For me, reading the article "Translanguaging Tejidos: Crafting Language for US Latinx Education" by Ofelia García and Maite T. Sánchez elicited such an ocean of feeling that I thought must have been unique to me. Having grown up in South Florida with Spanish as a first language, I found myself in the scenarios portrayed. To cite the authors: "Raciolinguistic ideologies have worked to produce Latinx people and their language as 'mixed' and 'deficient' in what Alim et al. (2016: 9) call 'the White American imaginary'" (García and Sánchez 2015, 64). These words struck very close to home, because I have had to deal with the stinging judgment of how I speak, in school, in public, or even just thoughts by friends.
Another section that I remember clearly was when the authors discussed language as a colonizing tool. They mentioned, “language, and especially language in education, has been the material from which other muros and fronteras have been built to keep Latinx communities dominated” (65). It always seemed to me that there was a social stigma attached to Spanish in such settings, but connecting it to larger systems of oppression had never occurred to me. It is not merely the prejudice of an actor in isolation; rather, it is infrastructure put there through systematic construction for centuries starting with Nebrija saying, “Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” (66). This phrase hit me like a hammer, making me realize that language has been used from day one as an instrument for weaving hierarchies.
I was left reconsidering what I thought about dual-language programs. I grew up assuming they were an unquestioned good, but García and Sánchez reveal how “‘dual language’ programs, camouflaged as a type of bilingual education, were meant to mask their sociopolitical purpose of redefining bilingual education and language away from the Latinx community” (68). Even worse, “many two-way ‘dual language’ programs became tools of gentrification, as white English speakers took the place of Latinx students who were pushed out of their communities” (68), according to the authors. That perspective made me face how even so-called progressive models can reproduce inequality if they don’t center Latinx voices and lived practices.
Yet, it felt so affirming on their end to frame translanguaging in political and liberatory terms. They state, "[T]ranslanguaging, as Flores (2014) has said, is a political act, and it works against the raciolinguistic ideologies that have racialized US Latinxs through language" (69). For me, using Spanish and English interchangeably has always been normal; however, this was most often corrected in school. This reading empowered me to think differently about those corrections: It wasn't that I was doing something wrong; rather, my full repertoire was being discounted. García and Sánchez describe translanguaging as “epistemic disobedience, a way to revoke the coloniality of power” (72), which made me understand the embedded resistance in simply speaking as my family and community do.
Ultimately, this reading forced me into lucid understanding of the nexus among language, race, and power. It made me feel visible but also challenged me to think about how I may contribute to these systems. Translanguaging is not just about teaching. As the authors state, “only when translanguaging promotes re-makings and transformations, is it worth pursuing” (70). I take it to mean the transformation of dignity, agency, and unwillingness to have our voices manipulated into another's mold.