“This is our country, too”: Embodied Experiences of and Resistance to Neo‐nationalism in a Midwest School District

Abstract

AbstractNationalist rhetoric is not new to the US political context of transnational migration (Johnson et al., 2018). However, the election cycle of 2016 amplified nationalist rhetoric and policy in new public spaces, including schools and classrooms. In this article, I analyze neo‐nationalist discourse as voiced by the Trump Administration in and adjacent to language classrooms and general education classrooms in a predominantly White, Midwestern school district with growing demographics of students designated as English Language Learners (ELLs). Using intertextual and interdiscursive analysis (Fairclough, 1992) and embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016), I trace how neo‐nationalist discourses entered the classrooms, homes, and, I argue, bodies of newly arrived, racialized, documented, and undocumented immigrant students. I demonstrate how such rhetoric and policy provoked physical manifestations of trauma coupled with resistance, showing how the circulation of neo‐nationalist ideas contributed to ideological constructions of immigrant student and family identities along lines of race, immigration status, and language. Based on my findings, I center participants' lived knowledge and goals to argue that these moments demand response in schools and language education classrooms and offer implications for research, policy, and practice.