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‘Converse racialization’ and ‘un/marking’ language: The making of a bilingual university in a neoliberal world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2020

Mike Mena Open the ORCID record for Mike Mena [Opens in a new window]  and
Ofelia García
Mike Mena*
Affiliation:
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA
Ofelia García
Affiliation:
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Mike Mena, Doctoral Student, Department of Linguistic Anthropology, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY10016, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The discourse on the opening of a bilingual university along the Texas-Mexico border leads us to propose a theory of ‘converse racialization’ through which the local Spanish is being progressively ‘unmarked’ and disassociated from the language practice of Mexican Americans. Converse racialization, as the equal and opposite co-constituting underside of racialization, shifts the directionality of semiotic indexes away from a particular ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ (including whiteness) and produces an apparent state of ‘unmarkedness’. We argue that the process of ‘unmarking’ Spanish has social, economic, and racializing consequences. Specifically, the language-as-resource discourse obscures and rearticulates the ‘deficiency perspective’ that continues to perpetuate structural inequalities that Latinxs in the border face. (Racialization, higher education, critical race theory, bilingualism, neoliberalism)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , June 2021 , pp. 343 - 364
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

This article benefited greatly from critiques and conversations with Anna Kushner, Ricardo Otheguy, and Angela Reyes. We also recognize the crucial and insightful feedback from Judith Irvine and the anonymous reviewer.

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