's interesting because race puts racialized groups into a double bind, which is, how do you fight against racism? You unite with others, you affiliate with others, or you create coalitions, et cetera, in order to fight against that. In that creation, also, you are inadvertently reinforcing racialized groups. It's something that is almost like, it's contradictory, but in the sense of what you're hoping to achieve, but it is one way for us to fight against the different racist practices.

Carrie: Let's talk about bilingual education. What is the difference between a dual language program and a subtractive English as a second language program? 

Laura: I'll say that a subtractive program is a program that would just, here in the US, for example, would just want the student to acquire English and is not interested in whether the student keeps their home languages. The schooling is just focused on teaching and the student learning English. That is what is a subtractive program. A dual language program is a type of bilingual program who has students who are still learning and improving on their home heritage languages and then also acquiring English. But a bilingual program, the one that I studied, had a mix of students who were of that characterization that the school labeled them as English language learners. Then half of the classroom were students who were Spanish language learners, so their dominant language was English. 

Megan: You talk a little bit about how these programs actually benefit the people, the students who were labeled as Spanish language learners more than Latinx students. Why is that the case?

Laura: That's the case because of how whiteness functions in society. It is really difficult to change different power dynamics in school districts, and the bilingual education program is no exception. Even though people were very well intentioned, there are lots of different ways that equity was subverted through because of whiteness. People were cognizant of it and they really struggled with how to correct this, how to ameliorate it. I'm hoping that my work along with other folks throughout the country shows that this is happening because of whiteness that is ingrained systematic in the US and it's not particular to, for example, individuals, just that individual location.

Megan: Really making the point that it's a structural problem. 

Laura: Definitely. Thank you.

Carrie: As always. What are the students' views of Spanish? 

Laura Moreno: I think I would say positive. Some of the students did drop the program, perhaps, they were just not really that, they didn't find it as beneficial, but perhaps not because they saw Spanish as stigmatized, it was more just because they weren't interested in taking an AP course and it conflicted with their bilingual requirement course, something like that. I didn't really see a lot of the Spanish language being stigmatized in the classroom. There was some instances where, obviously, different types of Spanish's were placed, for example, in one classroom, I remember the exact question, but it was like, which one is the better language? Some students were like, "Oh, the original one, the one from Spain". It's that kind of thing but it wasn't unchallenged and it wasn't...

Megan: Oh, that's really nice. Was it challenged by other students or by the teacher? 

Laura: I think in that instance, it was other students were also like, well, no, for example, Mexican Spanish because it's easier to say. It just depends. But what I do want to say is in the AP program, that's where I really saw the Spanish is being given different attention. Because in the Spanish AP, an AP is Advanced Placement. In that course, they are given a curriculum by the AP board, and they do really have an emphasis in Spanish language literature from Spain. 

Carrie: AP class, is that more like a dual language class or is that subtractive or is it something separate? 

Laura: That class was a combination of any student in the school who wanted to take AP Spanish for the AP credit. It was also the dual language students who wanted to have the Spanish language requirement for their program. It was a combination.

Carrie: I took AP Spanish in high school. Didn't have a dual language program. I wasn't part of a dual language program.

Laura: I was a teacher of Spanish in Philly and I taught the AP one year. I didn't like it. 

Carrie: Because of how you were beholding to the board. 

Laura: It wasn't the literature one. It was the language one. I also have taught international baccalaureate. I liked that program a lot more. 

Megan: I didn't do Spanish but I was in IB in high school. My school switched to AP after that and I'm glad that I got IB instead. 

Laura Moreno: I had a better experience as a teacher. I never took them as students because even though I grew up in Douglas Arizona which is right on the Mexican Sonora and Arizona border, it was not offered. I was never able to take bilingual education and I'm a big proponent of bilingual education by the way. 

Megan: One of the problems with bilingual education is that it is not offered in many places where it's desired.

Laura Moreno: Exactly. Definitely. I wish I would have had it for sure. That's actually why I became a Spanish teacher. 

Carrie: Tell us why you like bilingual education. What advantages does it provide? 

Laura: Sure. I think it is a correction to the historical wrong of in the US in terms of schools trying to subtract the languages of racialized students. It is a good way for us in order to recognize and correct that and then also to provide some type of cultural relevancy to students also. I'm a big fan of it for sure. And I wish I would have had it. In fact, when I was visiting the classrooms of the teachers, sometimes I had wished that I had been a student in their class, for example. I think I would have really benefited from it.

Carrie: Is there any difference in saying bilingual education versus dual language program or is it like bilingual education of umbrella term?

Laura: Bilingual education is the larger umbrella term, and then dual language is one program within that, because there's also, for example, transitional bilingual. There's so many different ones and different models. Dual language is a very particular one, and then some people call that also two-way because the languages are being taught, you could think of it as like, two different directions. One is trying to learn Spanish and the other one's trying to learn English. They're also called a Two-way immersion. So, there's lots of different types of bilingual education programs, and dual language is one of them.

Carrie: Some of them may be subtractive under this umbrella.

Laura: In my point of view, a bilingual program would not be subtracted, but that's my point of view. Some folks may disagree, and that's fine. For my definition, the bilingual program would not be because otherwise, it would not be bi. It would be like mono. It's only focusing on that language.

Carrie: It's using the other language only as a way to get to the primary language. Can you tell us a little bit about how bilingual education can perpetuate white supremacy?

Laura: Like I said, I do want to start by saying that I am a proponent of bilingual education, I would just like it to be better. One of the things that I think bilingual education has been focused on a lot is language, language learning. That makes total sense. But I think that in a program that is situated in a racialized society like ours, there does have to be a recognition that the program is what I call in the book a racial project. What I mean by a racial project is that it continues to provide different resources and opportunities to some folks that then reinforce also the racial grouping. That's what I mean by a racial project. By the way, I did not come up with the term racial project, but it was something that I thought was very useful for the book in order for us to see how bilingual education perpetuates racialization in our society through allocating different opportunities, which is the third part of the book where I focused really on how this bilingual program was providing different opportunities to folks based on the different power that they had, obviously, connected to whiteness.

Carrie: You talked about how, basically, to sell a bilingual program, you have to have these white families partake in it. Is that a true assessment of the bilingual education programs?

Laura: That is what some of the participants told me, that they felt that there was buy-in because there were middle class white folks interested in having their students learn a language. It was tied to discourse because some years back, some decades back, it was bad to be bilingual, you were deficient, et cetera. Now, there's this movement to like, "Oh, the bilingual brain has advantages", et cetera, and white middle class families want that advantage for their students so they are asking districts who were before, perhaps, residents to have the resources used in order to provide bilingual education. Now, districts are being pressured by middle class white parents to offer these programs. Now districts are like, "Oh, yes, wonderful." We'll offer them, and they will boost the academic performance of the Latinx students, and then also, obviously, the white parents will be enrolled in it. It's a win-win for some districts, I think. That's how people were talking about the program.

Carrie: But you mentioned that there's a problem with assuming that having a bilingual brain will help academic achievement for Latinx students, is that correct?

Laura: Oh, yeah. I'm not a proponent of talking about this bilingual advantage and this bilingual brain. I actually don't really think that that discourse is useful. It's actually, I think unhelpful in lots of ways, so definitely, I think it's very problematic.

Carrie: Why is that?

Laura: I think it's problematic because it assumes that there is actually this bilingual brain. What is a bilingual brain? I don't understand, really. I'm sure there are cognitive processes, but how are you defining when does the language stop, when does not, et cetera? To me, I'm not really too sure if the field is really thinking about language in terms of the historical or social processes that it has, when it's just talking about it living inside the brain. To me, that doesn't really make sense. But again, I'm not a linguist, so my knowledge of it is not as in depth as other folks. It's just by me just thinking logically, like okay, it doesn't pass the sniff test.

Carrie: Well, neither of us are neuro linguists, so we don't have much to say about it either. That's true. We don't. But you also mentioned that there's a structural problem with assuming that a bilingual brain will help academic achievement for Latinx students.

Laura: Yes. Thank you for bringing that up again because it really was something that, again, the program, the district promoted the program as if it was going to be good for, I think they called it growing brains, like, bilingualism is good for growing brains. There was this marketing of the program but what I point out in the book is that that could cause actually some confusion, for example, a mom whose son was Latinx and white. She thought, okay, well, if it’s giving the Latinx students advantages, then how are they ever going to catch up if there are also white students in the classroom getting advantages from being bilingual? Which is a very logical question in a way when you’re thinking about what the discourse is saying, we’re giving them advantages, the cognitive advantages through them being bilingual. Then like, oh, okay, so we want that because they are already cognitively disadvantaged. Is that what we’re saying? It’s just an odd logic to then say we’re going to be improving the Latinx achievement because we’re going to improve their cognitive abilities through them being bilingual. It’s just not really why students in the US are not achieving. It has to do way more with structural racism and the disadvantage in not providing students with the adequate resources that they need. 

Carrie: The advantages of bilingualism for those students probably comes more from not being disrespected for speaking two languages.

Laura: Yes. Thank you. 

Carrie: How did these Latinx students become tracked? And what is tracking? 

Laura: Tracking happens a lot in high schools and in middle schools. It could happen from elementary school, but since my study is in high school, I’ll give an example there. The students were tracked based on, for example, their math scores. If they scored highly on a math standardized test, they would be placed in one math class. Other students who had placed lower in their math score were placed in a lower track. What happens in schools and what happened in this program is that they get different types of opportunities in terms of the learning opportunities and the enrichment opportunities that they have based on these ideas about like what the ...It is almost like cognitive, whether or not they are cognitively able to learn math, for example and then the people who are judged to not be able to cognitively do math are put in lower classes in order for the cognitively able students to be able to do math at a faster pace. That’s what happens in tracking, and that was something that happened in this program. They were also tracked based on that and they were also tracked based on the language. For example, there was a biliteracy course that the students were placed in and there was a high biliteracy course. I actually don’t know if that’s what they actually called it. But I noticed that a lot of the white students were placed in a course that was a biliteracy course at the end of the school day, that they were able to choose whatever they wanted to read and they could read with their friends or they be silently alone. In the other lower-tracked biliteracy course, it was only half an hour at the end of the day. The students in the lower-tracked biliteracy course had to do multiple-choice answers on a laptop of a quarable program. 

Carrie: Not agentive activities just like-

Laura: Definitely. They read a paragraph and then answered some multiple choice.

Carrie: That’s barely got to do with literacy. Wouldn't it be better to just have them read? 

Laura: Definitely. But that’s the problem with tracking is that we’re giving them different opportunities and enrichment opportunities because we’re thinking about students that are not able to do something, for example. 

Carrie: It makes me so angry.

Laura: Oh yeah, definitely. I'm right there with you. 

Carrie: How can we make bilingual education a project that contests racial injustice? 

Laura: I think bilingual education, in order for it to contest being a racist project for example, it has to recognize that it is a racial project and that it is situated within a schooling system that perpetuates racialization. It has to pay attention to that. One of the ways to do that is to make sure to teach about race and about Latinidad, for example, which is one of the things that is dominant in the book as an example of how it teaches about race and some of the contradictions in that. In order for bilingual programs to be racial projects that actually advance in a way that would be, for example, an anti-racist way, there has to be recognition of how it is situated in our society and of the contradictions that could be. Recognize these contradictions and that it could in inadvertently contribute to the racialization that it does contribute inadvertently to the racialization of folks. There has to be a recognition in order for them to be this critical consciousness, and then for them to also act upon that and then make sure that the program addresses racism and how to incorporate it in their pedagogy, et cetera. 

Carrie: Do you think that’s a long way off, or do you think we can get there soon? 

Laura: I was actually hopeful because when I first began the project, I actually didn’t think I would see much at all in terms of race pedagogy. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought I saw way more than I had expected. Obviously, I would have liked there to be a more systematic way throughout the program where it was more like some teachers really took that on, but I was pleasantly surprised. If I’m being honest, it makes me hopeful that there could be improvement in the programs in this way. So yeah, definitely, I think it could happen. The problem is, like we touched on in the beginning, was this discourse now that really is attacking the type of pedagogy that the teachers were engaged in. The teachers who engaged in that were really some of the most effective teachers, in my point of view. They really listened to their students and changed their lessons and planning et cetera based on students’ interests. These were really masterful teachers, I would say.

Carrie: Those are dangerous teachers to the right wing. That’s why they’re attacking them. 

Laura: There’s a reason why there is really this concerted effort to attack schools, definitely.

Carrie: You brought up Latino dad, can you explain that to us? 

Laura: What I mean by Latino dad is a concept that is more like an ideology and an idea about what it’s like to be Latinx. It's a context that people define differently. To be honest, when I first started the book, I didn’t really understand what it was. As I’ve read more about it from different scholars, different ideas, to me it more about what it does in society more than like who is Latinx. What it does in society in terms of, for example, erase indigeneity or erase blackness. It is something that in Latin America, it has been used for that, but it's interesting because that is definitely true in Latin America, and it is also true in the US that the Latinx group really emerged from the Hispanic group, which emerged from calling basically everyone Mexican American even though they were not from Mexico. It’s like this phrase that is sometimes used sometimes as a slur anyone who is Spanish speaking. There is a history of a different layer of racialization and a different type of racial project that happened because of US colonialism and US Empire that is not the case in Latin America. Latinidad in Latin America is definitely something for erasing indigeneity and blackness. In the US it's also that, but it is also the case that Latinidad is also because it's tied to this different history of colonization, a different type of racial project that is like the US empire and the US colonial project. There is a different type of layer, if I could say that. 

Carrie: Do you think that outsiders and insiders who Latinidad assume that Spanish is part of what makes someone Latinx? Because I myself am Latinx, but I don't speak Spanish. And I was on threads yesterday and someone I saw a post that said, "How can you be Mexican American and not know Spanish?" This is a very common thing that I see and hear. What do you think?

Laura: This is very interesting because, in some of my work I have written about how the Latinx racialist category is, this category that has this signature boundary of this imagined Spanish. I think imagined because we know that not everyone who is Latinx speaks Spanish. But it is this imagined, this is an example of exactly how this group is imagined. This is actually what race does. It imagines, it creates these, like whoever calls ideal type, which is it decentralizes in order for us to just simplify and explain. The problem with race is that this is a nefarious aspect of it, where it is done in order to lump people together, into this group, and then ignore either their cultural similarities or their cultural differences with other folks in the group. How that fits into this book is that in this book, I show how bilingual education is a racial project that is contributing to this idea that Spanish is the signature boundary of the Latinx group. 

One of the things that I'm doing in my work is I'm trying to advance this idea that, let me back up and say that race social science has already shown that race is not really ascribed just based on phenotype and skin color. Race is a much more complex social process. Because of that, we have to understand that race is not just skin color to simplify it. But this is interesting because with the Latinx group, some scholars and some folks in popular culture say that the Latinx group is not a race because there are lots of different phenotypes. To me, this simplifies race to being about skin color. Then that takes me to the point, well then I had the question then like, then what is race? Once we define what race is, then how could Latinx not be a group, not be a racialized group in a way? If it is a racialized group, then how are people really contributing to it being this racialized group? What I argue in the book is that bilingual education in the way that it talks about Latinx and Latinidad, it is contributing to thinking about this imagined Spanish or that the Latinx group is Spanish speakers. So, it is continuing this type of definition of what is Latinx. 

Carrie: Because it can be harmful, this assumption. 

Laura: Yeah, definitely. It could be definitely harmful, but it's interesting because then the alternative is again, here in the US, the history is this monolingual subtractive assimilative process. This is exactly what I'm talking about in the book, this contradiction. A racialized society. There's just contradictions the more and more we dig deep into it. 

Carrie: Like you're saying, race isn't really real. It's real in the sense of how we act as if it's real. But it's nothing there. There's nothing to point at really. It has to be contradictory just because there's no underpinning there. 

Laura: Yes, definitely. That's not to say that colorism is not real. 

Carrie: No, it's real. 

Laura: People really suffer. There is obviously anti-blackness, and I do talk about anti-blackness in the book and anti-indigeneity and how the Latinx group is positioned in the program in relation to blackness, whiteness, Asianness, and indigeneity. That is a discussion also that happens in the book. What I'm saying also is that we do have to also recognize that the Latinx group is not just an ethnicity. Yes, it is an ethnicity. I'm not interested that much discussing if it's an ethnicity or not. I'm more interested when people say it's not a race. I do think it is a racialized group, and one of the things that I think my work in this book is showing that it is this imagined Spanish that is the boundary of the Latinx group. 

Carrie: It comes through in comments like people saying, how are you Mexican American, don't speak Spanish. 

Laura: Definitely. It comes in, if I can bring in my personal experience, like I mentioned earlier that I was a Spanish teacher. I recognized when I was very young, so I chose to be a teacher in high school. Then in undergrad I was debating whether doing Spanish or history. Then in Arizona when I was an undergrad, they passed a bill prohibiting bilingual education, and that really made my decision for me. I said, well, like, okay, they're attacking Latinx folks, Hispanic folks. I don't remember what we called it back then in Arizona. But it really made the decision for me that, oh, I'll be a Spanish teacher because I need to make sure to contribute to children like me being able to still maintain their language, their Spanish language. 

Carrie: Everything interesting, I think involves some contradiction. 

Laura: Yes, definitely. Thank you. 

Carrie: Is there anything that you'd like to say to our listeners that we may have not asked you besides read the book, which is a lovely book by the way. I had so many feelings, 

Laura: Thank you. It took a lot of feelings also from me. Thank you so much for reading it. I actually wrote the book thinking about educators and hoping that it is very accessible to educators. I wanted to provide a lot of examples and I wanted to bring in racial theory that is really advanced, but making it very simplified in a way, not simplified, excuse me, to really be accessible and to not just leave these contradictions unexplored and really wanted people to come away with hearing these examples and hearing how these contradictions live in classrooms and how teachers and students are really grappling with them. Then hoping that there's a change in also how communities support teachers, because teachers really do need the support from communities in order to be able to do the type of work that, for example, saw in these classrooms. 

Carrie: I think that's always the case, and it's even more the case now with all these rightwing attacks.  Thank you so much. This was a fascinating conversation. 

Laura: Thank you. 

Carrie: It was.  

Laura: Thank you. I really appreciate it. 

Carrie: We always leave listeners with one final message. "Don't be an asshole". 

Laura: Than you.

Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillen. Theme music by Nick Gran. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at vocal fries pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com. 


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