Speaker: Dr. Nelson Flores
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Date and Time: September 21, 4:00 PM (in person)
Place: Ritter Hall 205, Temple University

A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of the Self Abstract: In this presentation I conduct a raciolinguistic genealogy of my own life as a point of entry for exploring the relationship between language and race in the post-Civil Rights era. I begin by situating my family history within broader histories of colonialism that led to my parent’s displacement from Latin America to the US where they found themselves racialized because of their use of Spanish. I then examine my raciolinguistic socialization throughout childhood that informed my relationship to both English and Spanish before shifting toward an exploration of my professional trajectory into bilingual education. I contextualize my professional trajectory within the legacy of the Bilingual Education Act (BEA). Informed by the culture of poverty, the BEA posited that bilingual education was particularly well-suited to fix the purported cultural and linguistic deficiencies of Latinx students. While informed by longstanding colonial logics, the BEA also paved the way for Latinx professionals and researchers who had to balance their desires to advocate for Latinx students with the culture of poverty discourses that made their institutional positions possible to begin with. I position myself as an inheritor of this tension and examine the ways that this has played out in my time as an ESL teacher as well as a bilingual education researcher.