“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh. It was so in the beginning and it is so today. The language, the Word, carries within it the history, the culture, the traditions, the very life of a people, the flesh. Language is people. We cannot even conceive of a people without a language, or a language without a people. The two are the one and the same. To know one is to know the other.” (Sabine Ulibarri, cited in Crawford, 2004, pg. 13)

The acceleration of non-English language loss in current times is, to say the least, highly troublesome. In the United States, Spanish-speaking immigrants and their children are acquiring English at a more rapid rate than any previous generations and simultaneously losing their ability to speak Spanish more quickly. By the third generation, newcomers have typically adopted English as their usual language and abandoned their mother tongue ( Tienda & Mitchell, 2006).

In this regard, Gutiérrez and Jaramillo (2006) claim that, in the U.S. context, language—the Word (and by this they mean the English language)—has become the new proxy for race. In other words, restrictive language policies and pedagogical practices that are purposefully dissonant with well-established and robust research findings function as a substitute for race-based discrimination. Under this perspective, the claim that we now live in a post-racial society does not hold true, as racial discrimination has simply morphed. As anthropologist Sandra Lopez-Rocha  contends, society is not post-racial because racial discrimination—based mainly on skin color—is still central to social relationships. Researcher and language activist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas agrees with this view, contending that schools are committing linguistic genocide everyday. To destroy a population, she says, you get their language first; get rid of the language and bring in another, and that brings in another worldview.

Written by current in-service teachers enrolled in a graduate class about issues in bilingual education that I teach, the following essays were inspired by immigrant children and youth attending K–12 schools in Rhode Island. These pieces not only exemplify the loss and struggle just described, but they also give testimony of the dissonance between research and practice when it comes to educating language minorities and how children cope in simple yet powerful ways as restrictive English-only policies set out to silence their lives . . . their word . . . their flesh!

REFERENCES

Crawford, J (2004). Educating English Learners: Language Diversity in the Classroom. 5th Edition. Bilingual Education Services, Inc -Please remove the commas for Sandra Lopez' quote, since it was paraphrased

Gutiérrez, K. D., & Jaramillo, N. E. (2006). Looking for educational equity: The consequences of relying on Brown. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 105, 173–189 doi:110.1111/j.1744-7984.2006.00081.x

Lopez-Rocha, S. (2006). The color of culture: Post-racial and post-ethnic considerations in the United States. Paper presented at the the Humanities Conference, University of Charthage, Tunis, Tunisia.

Tienda, M., & Mitchell, F. (2006). Multiple origins, uncertain destinies: Hispanics and the American future. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.