Latina/O Bilingual Teacher Candidates' Negotiation of Raciolinguistic Ideologies

In this ethnography, I examine how 17 Latinx bilingual education teacher candidates (TCs) completing a teacher education program at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HIS) in Southwest Texas negotiate circulating raciolinguistic ideologies across social and institutional spaces. Data for this dissertation consisted of classroom observations, individual interviews, multiple classroom artifacts, and group member-checking sessions. Drawing on the raciolinguistic perspective to language ideologies, I analyzed the ideological infrastructures these TCs navigate at school, in the home, at work, and in social/public spaces. Drawing on the concept of linguistic citizenship, I examined the subtle and overt ways they have pushed back against these infrastructures. Findings reveal that these TCs have experienced a number of raciolinguistic metacommentary that not only index difference but also mobilize and reinscribe raciolinguistically enregistered figures of personhood and notions of language. These raciolinguistic metacommentary constrain their ethnolinguistic subjectivities, to the point that they experience (1) linguistic insecurity/shame, (2) language shift/loss, and (3) a heightened sense of hypervigilance on language correctness. Findings also reveal that despite these metacommentary, TCs manage to articulate and forge alternative identity positions and understanding of language and bilingualism that are rooted in their experiences in the Latinx communities in which they grew up on the Southside of San Antonio and border towns.