Raciolinguistic metacommentary: Examining Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates’ everyday experiences with raciolinguistic ideologies

ABSTRACT

This article documents the spontaneous, implicit, and explicit ideological commentary – what I have termed raciolinguistic metacommentary – that 17 Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates (TCs) reported encountering in their everyday lives on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Analysis of data from a one-year critical ethnography shows that these ideological comments not only point to perceived (non)linguistic difference at the individual level but also mobilize marginalizing indexical images of U.S. Latinas/os that reinscribe existing racial hierarchies. In light of these findings, this article underscores the need for more scholarly attention to be paid to the raciolinguistics of the everyday or how raciolinguistic ideologies creep into social spaces such as Latina/o homes and communities to shape Latina/o bilinguals’ lived experiences of language and identity possibilities. The concept of raciolinguistic metacommentary is proposed as an analytical tool for this endeavor.

KEYWORDS:

• Language ideologies
• raciolinguistic perspective
• raciolinguistic metacommentary
• Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates
• raciolinguistics of the everyday

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The International Research Foundation (TIRF) for English Language Education [N/A].