Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Mass Media Engagement: Implications for Sociolinguistic Justice

Abstract

This article describes the rise of Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) as an institutional designation within postsecondary education in the U.S. context, and outlines some of the language-based challenges U.S. Latinx students face on campus and in the home speech community. Engagement with the mass media through editorial writing and interviews in television, radio, and print formats is conceived of as a productive means of educating the public about HSIs and the language issues that contextualize the lives of the student bodies that attend them, combating misinformation about U.S. Latinx speech communities, and, more generally, for doing what Wolfram (2016) calls “public sociolinguistics education.” A model of mass media engagement is suggested, in which community-based sociolinguistic research is communicated by the researcher to press specialists at the university, who help place it with journalists, who then disseminate sociolinguistic knowledge to the general public. The effects of mass media engagement—including community involvement and the creation of sociolinguistic artifacts—are discussed, and practical advice for promoting sociolinguistic perspectives through mass media engagement is given.