Examining raciolinguistic struggles in institutional settings: A duoethnography

Abstract

In this duoethnography, we draw on the zone of (non)being (Fanon, 2010) and linguistic citizenship (Stroud & Kerfoot, 2020) to examine the struggles that we—a high school teacher and a doctoral fellow/teacher educator of color—face in our institutional contexts. We illustrate the ways our language practices become excluded and the ways we are misrepresented as Latinos. Our analysis sheds light on how we engage with the raciolinguistic ideologies at the heart of these exclusions and misrepresentations. Our findings add to the existing literature on raciolinguistic ideologies by centering our struggles within institutional structures of inequity and marginalization, and illuminating the ways contextual factors shape our critical engagement with these structures.