Resisting Anti-Immigrant Discourses and Linguicism
Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
[From Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlines/La Frontera: The New Mestiza]1
In this well-known quote, Latina writer and poet Gloria Anzaldúa talks about her desire to communicate in multiple voices, to feel pride in the many languages she speaks, and to have her multilingual tongue legitimized. The journey toward pride can be a difficult one in multilingual communities where the use of particular languages or language varieties is devalued, trivialized, or vilified. We recount a journey undertaken by a young Chinese-Canadian born artist named Evelyn Yeung, who needed to reconstitute who she was in a city and a school that had recently seen the arrival of a large number of immigrants from Hong Kong. The data was collected in Evelyn's enriched art class, which was beginning a painting assignment when we began our observations. Evelyn's art teacher, Leslie Edgars, had asked her students to write reflection pieces in their art journals during the painting project. We begin with excerpts from Evelyn's first two art journal entries, which were tape recorded when she read them aloud to me. At the end of that school year, I asked Evelyn to join the research team and paid her to write a final reflection piece about creating her art piece, Journey to Acceptance. In the Commentary, I analyze Evelyn's artwork as a pedagogical project that not only encouraged linguistic pride, but that also challenged anti-immigrant ideas that structured students' relationships at school. Drawing, in part, on the work undertaken by Leslie Edgars, the Pedagogical Discussion looks at how teachers might prepare themselves for work in multilingual, multiracial schools where issues of language, identity, and discrimination need to be negotiated on a daily basis. The ethnographic excerpts, the Commentary, and Pedagogical Discussion have been member checked by Evelyn Yeung and Leslie Edgars.
1 See Anzaldúa' (1987, p. 59).
