“Why does bilingualism look good on them but not on us?”: Critical Testimonios Towards Reclaiming our Rich Linguistic Assets

This paper amplifies the voices of four undergraduate students in their journeys to (re)learn, (re)frame, and (re)claim their lived experiences as Spanish-speaking bilingual Latine scholars as they navigated deficit-based schooling. Under the current anti-immigrant, anti-Latine, sociopolitical climate, our communities will continue to experience violence, both physically and ideologically. White hegemony will continue to work to silence our immigrant communities, our multilingual communities, to which we must continue to resist and share our stories of systemic linguistic injustices. Four undergraduate co-authors provide testimonios as evidence of linguistic harm and deficit perspectives that continued to plague their K-12 schooling. Through the lens of raciolinguistic ideologies, our testimonios explore how: (a) schooling practices were governed by the White Listening Subject (WLS) and manifest within educators and language assessments, (b) the WLS pushed us towards white hegemonic linguistic practices, further severing our relationship between our languages and culture, and (c) engaging in the decolonial practice of testimonio and raciolinguistic justice fostered our critical consciousness. Unapologetically, we share our testimonios of experiencing linguistic violence within the classroom; violence that is enacted through the WLS that further embeds raciolinguistic ideologies into our schools.