Linguistic and racial re-formation of indigenous Mexicans’ languages and races in Florida Heartland K-12 schools

Abstract

I interrogate how consequential representations of student characteristics are fashioned by analyzing identification, recording, and reporting of student and parent language, race, and ethnicity in K-12 school registration, school records, and state reporting. In the Florida Heartland, analysis of ethnographic school observations, school electronic records, a language inventory (survey), interviews, and official state data show that language, race, and ethnicity information for some K-12 students and parents (especially indigenous Mexicans) collected during enrollment are not recorded accurately and undergo transformation from collection to reporting. According to my language inventory, students' parents were indigenous language speakers 19 times more often than reflected in raw school records. In records from the local middle school, 10 percent of students were American Indian, though the state reported this as 0 percent. This linguistic and racial re-formation resulted from several factors, including registrars recording languages as others (i.e. Spanish instead of Náhuatl), differential questioning practices, and state reporting policy. As discussed, enhanced procedures and updated policy should improve areas affected by inaccurate data.1. Introduction. Student demographic information, such as language, race, and ethnicity, is consistently quantified in US educational institutions after it is gathered during school registration. Representations of this demographic information are then used in a myriad of consequential ways, including during making decisions on affirmative action programs, investigations into school segregation (NCES 1996; Renn 2009), balancing classrooms, investigations of discrimination in ability grouping (Lopez 2003a; Vizcarra 2017), federal and state reporting of student progress by aggregated sub-groups, screening children for language services, informing culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2014), and accessibility in school-home communication. Prior research has examined issues surrounding school registration interactions and the subsequent quantification of student characteristics (e.g., Baquedano-López . Yet none highlight the important site of the on-the-ground micro processes that occur during school registration, tracing it all the way to codified reporting at the state level, as the present study does.In investigating how representations of student and parent language, race, and ethnicity are constructed by schools and the state, I introduce the terms 'linguistic re-formation' and 'racial reformation' as theorization tools. With roots in Omi and Winant's (1986) 'racial formation', the terms respectively describe the processes of transformation that characteristics (i.e. language, race, and ethnicity) reported by students and parents may undergo by the time the information is used at school or in state reports. With this in mind, this study showed:

Linguistic Re-Formation in Florida Heartland Schools: School Erasures of Indigenous Latino Languages

“…When conducting the HLS, Central registrars often Latinized students by excluding the Indigenous languages of Indigenous Latino students and recognizing only their (actual or perceived) use of Spanish (Campbell, 2016; Campbell-Montalvo, 2019). This was likewise found in Perez, Vasquez, and Buriel’s (2016) research on Mixteco students cast as Spanish-speakers and in Baquedano-López’s (2019) research on how incoming Maya students from Yucatan, Mexico, were understood by California schools.…”

“…However, previous studies have not offered a quantification of this Latinization nor a close look at the processes shaping it—a gap my research fills. There is also a corresponding need to be able to describe and theorize about the mechanism through which language representations come to misrepresent speakers’ linguistic repertoires 2 —addressed by my development of “linguistic re-formation.” This term refers to processes of transformation that language representations undergo from their reporting by speakers to digestion (codifying) by others (authorities; Campbell-Montalvo, 2019).…”