“We’re not fully us without our languages”: multilingual Latina educators and raciolinguistic ideological clarity

Abstract

Ideological clarity has been defined as a process in which one struggles to identify dominant society’s explanations for existing societal socioeconomic hierarchies and then juxtapose them with one’s own. In this paper, ideological clarity is used to analyze the ability of multilingual Latina educators to identify, name, and disrupt dominant raciolinguistic narratives and their effects on the students they teach. We present the anécdotas–short, illustrative stories frequently used for teaching and learning–of five K-12 multilingual Latina educators to show how they have developed and employed raciolinguistic ideological clarity. Our findings demonstrate that, in identifying, naming, and disrupting dominant raciolinguistic narratives through both their words and their actions, they actively dismantle racial injustice and construct educational possibilities for language minoritized students of color.