Emerging histories, emerging conceptualizations of language

The use of Spanish in primary and secondary education has not occurred without constant political struggle. Texas initially supported public bilingual education until the years before WWI, which resulted in the state's 1918 English-only law designed to ‘protect’ democracy from immigrants and force ‘Americanization’. English-only instruction also provided a ‘pedagogical’ justification for the segregation of Mexican American children, now said to need specialized English instruction (Blanton Reference Blanton2004). Racist movements against Spanish speakers often invoked early language research and ‘scientific’ testing measures to back the claim that Mexicans and Mexican Americans suffered from a diminished mental capacity, sometimes framed as due to the Spanish language, and other times due to engaging in bilingual practices (San Miguel Reference San Miguel1987, Reference San Miguel2001; Delgado Bernal Reference Delgado Bernal1999; González Reference González1990/2013, Reference González and Moreno1999; Blanton Reference Blanton2004). Over time, the Spanish language came to strongly index a specific form of racialized personhood that was ‘naturally deficient’. The ‘deficiency’ perspective—or the perception of persons as always lacking abilities, which in turn tends to erase structurally produced inequalities—remains a powerful ideology to the present day (Valdés Reference Valdés1997; Valencia Reference Valencia2010; Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2015). It follows then that the neoliberal framing of Spanish-as-resource, where the Spanish language is framed as an ‘asset’, would appear to be a logical response to counter the deficiency perspective in a deep south Texas university.

UTRGV is located in the geographic region known as the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), which has a 90% ‘Hispanic’-identifying population (US Census Bureau 2010). It is located on the southeastern most tip of Texas—a strip of land lining the Rio Grande River that includes the four counties immediately north of Mexico and surrounded by Border Patrol checkpoints on three sides (north, south, and west) with the Gulf of Mexico to the east. The geographic territory itself was once claimed by native and indigenous populations, but it was eventually colonized as part of the Spanish Empire, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States (and the Confederacy), and was sometimes claimed by two nations simultaneously (Menchaca Reference Menchaca2011; Lozano Reference Lozano2018). In terms of linguistic practice, the Spanish language preceded the arrival of English, that is, English was the ‘foreign’ language in this area.

Spanish in the United States is generally taught as an academic subject following elitist traditions and presented as a ‘foreign’ language, and not in relation to the Spanish spoken by the 50.6 million Latinxs in the United States (García Reference García2014:68). As shown in the analysis below, despite the fact that content classes are being taught in Spanish, UTRGV has chosen to follow a conceptual framing of Spanish as a ‘foreign language’, ignoring its historical presence prior to its colonization by Texas and the United States. To figure out why, we need a broader context.

In the twenty-first century, sociolinguistic scholarship has noted the increased revaluation of linguistic resources in a global neoliberal economy (Heller Reference Heller2003, Reference Heller2010; Moyer & Martín Rojo Reference Moyer, Rojo and Heller2007; Duchêne & Heller Reference Duchêne and Heller2012; Heller & Duchêne Reference Heller, Duchêne and Coupland2016; Martín Rojo & Del Percio Reference Martín Rojo and Del Percio2019). It could be argued that it is these emerging global arrangements along with the rising dominance of the language-as-resource discourse that has enabled the creation of UTRGV as a bilingual English/Spanish institution of higher education in the conservative state of Texas. However, Spanish has already served as an economic resource or has functioned to open up access to other resources for Spanish speakers at various moments in history (Valdés Reference Valdés1997; Villa Reference Villa2000; Carreira Reference Carreira2000; García & Mason Reference García, Mason, Harbert, McConnel-Ginet, Miller and Whitman2009). What is perceived as ‘new’ about this contemporary resignification of Spanish is its broader economic appeal to White-identifying middle and upper classes in the United States—the same groups that have delegitimized the Spanish of Latinxs in the first place (García Reference García, Cobas, Duany and Feagin2009a; Rumbaut Reference Rumbaut, Cobas, Duany and Feagin2009; Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2015). There is a (re)convergence of interests (Bell Reference Bell1980; Freire, Valdez, & Delavan Reference Freire, Valdez; and Delavan2016) where the dominant (white) population has become increasingly willing to support the interests of subjugated populations in an effort to reproduce their own dominance in a neoliberal world. Additionally, as higher education becomes an increasingly competitive arena (for rankings, for funding, for prestige, for students and faculty), concepts like ‘diversity’, and here, Spanish and bilingualism, become competitive economic interests for universities as well (more on this below).

The public discourse and marketing of English/Spanish bilingualism suggests, intentionally or not, that UTRGV will be ‘producing’ graduates that speak an elite register of Spanish disconnected from the Spanish speaking homes of the Rio Grande Valley. Readers may wonder how this is different from what happens in universities across Latin America and Spain, where the Spanish register used in university instruction is often different from that used by some in the local population at home. But in those universities, Spanish has not been a racialized object used to perpetuate social inequalities. Instead, Spanish is a national object of pride. When in some instances higher education leads some individuals to appropriate features perceived as standard, this is not seen as debasing a whole community of speakers. In fact, there are many university-educated successful Latin Americans and Spaniards whose Spanish contains features that the university may perceive as nonstandard. Spanish in these national cases continues to be linked to a people whose repertoires demonstrate the variability that marks ‘authentic’ Spanish speakers. We can, for example, mostly recognize Andalucian, Argentinean, or Cuban Spanish-speaking people across their racial, social class, and gender differences, whether they are using features considered ‘standard’ or not. Spanish then is always from someplace and produced somewhere by speakers considered authentic and legitimate.

This is not so when a language and its people have been racialized and delegitimized. The Spanish language promoted by UTRGV is said to be ‘global’, ‘modern’, and ‘foreign’, but not definitively linked to a specific country, and especially not the Spanish-speaking homes of Rio Grande Valley residents—a foreign-not-family discursive frame that advances a language from nowhere. Yet, a language from nowhere does not exist. In this case, Spanish is, at minimum, from anywhere else but ‘home’—a language-elsewhere that can be recognized as a ‘standard’ register that is not marked by a history of the racializing deficiency perspective. This kind of unmarking could potentially ‘add value’ to Spanish without altering the subordinated status or perceived ‘otherness’ of Latinxs who are (or imagined to be) Spanish speakers in the United States. Put another way, a ‘Spanish-elsewhere’ is meant to index a specific ‘unmarked’ institutionally legitimized language practice and form of neoliberal personhood, which will likely resignify the language without resignifying the racialized Latinx bodies who use it (or are imagined to use it). Unmarking social phenomena, then, comes with a set of interests—racial, symbolic, economic—which are veiled through the process of unmarking. A racialized, stigmatized object, such as the Spanish language, is resignified as an ‘unmarked’ object in an effort to add capitalist value within the tenets of neoliberalism. Next, we identify the theoretical grounding from which we advance the notion of converse racialization and unmarking.

Theorizing converse racialization and un/marking

Bonnie Urciuoli (Reference Urciuoli1996) has studied how groups are discursively racialized. We would like to posit another active form of discursive race formation, converse racialization. Specifically, converse racialization shifts the directionality of semiotic indexes—signs that draw connections and lines of contiguity—away from a particular ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ (including whiteness) and toward an apparent state of ‘unmarkedness’.

A focus on indexicality foregrounds the ongoing emergence of meanings that may be activated (or erased) in particular contexts that are themselves situated within constellations of ideologically related meanings, or what Penelope Eckert (Reference Eckert2008) calls ‘indexical fields’. Indexicals come bundled with presupposed meanings and histories that entail a range of productive effects on any given context, which may reinforce previous indexical connections or forge new ones (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003a). Indexicality is a culturally embedded mode of signification interpreted by human agents. People come to notice, in varying degrees of intensity, only some signs as connecting to other signs, while others are taken for granted. And, the degree to which some sign becomes marked by a particular meaning depends on the degree to which a sign is conventionalized, or institutionalized. That is, indexical fields may be rearranged and over time lead human agents to interpret them as cohering into relatively stable racializing discourses that mark certain groups, bodies, and linguistic practices in everyday social life.

Urciuoli (Reference Urciuoli1996) employed an oppositional, contrastive relation with poles ranging from ‘marked’ to ‘unmarked’ to describe the degree or intensity of racialization. Persons and practices perceived as ‘unmarked’ implies a political positionality considered normative, which becomes the ground by which difference is measured—meaning nonwhiteness emerges in relation to whiteness. To reproduce its positioning as ‘unmarked’, whiteness must be institutionally legitimated, adapted, and modified (through academia, education, law, politics, economics, etc.) in a way that backgrounds or erases its hierarchical privilege to define and naturalize social relations. Crucially, ‘unmarked’ phenomena cannot exist without an ‘unmarked’ perspective that recognizes phenomena as such. The perspective that entails ‘unmarkedness’ is not a timeless reality, but is a co-constitutive effect of the active process of unmarking. Converse racialization gives name to the specific form of discursive race formation that perpetuates the erasure of indexicals that could draw attention to any potentially non-normative aspect of a given phenomenon, which creates particular affordances—possibilities, likelihoods, and constraints—unequally distributed across white- and nonwhite-identifying populations.

Converse racialization does not simply refer to the racialization of a white race group, but to its on-going constitution as the social and political norm that maintains the domination of minoritized groups. Therefore, converse racialization can be a discursive tool for the domination and oppression of black and brown bodies. In this sense, converse racialization (unmarking) has always been integral to racialization (marking); it only draws less attention to itself—meaning racialization and its converse are equal co-constitutive processes of un/marking. Yet, stigmatized groups, bodies, and linguistic practices may also undergo unmarking. However, we should not assume that when converse racialization is applied to stigmatized populations that the privilege to order social relations and hierarchies that are afforded to white populations are equally extended to nonwhite populations. Instead, the unmarking of stigmatized groups/practices produces a different set of affordances that can be beneficial, but also potentially dangerous if accepted uncritically. For these reasons, we assert non-white groups/practices do not undergo a uniform ‘de-racialization’, but a re-racialization that becomes more acceptable or less subversive from a historically legitimated institutional positionality.

Unmarking produces the effect of ‘normalcy’ detached from social inequality, racial subjugation, and political struggle that leaves the phenomenon neutral, unnoticed, unspoken, and literally unremarkable. These norms are in turn misrecognized (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991) as natural and timeless by veiling the historical processes that produced those norms, and thus reducing the likelihood of their being perceived or remarked upon in a way that would encourage critique, or to be discursively remarked upon. Without directing our analysis toward both sides of the un/marking process, developing the critical awareness to respond effectively to hegemonic racializing projects remains unlikely. In the next sections, we foreground the processual unmarking of Spanish at UTRGV, which, as mentioned above, affords new avenues to contest the racial subordination of the Latinx community, but is also coupled with potential dangers.

Becoming a ‘bilingual’ university in a neoliberal world: Strategic planning

This analysis of unmarking must be historically situated within a contemporary neoliberalizing field of higher education, which encourages, and indeed puts into practice, a specific set of behaviors and form of rationality that privileges ‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘competition’ as the ‘unmarked’ norm. Since the 1990s, universities have been more intensely positioned to compete in the neoliberal global market (Levidow Reference Levidow, Saad-Filho and Johnston2005), leading to a wide adoption of market-oriented and managerial procedures (Shumar Reference Shumar1997; Tuchman Reference Tuchman2009), campuses steeped in ‘corporate culture’ (Giroux Reference Giroux2002; Levin Reference Levin2005, Reference Levin2006), and an overall economic restructuring (Slaughter & Rhoades Reference Slaughter and Rhoades2004)—or what scholars have described as the ‘neoliberalization’ of the academy (Saunders Reference Saunders2010). Universities are observed to be acting as entrepreneurial competitors that produce entrepreneurial individuals (Zimmermann & Flubacher Reference Zimmermann and Flubacher2017)—that is, idealized subjects that make ‘rational,’ market-oriented choices, under constant self-improvement, and maximally responsible for one's own success and failure. This is an historically situated form of ‘neoliberal agency’ where people are expected to reflexively run themselves as though they were a business, which changes what it means to be an individual (Gershon Reference Gershon2011). Universities, then, must strategically plan how they will project themselves, or forge indexical connections between themselves, their competitive graduates, and the future of the global marketplace.

We begin our analysis with the publication in March 2017 of UTRGV's five-year university strategic plan (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley 2017a,b). The announcement of its publication appeared in the Rio Grande Guardian, the Rio Grande Valley's ‘first and leading’ online newspaper dedicated to South Texas border issues. Outgoing Provost Havidán Rodríguez commented on the importance of the strategic plan, stating:

Provost Rodríguez is quoted at length to emphasize the perceived connection between the university and the local student/parent population. The UTRGV is a ‘distributed campus’ with many teaching sites spread over 100+ miles along the US-Mexico border serving primarily students who already live in the four most southern counties in Texas (Starr, Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron). Approximately 93.5% of the 27,809 students are local residents of the Rio Grande Valley (Institutional summary, 2017–2018).Footnote ¹ Of the total student population 89% identify as Hispanic. The strategic plan describes itself as the starting point for the university's development and is meant to be a ‘live’ document that is reviewed every six months. While the strategic plan is designed to serve regional needs, it interdiscursively links to two previously released University of Texas System guidelines referred to as the Guiding Principles (released in 2013) and the Quantum Leaps (released in 2015).Footnote ²

The goals of the Quantum Leaps are meant to be generally applicable to all Texas universities within the UT System. For example, some general goals include ‘increase the number of students entering the college pipeline’ and ‘build the state's and nation's next generation of leaders’. The Quantum Leaps initiatives (included in the strategic plan appendix) is frequently referred to throughout the UTRGV strategic plan. By contrast, the earlier published Guiding Principles (also included in the strategic plan appendix) were passed down from the UT System Board of Regents in 2013 for the purpose of directing the designing and planning of the institution that would become UTRGV two years later. In no uncertain terms, the vision embedded in these fifteen state-level guiding principles imagines a university that is globally competitive. More than half of the principles include phrases like, ‘become a global leader in higher education’, ‘help solve local, state, national and global problems’, ‘improve the quality of life for the region, the state, the nation and our world’, and, eventually the end goal to serve as the ‘Gateway to the Americas’. While the Guiding Principles do mention the importance of the ‘region’, the ‘local’, and the ‘community’, ultimately, the principles forge indexical links that go ‘beyond’ the Rio Grande Valley—that is, connect the university's relevance across spatial and temporal scales: from the community, to the regional, to the state, to the global, and from the past/present into the future.

The title of the strategic plan, ‘Transforming our world’ (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley 2017a), produces a globally linked conceptualization of UTRGV. This is in stark contrast to the quote from the Rio Grande Guardian presented above where Provost Rodríguez places heavy emphasis on defining UTRGV through its local student/parent population. Notably, the perceived bilingualism of the current and incoming student population of UTRGV is not listed as a ‘Core priority’ in the strategic plan, but located in a separate section called ‘Other key areas of focus’. The strategic plan was a coordinated, highly inclusive effort between a strategic plan committee, a strategic planning steering committee, and fifteen additional subcommittees, all tasked with collecting data and feedback from December 2015 until its publication in March 2017. The strategic plan is a full color, professional marketing document that comes in three versions: a forty-page version, a shortened twenty-four-page ‘overview’ version (where every other page has photos of campus life), and a ‘summary’ version that is two pages of text. With this said, we assume every aspect of the final draft of the strategic plan was intentional—that is, takes into account local, national, and global political, marketing, and educational trends.

In Shumar's (Reference Shumar1997) ethnographic account of a neoliberalizing university, he notes that publicly disseminated university brochures as well as strategic planning are directly taken from corporate marketing and organizational methods. At UTRGV, the strategic plan doubles as a marketing brochure to attract prospective students and their parents both within and ‘beyond’ the Rio Grande Valley. Notably, no translations into Spanish have been made of the strategic plan or the university website, which were early goals in the opening of the university. At a practical level, we discovered this is a staffing issue. However, this also reveals who remains the prioritized audience: English speakers/readers. To become ‘globally’ relevant in a neoliberal world means taking strategic steps to frame cultural or racial difference as nonthreatening to the institutional order—that is, making the already bilingual population of the university ‘officially’ bilingual in terms legible to a neoliberal marketplace. In this sense, UTRGV must take careful steps to not mark itself as ‘too different’ or somehow outside neoliberal values, while also manipulating (resignifying) the meaning of racially marked objects—like ‘language’ and ‘culture’—into objects that have the potential to index a ‘competitive edge’ for the institution and prospective students.

The texts presented illustrate how a university might project itself into the global marketplace; it must offer something unique to be competitive, but not in a subversive way. This became the condition for which Spanish and bilingualism were able to be reimagined, not as a source of racial ‘deficiency,’ or as a politically charged object, but as an ‘unmarked’ competitive asset. We previously asserted that a broader neoliberal rationality has produced an unmarked foreign-not-family linguistic register, a language-elsewhere disconnected from ‘culture’ and history. Next, we analyze the public discourse of various university actors to illustrate when and where such conceptualizations emerge and how they align with a broader neoliberal rationality that serves to un/mark language in a specific way: as a ‘competitive edge’.

‘Unmarking’ the Spanish language: Producing a competitive edge

For Spanish to be discursively framed as an unmarked, competitive global resource, it must be detached from the local and resignified as a ‘foreign’ language, as a language-elsewhere, not learned ‘naturally’ at home, but as an academic subject (García Reference García2014). This form of Spanish-language competency indexes an individual actor who invested their time in learning, and therefore, invested in themselves (Martín Rojo Reference Martín Rojo2019). UTRGV continues this tradition by offering graduate and undergraduate degrees in the Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies where Spanish (along with French) are described as ‘modern’, but also as a ‘foreign’ language on the department website. The website describes the Rio Grande Valley as a ‘center of social, commercial and professional activity that is conducted either entirely in Spanish, or bilingually in Spanish and English’. More often than not, the UTRGV website indexically links Spanish to commercial/professional linguistic practice while downplaying, backgrounding, or erasing (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) what could be described as ‘informal’ or ‘family’ linguistic practice and appealing to what we previously called a foreign-not-family register of Spanish, a language-elsewhere. However, if the goal is the unmarking of Spanish, why would UTRGV continue to describe the language as ‘foreign’?

Latinxs, and specifically, persons of Mexican descent (or imagined to be of Mexican descent), have historically been cast as ‘foreign’, which ‘distanced them both from Euro-Americans culturally and from the Southwest as spatial referent: it stripped Mexicans of the claim of belonging that they had had as natives, even as conquered natives’ (Ngai Reference Ngai2004:133, our emphasis). In an institution of higher education, the designation ‘foreign’ may serve a related distancing function. Rosa (Reference Rosa2016) asserts that one way we might dissociate Spanish from present-day stigmatized Spanish-speaking populations is to position the language as part of an imagined Latinx past—a form of temporal distancing. In this sense, a Spanish from a ‘foreign’ past implies a successful assimilation into (white) American society instead of a language marked by American history as the ‘language of the conquered, the colonized and the immigrants; that is, as a language of poverty’ (García & Mason Reference García, Mason, Harbert, McConnel-Ginet, Miller and Whitman2009:78, italics in original). UTRGV's description of Spanish as ‘foreign’, but also ‘global’ and ‘modern’ may serve as both a spatial and temporal distancing strategy. ‘Foreign’ indexes outside of the historical United States, while ‘modern’ and ‘foreign’ index an academic register from elsewhere that can be projected into a global future unhindered by American history. Additionally, the Spanish language (and its real and imagined speakers) continues to be framed as dangerous to the linguistic orderliness of the United States (Hill Reference Hill1998; Leeman Reference Leeman2004; Zentella Reference Zentella, Orosco and Páez2009; Otheguy & Stern Reference Otheguy and Stern2011; Otheguy Reference Otheguy, Tortora, Dikken, Montoya and O'Neill2016) and remains too threatening to be presented as an ‘American language’ (Lozano Reference Lozano2018). This section analyzes discursive examples of converse racialization—the unmarking of a racially stigmatized linguistic object (the Spanish language)—found in interviews with various actors (students, professors, administrators, and politicians) of the UTRGV's bilingual initiative, while paying close attention to the way language skills become indexically linked to notions of global competitiveness (see Piller & Cho Reference Piller and Cho2013).

In 2014, before the legacy institutions University of Texas Pan-American (UTPA) and University of Brownsville (UTB) were officially combined, renamed, and ‘reopened’ as UTRGV, the news of the bilingual initiative began drawing public feedback. UTPA Professor Victor Alvarado expressed excitement to the Rio Grande Guardian, stating:

Alvarado hails from Chile and has supported the idea of UTPA becoming bilingual for many years and believes it would be a source of ‘uniqueness’. In the same interview, he recounted a story of his experience attempting to teach a course in Spanish at UTPA in 1972.

The primary obstacle that Alvarado perceives is that the students and faculty are not, as he describes, ‘truly bilingual’ and ‘never studied Spanish formally’, except those who came from ‘foreign countries, Mexico, South America or Spain’. Those who he considers bilingual students only ‘learn Spanish at a colloquial level’. Undoubtedly, the ‘colloquial’ Spanish he refers to is the local register of Spanish heard in homes, restaurants, the campus cafeteria, but also local businesses and politics. Alvarado finds it more plausible to attract professors from other countries (from elsewhere) who speak ‘correct’ Spanish (a Spanish-elsewhere) to take over the bilingual initiative. These faculty members would also potentially serve the purpose of embodying indexical connections ‘beyond’ the Rio Grande Valley—that is, to the southern hemisphere and Europe. This aligns with our assertion that a foreign-not-family model advocates for a specific register of Spanish, a language-elsewhere, as more valuable, or to Alvarado simply ‘correct’ in comparison to the regional Spanish register, or even any Spanish learned in the United States. This seems at odds with characterizations of the Rio Grande Valley being a region full of pre-existing linguistic ‘assets’. This is not, however, at odds with producing a globally linked competitive university.

In another interview, former UTRGV Provost Rodríguez locates the source of uniqueness the university offers.

The guiding principle he cites states, ‘Promote arts and humanities programs to produce state, national and world leaders who are bi-cultural, bi-lingual [sic] and bi-literate’ (our emphasis). This particular principle sets up the possibility of publicly marketing UTRGV as not only a globally linked Hispanic-serving institution, but also an institution with a ‘unique’ competitive edge. The Provost further characterizes UTRGV as an ‘economic engine for the region’ (Taylor Reference Taylor2016b) and the local Latinx population as a ‘major, major strength’ that ‘we have got to embrace’—additionally noting that ‘we have not found another example [of a bilingual university] in the United States’ (Taylor Reference Taylor2016a). However, to project UTRGV as nationally competitive, this ‘uniqueness’ must be framed in the ‘right way’ (Gershon Reference Gershon2016:237), or not subversive to a marketplace rationality.

Francisco Guajardo, the Executive Director of the B3 (Bilingual, Bicultural, and Biliterate) Institute responsible for overseeing the implementation of bilingualism, biculturalism, and biliteracy across the university, similarly identifies the Guiding Principles as a crucial step toward implementing a university-wide bilingual format. Guajardo explains:

In Guajardo's academic publications (Guajardo & Guajardo Reference Guajardo and Guajardo2004, Reference Guajardo and Guajardo2017), the word ‘asset’ is often employed to counter the perception of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley as culturally, linguistically, and racially ‘deficient’. Often, he speaks of ‘assets’ in terms of the strength and resilience of the south Texas border communities and their language practices that continue to thrive in spite of the historical subjugation of persons of Mexican descent. Indeed, English and Spanish is heard in most, if not all, arenas of life in the Rio Grande Valley. Yet, when the term ‘asset’ is contextualized across interviews and positioned within global discursive trends, the term ‘asset’ is swept up in the dominant indexical field of neoliberal discourses and becomes indexically linked with serving a competitive function and less associated with the history of Latinx ethnoracial subordination. More specifically, within the rationality of neoliberalism, Spanish ‘adds value’ when racialized subjects are perceived as learning Spanish as an elite register that indexes an individual who acquires additional language competencies to become competitive in the marketplace. This process forms a ‘linguistic elite’ (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003b) whose subject position indexes competitive potential and recognition in a neoliberal global marketplace. And, if a university is involved in producing globally competitive graduates, it can stake a claim to being a globally competitive university, and even a producer of competition itself. This creates a chain of indexicality between neoliberal subjects unaffiliated with any ethnoracial group, but instead linked to an institution with aspirations to compete in the marketplace at a global scale.

Director Guajardo imagines the possibility of other universities following in the footsteps of UTRGV.

Here, being ‘competitive’ at the institutional scale is positioned as normative, while simultaneously forging indexes of competition between and among individuals as both desirable and itself a source of value “in all walks of life.” Bilingualism is not only predicted to be the ‘competitive edge’ the university will be capitalizing on; it is a competitive edge that will be passed onto emerging bilingual graduates from UTRGV—that is, theoretically the students themselves will graduate with institutionally legitimated linguistic assets (bilingualism and biliteracy), but also something called ‘biculturalism’.

As scholars have identified, the language of ‘diversity’ goes together with concepts like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘inclusion’, with little evidence that initiatives framed as such do anything to actually alter structural inequity (Melamed Reference Melamed2011; Ahmed Reference Ahmed2012; Patel Reference Patel2015; Urciuoli Reference Urciuoli2016a,Reference Urciuolib). One of UTRGV's proposed values of the strategic plan is named ‘Diversity, access, and inclusion’. It states, ‘Establishing an accessible educational environment requires that we cultivate and enhance the diverse, multicultural, and linguistic assets of our university and the Rio Grande Valley’ (our emphasis). The statement does more than propose an institutional value; it frames aspects of local life as a set of objectified assets that can be acquired as a ‘competitive edge’ by prospective students without mentioning exactly what culture(s), what language(s), and what kind of diversity, which has the effect of unmarking each conceptual object by cloaking them in ambiguity. Nevertheless, there is some imagined ‘unique’ and ‘competitive’ edge—cultural asset(s) and linguistic asset(s)—that can be acquired by UTRGV graduates as two separate things, or as parallel objectifications disconnected from history and recognized in a form that ‘adds value’ to neoliberal subjects (Urciuoli Reference Urciuoli2016b).

The ‘competitive edge’ theme is echoed in three interviews (one professor, one student, and one regional political leader) conducted by the international online news media company, TRT World, whose headquarters is in Turkey and promises to give ‘new perspectives on world events to a global audience’.Footnote ³ This news story was uploaded about two years after the opening of UTRGV and features footage from a bilingual classroom being taught by Professor Dagoberto Ramirez. From his UTRGV university office, Ramirez states, “If my students are going to get a nursing degree, and they can speak English and Spanish, they'll be hired anywhere along the border, anywhere in large cities”. Bilingualism is presented as an asset and competitive edge that indexes an imagined potential for geographic mobility that can be valued in itself, which is acquired through language skills, which is acquired through individual self-development (Gao & Park Reference Gao and Park2015). In the next scene showing Ramirez leading a classroom discussion on bilingualism, he proudly exclaims, “A person with two languages is worth two people”. Here Ramirez equates a bilingual worker with the value (and pay?) of two workers—a competitive edge that indexes upward mobility—a proposition that is not supported by any conclusive data (Villa & Villa Reference Villa and Villa2005). This is, however, a distinctly neoliberal form of personhood whose value is based on an accumulated assemblage of competitive skills.

In an interview with one of Ramirez's students, Sofía Gonzolas says through a regionally marked register of English, “You can get more opportunity, careers, in career-wise. And you can get more comfortable communicating with people”. Sofía Gonzolas similarly correlates bilingualism with ‘opportunity’—that is, access to a selection of otherwise unattainable careers now available with an additional language skill, which is imagined to be legitimated through the university, not by everyday practice. If language can be imagined as a quantifiable increase to ones’ human capital, it can then also be filtered through a speculative cost-benefit analysis and further projected onto a quantifiable increase in career opportunity—meaning, more languages, more jobs. The statements by Professor Ramirez and student Gonzolas directly align with a number of neoliberal propositions that perpetuate the idea that language has an inherent economic value that can be transformed into an unmarked object that ‘adds value,’ not to everyone, but to university students engaged in making themselves linguistically competitive, what scholar Luisa Martín Rojo (Reference Martín Rojo2019) has aptly called a ‘self-made speaker’.

Included in this same news story is an interview with the highest-ranking chairman of the local Republican Party, Sergio Sanchez. While Sanchez asserts that English is the ‘unofficial’ language of the United States, a bilingual competence is good for the local and international economy. When asked to relate his position on UTRGV's bilingual initiative, he states, “For me, it's a marketable skill and I would desire that of all the kids going to the university, and, because it is an international market and international trade, because of NAFTA, it's beneficial”. Sanchez seems to be implying that ‘kids going to the university’ are not already bilingual, or not yet marketable as such. In other words, a language practice that indexes ‘kids’ learning language at home does not index the ‘desirable’ type of neoliberal subjectivity or institutional legitimacy that can be considered a marketable skill. The news story includes a short video clip of President Trump shaking hands while walking down a busy sidewalk, which is used to contextualize the interview by indirectly indexing the racializing comments Trump had recently made while announcing his presidential run in 2015, the now infamous comments on Mexican's ‘bringing drugs’, ‘bringing crime’, and being ‘rapists’. Yet, when Spanish is discursively framed as an ‘unmarked’ competitive economic asset it can be insulated from political critique.

Importantly, we see three individual actors in vastly differentiated subject positions (faculty, student, and a political figure) all reproducing discursive formulations of ‘language’ within the competition-driven logic of neoliberalism. Specifically, the idea is that the most valuable kind of bilingualism (with respect to Spanish in the United States) entails a Spanish from elsewhere acquired by competitive subjects that ‘made the effort’ to learn an elite register of Spanish, which in turn shifts indexes away from the family and community practice and instead forges cross-scalar indexes of competitiveness: from the global, to the international, to the institutional, and to the individual. However, this unmarking is not going unnoticed, and some of the strongest critiques also come from the UTRGV faculty.

Contesting the taming of the wild tongue

One of the most vocal critics of the university's bilingual initiative is Professor Stephanie Alvarez, the founding director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at UTRGV. At the time of this interview with the Texas Observer (Tyx Reference Tyx2017), the Mexican-American Studies department had only two faculty members, including Alvarez. For Alvarez, the marketing and focus on the university's goal to become ‘bilingual’ has deflected attention from the Mexican American studies program, which critically analyzes the history and culture of borderlands regions like South Texas. Alvarez describes the marketing of the university succinctly:

Here, Alvarez describes what she interprets as the goal of UTRGV, which is to produce ‘bilingual, biliterate’ students, but not ‘bicultural’ students—meaning she perceives the university as attempting to unmark the students and the geographic region by suppressing the historical knowledge of political struggle of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. This includes the history of Latinx education in Texas (and the southwest) in which dominant economic forces shaped education to become a powerful institutional mechanism that reproduced a strictly horizontal movement on the hierarchical socioeconomic scale, which, not coincidentally, doubly entrenched the ethnoracial subordination of Latinx communities (Montejano Reference Montejano1987; González Reference González1990/2013,1999; Muñoz Reference Muñoz1989/2007).

Additionally, Alvarez notes that no other degree plan besides Mexican American Studies requires a Mexican American studies course. We can suggest that one potential end result may be the production of bilingual Latinx graduates that speak a register of Spanish no longer marked by the centuries-long historical oppression and domination of racialized real or imagined Spanish-speaking populations—that is, the kind of ‘disrupting’ knowledge and counter-narratives that could serve as a catalyst for a deeper critical awareness of hegemonic hierarchical orderings of ‘race’, ‘language’, and ‘culture’ in the United States. Indeed, there is no mention of a ‘Mexican culture’ or ‘Mexican American culture’ anywhere in the strategic plan. Un/marking, then, both unwrites and rewrites history, which entails new possibilities, trajectories, and likelihoods in future decision making.

In isolation, each identified moment of discursive converse racialization cannot successfully shift racializing indexes toward a state of ‘unmarkedness’. Only cumulatively and over time will the discursive links reorganize the indexical field to more forcefully emerge and cohere into a stable discursive indexical chain that resignifies Spanish as a resource and commodifiable asset detached from Spanish speakers and Latinx ‘culture’. Yet, the establishment of a bilingual university remains an important step for Latinxs and RGV residents. It would also be misguided to equate university marketing strategies and public discourse with the work being done in the classroom and around the campus. Director Guajardo, himself an experienced scholar-activist, recognizes that UTRGV ‘stands at its own point of innovation, as it seeks to reconcile issues of race, culture, language, and identity through its institution-building efforts’ (De La Trinidad, Guajardo, Kranz, & Guajardo Reference De La Trinidad, Guajardo, Kranz; and Guajardo2017:53). Crucially, Guajardo continues to advocate for pedagogies grounded in alternative epistemological terrains that confront the particular issues faced by stigmatized populations in order to create new possibilities and avenues for research (Guajardo & Guajardo Reference Guajardo and Guajardo2004, Reference Guajardo and Guajardo2017; Guajardo Reference Guajardo2007). In this sense, Director Guajardo and Professor Alvarez are critically aware of the need to proceed with caution.

Important to Guajardo is making space for the practical reality of the faculty's training, expertise, and linguistic capacity to teach in Spanish or bilingually. In a conversation with Guajardo in August 2017, he states, “we need to explore, you know, who we are. And, how we language is how we make sense of the world”. Paradoxically, the creation of a bilingual university that was made possible by a process of unmarking Spanish is precisely what has created the intellectual space to question the role that language has had in the history of domination of Mexican Americans. Guajardo has been ‘pushing the envelope’ by inviting dialogue with scholars who, extending the legacy of Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa1987), offer a critical view of language––Spanish, English, and bilingualism. A faculty learning community where faculty across academic disciplines come together to discuss language in the borderlands and its role in the struggle has been developed by two faculty members, Alissa Cavazos and Sandra Musanti (see Musanti & Cavazos Reference Musanti and Cavazos2018). Together some members of the faculty are beginning to design pedagogies and curriculum that respond to the body politics of knowledge in the epistemological fronteras in which languaging and learning take place at UTRGV.

One of UTRGV's most prestigious alumni is Gloria Anzaldúa, who received her bachelor's degree from what was then Pan American University. The process of converse racialization and the unmarking of Spanish that we have been describing has been conducted with what Audre Lorde has called the ‘master's tools’ that ‘will never enable us to bring genuine change’ (Reference Lorde1979). Those whose locus of enunciation is a Nepantla, the Nahuatl word used by Anzaldúa to describe the tierra entre medio, the frontera, must release what she calls their ‘wild tongue’ (Reference Anzaldúa1987). It is that wild tongue, and not simply a tamed or ‘umarked’ tongue, that could speak the silences in knowledge that can challenge the prevailing social structures. Transformation, says Anzaldúa, ‘occurs in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries’ (Reference Anzaldúa, Anzaldúa and Keating2002:1). To escape the regulatory force of language—English or Spanish, or English and Spanish—one has to exert ‘an other thinking’ (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2000) for which ‘an other tongue’ is necessary. Only the body politics of bilingual minoritized and racialized peoples who understand the power of their own languaging can alter the knowledge-power structure that continues to hide the histories of social and economic domination in the invention of languages (Makoni & Pennycook Reference Makoni and Pennycook2007). And although precarious, a space has been created in UTRGV to start exploring some of these linguistic histories and practices, including what some have called translanguaging (García Reference García2009b; García & Li Wei Reference García and Wei2014). Translanguaging work is a political act (Flores Reference Flores2014), disrupting the circle of oppression created by the regulatory force of named languages in institutions. Through these explorations some institutional spaces are being created at UTRGV to critically reflect on how the unmarking of Spanish and bilingualism has enabled a process of converse racialization that could also be used to exclude them, despite the university now being declared ‘bilingual’, ‘bicultural’, and ‘biliterate’.