Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Spanish Speakers in a California Child Welfare Court

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that metalinguistic communities can draw on language ideologies about non-group members to construct their own social identity. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of parents and legal professionals in a California child welfare court, Lopez-Espino argues that social workers, judges, and attorneys routinely use the category of “Spanish speakers” in ways that implicitly emphasize their own English-dominant language practices as standard and normative. Building on existing scholarship on raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa 2015), Lopez-Espino argues that legal professionals conflate being Spanish-dominant as indicative of lacking “sophistication,” lacking legal status, being passive, and having deficient cultural practices of child-rearing. The chapter concludes that the circulation of such raciolinguistic ideologies can negatively affect racialized and minoritized persons’ access to a fair and equitable legal experience.