Dr. Mike Mena
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Dr. Mena’s research deals with the ideological perceptions of race and language in the context of American education. His award‑winning YouTube channel, The Social Life of Language, serves as a contemporary and activist pedagogical model to those interested in producing accessible and engaging educational content, with special attention paid to reaching students of color and promoting marginalized scholars.
For more information: www.maestromikemena.com
Soft Linguistic Terrorism for the 21st Century: Dreaming in "Standard" Language
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) opened in 2015 as one of the first self‑identified “bilingual, biliterate, bicultural” universities in the United States. This is a generational achievement in the near 200‑year struggle for educational advancement of Latinas in Texas—a sector systematically excluded from statewide educational policy and economic enfranchisement (Montemayor 1987; Blanton 2004). While English/Spanish bilingual education has historically been framed as a “problem,” in the 1990s sociolinguistics made a discursive shift such that trying to “fix” Spanish bilingualism is a political measurement of epistemic violence.
However, the university still focuses on appropriateness of language, questions of “bad” Spanish, and how multilingual students should perform in professional settings. This raises issues of linguistic citizenship and linguistic devaluing. Others, specifically, I describe the overwhelming pressure students face to shift to so‑called “standard” registers while simultaneously legitimizing Spanish bilingualism.
My presentation also examines the limitations of appropriateness‑based rubrics and “deficit language” approaches—those that pathologize variety found among minoritized speakers—using campus data collected during the Reclassification of English Learners in Texas (Flores and Rosa 2015–2017). Drawing from current arguments by Mexican, Mexican‑American, and Latinx sociolinguists, the talk argues that students’ language practices offer insight into how multilingual speakers “police” themselves based on deeply entrenched ideologies of language. Such policing leads to what is known as a form of linguistic terrorism (Anzaldúa 1987).