Decolonizing US Latinx Students’ Language: El Sur in the Schools of El Norte

Abstract

Abstract This article considers how the racialized bilingual Latinx students in El Norte live in an epistemological Sur where their knowledge systems, which include their language and cultural practices are discounted. Centring the schooling experience of two US Latinas today, the article theorizes the differences between perceiving their language and bilingualism from the external perspective of dominant schooling institutions of the Global North, and from the inside perspective of racialized speakers. Bringing to bear thinking from an epistemological Sur (Santos 2009), revealed through a decolonizing sociolinguistic approach and Latinx decolonizing research sensibility, the article discusses how tools external to the Latinx experience—academic language and additive bilingualism—have contributed to the subjugation and failure of Latinx students. It ends by proposing translanguaging as a tool that has emerged from Latinx own experience and how its use in their education may open a decolonial option.