“Se me sale el Español y se me pega el Spanglish!”: Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates’ racialized notions of bilingualism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways Latino/a bilingual teacher candidates (TCs) talk about their own and others’ language practices and the ways this talk reflects and reproduces racialized notions of bilingualism. Drawing on data from a one-year critical ethnography at a Hispanic-serving institution in Southwest Texas, this article demonstrates that TCs have been socialized into raciolinguistic ideologies of Spanish as language to be contained and Spanglish/code-switching as disease or bad habit. TCs’ unconscious adoption of raciolinguistic ideologies was evident in their use of the phrases ‘se me sale’ and ‘se me pega’ to characterize fluid and dynamic languaging in a variety of settings. Findings have implications for bilingual teacher education research and practice, as regards bringing attention to the ways TCs depict the language practices of racialized individuals and encouraging TCs to critically engage marginalizing notions of bilingualism that might be in circulation in Latinx homes and communities.