Becoming the System : A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. This book challenges that framing by pointing to the ways that the foundations of modern approaches to bilingual education have their roots deficit perspectives of Latinx communities. It connects these deficit perspectives with a broader shift in discussions of race that framed racial inequities as a product of cultural and linguistic deficiencies of racialized communities as opposed to structural barriers produced by centuries of racist policies. It then examines the ways that Latinx professionals who entered the field of bilingual education were expected to adopt this deficit perspective in ways that served to maintain racial oppression.

Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. In Becoming the System, author Nelson Flores challenges that framework by examining the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies. He adopts a methodology that he terms raciolinguistic genealogy as a point of entry for arguing that the institutionalization of bilingual education was part of a broader reconfiguration of race in the postcolonial era. This reconfiguration located the root of racial inequities within a psychologically damaged racialized subject who, after having experienced multiple generations of racial oppression, had either from a liberal perspective developed a culture of poverty or a radical perspective developed colonized mindset that prevented racial progress. After examining the ways that this psychologically damaged racialized subject provided the ideological foundation for the Bilingual Education Act (BEA), Flores then examines how institutionalizing the BEA produced a cadre of Latinx professionals who were afforded contingent proximity to whiteness in exchange for their acceptance of deficit framings of Latinx communities. He goes on to examine the ways that this institutionalization helped pave the way for neoliberal educational reforms that serve to maintain the racial status quo. This has culminated in the exponential growth of dual language education as a commodity for affluent monolingual white families even as the bilingualism of Latinx communities continue to be pathologized and policed. Flores concludes by implicating himself as a Latinx professional working in bilingual education in this political incorporation and posits the present volume as resistance to the commodification and weaponization of Latinx bilingualism.