Emotions and the language‐ness of experience in heritage language lives

Abstract

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to meet Chicanx cultural theorist Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez at the University of Arizona. After completing a PhD in German language and literature, she went on to a stellar career in Chicanx literatures and cultural studies. I remember asking her why she had chosen to study German instead of Spanish. "Spanish," she said, "was just too charged, too emotional." Her response made me think about how emotional Spanish and Spanish-accented English had been in my life growing up on the Texas-Mexico border. It took me back to the emotions of fear, anger, and resentment that welled inside me whenever I would cross the border with my father who, in broken English, would declare his American citizenship only to be told, "now, how did you ever get to be an American citizen." It also took me back to the emotions of coming out of a slumber to hear undecipherable words spoken in Spanish and feeling a sense of being at home. I was serving as director of the Spanish-for-heritage-learners program at the University of Arizona, and I remember it dawning on me that the work I was doing there was so much more profound than simply "preparing these kids to become Spanish majors and minors," as I had been charged by the department head at the time. The work was indeed emotional-students navigated comforts and discomforts in heritage language classrooms, sometimes having to do with harm or joy experienced outside of school and other times having to do with joy or harm experienced in school. How could we create a program that healed the multiple harms that students had experienced in and through their heritage language? How could we create a program that would be a "safe space" for students to share these emotions? How could we create a program that would tap into the comfort and enjoyment of the heritage language?At the time that I was pondering these questions, there was no technical idiom to describe the role of emotions in language learning, and heritage language education was still viewed largely as linguistic remediation that could be achieved through metalinguistic instruction. In my own thinking, I used the short-hand of "language experience" to describe this aspect of heritage language living. In my 2006 book, Mexican Americans and language: Del dicho al hecho, I defined language experience as "more than just the language itself and more than the deployment of the language in social situations. A language experience is the composite of a group's experience with, in, and through language" (Martínez, 2006, p. 7). With my colleague Robert Train, we reworked this concept to think instead of a languageness of experience as "a complex of dynamic, tension-filled sites of locally embodied particularities, relationalities, positionalities and subjectivities that are woven into our human experiencing, languaging and translanguaging, as we live in the world" (Martínez & Train, 2020, p. 18). The language-ness