1. Please introduce your book to our readers in a few sentences.
My book, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, explores how schools play a pivotal role in shaping our understanding of race and the Latinx racial category. It unpacks the ways in which schools reinforce and challenge ideas about race and the racialized groups in our society. The book invites educators to rethink how race is taught in schools to better serve diverse student populations. It focuses on a bilingual education program to show how our society forms the Latinx group as a racialized group, in a complicated way that both counters and advances racist ideas.
2. How would you characterize bilingual education in the US?
Bilingual education in the U.S. serves to counter the country’s history of underserving students who come from non-dominant communities. It has been connected to ethnic studies, but often it’s seen as just focused on language. While bilingual education can serve to affirm students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds, it also exists within an educational system that often underfunds and undervalues programs that cater to non-dominant languages and communities. It holds potential for transformative learning, but often falls short of its ideals due to systemic inequities.
3. Many celebrate bilingual education as inherently anti-racist, yet you argue it often falls short. In what way?
I’m an advocate of bilingual education, and I wish I had had that opportunity as a youth growing up in Arizona schools. Bilingual education is often celebrated as anti-racist because the U.S. has an assimilationist, monolinguistic, and racist history. The U.S. hasn’t historically provided the Latinx community and other minoritized communities with schooling that is culturally sustaining. Bilingual education programs aim for biculturalism and value linguistic diversity and challenge the dominance of English. However, bilingual education can fall short when it doesn’t actively teach about race and confront forms of racism, such as anti-Blackness or the marginalization of Indigenous languages and groups. This is something other researchers have also found. I argue that in many cases, bilingual programs focus so much on language that they fail to address the deeper racial and socio-political issues that influence who benefits from these programs and how they operate, leaving structural inequities largely intact.
4. You emphasize the need for teachers to adopt an inquiry-based stance when tackling race and racialization in the classroom. What are some practical strategies or examples of how this could be implemented effectively?
Adopting an inquiry-based stance means approaching one’s teaching as a professional who is interested in systematically and intentionally learning about one’s practice.
Race is a topic that is taboo in many parts of our society. Teachers can implement this by creating opportunities for students to ask their own questions about race, explore their community’s issues, and consider how to act against racist practices. My book, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, has examples of teachers engaging in this type of pedagogy. For example, one teacher taught about the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. Another teacher had a lesson about the Spanish colonial casta racial system. Encouraging students to bring their own experiences and questions into the classroom creates a more dynamic and engaged learning environment.
5. What role should our communities play in addressing the racialization of Latinx children?
Communities play a crucial role in supporting teachers by seeing teachers as professionals, and in supporting teachers to provide lessons that teach critically about race and in advocating for their schools to integrate ethnic studies. Supporting the teaching of race is especially important considering the attack on so-called “critical race theory,” which is a catch-all phrase for anything the far-right doesn’t like. So instead of having a debate about whether schools should teach about race, communities should deliberate about how to better support teachers to teach about race through the school years and in a way that develops students critical racial consciousness.
6. What is “ambitious teaching,” and how can it transform classrooms? Can you share a concrete example of ambitious teaching in practice?
In my book, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, I conclude with a call for an ambitious approach to teaching about the ambivalence of race. Ambitious teaching involves setting high expectations for all students, while recognizing and valuing their unique experiences and perspectives. The ambivalence of race refers to acknowledging that race is a complex concept full of contradictions, and I advocate for leaning into those contradictions instead of simplifying racial ideas and issues. I draw from Professor Zeus Leonardo’s work on this. Although I suggest reading the book to get a better explanation of this, we can start by thinking that it’s not useful or advisable to be colorblind, meaning to not notice that our society is racialized and that some groups systematically receive inequitable resources. Thus, it’s better to recognize that race and racism exist as a social structure, but we should also recognize that “race” is a nefarious concept. So I write about the idea of needing to not be colorblind while also adopting an anti-racist stance and an anti-race stance, which again draws from Professor Leonardo’s work.
While an ambitious approach to teaching about the ambivalence of race would look different depending on the context, it means moving beyond rote learning about historical events to create a classroom where students engage deeply with complex ideas, including those related to race and the process of how society creates racialized groups. For example, an ambitious teacher might guide students through a project examining racial disparities in their own community, encouraging them to gather data, interview community members, and present their findings about how the unequal distribution of resources reinforces ideas about racialized groups and hierarchies. This kind of project helps students develop critical thinking skills and see themselves as active participants in their learning. But, like I mentioned before, an ambitious approach to teaching about the ambivalence of race would look different depending on the context.
7. Ethnic studies have been cited as a pathway to more critically race-conscious education. How can ethnic studies be integrated into bilingual education to achieve this goal?
Ethnic studies and bilingual education can complement each other by providing students with the tools to critically examine our society. Integrating ethnic studies into bilingual education could involve using texts and materials that reflect the histories and experiences of the students in the classroom, encouraging students to explore the intersections of race, language, and power. For example, a bilingual classroom might read and discuss examples using both languages to deepen students’ understanding of how different societies structure opportunities for some but not others.
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