Jonathan Rosa

Jonathan Rosa is an Associate Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Vocal Fries Podcast (2020)
with Nelson Flores


 * I was writing about what I called, “ideologies of languagelessness,” that just framed certain populations as deficient in any language that they use. It’s not just certain populations. It’s racialized populations.


 * I think this is a very common phenomenon that happens with marginalized populations where people who are marked in particular ways based on race, gender, and sexuality, especially, there’s this sense that you’re all the same and you all could be a spokesperson for whatever set of ideas.


 * some of these genetic ancestry tests which proport to find race in your genes but, in fact, have to presume that race already lives in your genes in order to then find it there. If you understand race to be something historically constructed, then it doesn’t live in your genes.

Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2018)

 * The mantra of ‘diversity and inclusion’ can be understood as part of a normative project that seeks to present the superficial appearance of racial diversity while leaving white supremacist institutions and structures fundamentally unchallenged (Ahmed 2012).


 * Nelson Flores and I (2015) have shown how raciolinguistic ideologies relegate racialized students designated as Long-Term English Learners, Heritage Language Learners, and Standard English Learners to a perpetual status of linguistic deficiency regardless of the extent to which, from many perspectives, their linguistic practices might seem to correspond to standardized norms. Thus, we suggest shifting focus from modifying racially minoritized subjects' linguistic practices to contesting hegemonically positioned subjects' modes of perception.


 * NNHS students discussed Americanness in their everyday interactions. For example, Mr Ford, a popular White teacher, made a jocular reference to the title of a popular television show when he told a classroom full of seniors who had not completed an assignment that they ‘should be called America’s biggest losers!’ A mexican girl (Gen 3, Grade 12) retorted, ‘But we’re not even American!’ This kind of comment reflects Latinx students’ awareness that they were positioned as somehow un-American.


 * Jorge’s andd Yesi’s experiences show how particular enactments of Puerto Ricaness and Mexicanness were viewed as problematic. Not coincidentally, Jorge and Yesi became marked in part because of their Spanish and English language practices, respectively.


 * Earlier this year, a self-identified White, monolingual English-speaking teacher explained to me that, among other signs of her stupidity, Dr Baez’s English language skills are ‘horrible, and from what I hear, her Spanish isn’t that good either’...If Dr Baez, the bilingual school principal with multiple university degrees, including a doctorate in education, was subjected to such discriminatory thinking, then what could this mean for students, who were positioned in highly subordinate institutional positions?


 * While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome


 * Whereas claims about biological inferiority are no longer acceptable in mainstream US public discourse, claims about linguistic inferiority are often perceived as perfectly legitimate.