The teaching of Spanish to native speakers has been packaged under diverse names, emerging most recently as “Spanish as a Heritage Language.” Whether it is couched as developmental bilingual education, maintenance bilingual education, Spanish for native speakers, or heritage language development, advocates for programs of academic excellence in two languages have been dealt a stunning blow by recent federal school reform measures. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, eliminates, for all intents and purposes, the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII), as programs for English language learners have been subsumed under Title III of NCLB. All reference to bilingual education has been expunged from federal parlance, replaced in both form and substance by English language acquisition programs. The former Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA), the repository of research on minoritized languages in the United States, has been transformed into the Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students. Needless to say, support for native-language instruction is not found in Title III, as English language acquisition takes center stage. Add to this scenario the referenda passed in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts dismantling bilingual education, as well as the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the country, and the prospect of fostering Spanish as a heritage language seems dismal indeed.

Notwithstanding this grim political scenario, editors Ana Roca and M. Cecilia Columbi have brought together a series of articles centered on the teaching and learning of Spanish for students who can claim a Spanish-speaking heritage. As evidenced in Mi lengua: Spanish as a heritage language in the United States, the terms “heritage language” (HL) and “heritage language learner” (HLL) have become increasingly common as applied linguists and teachers alike recognize that heritage speakers and learners require pedagogical practices that are distinct from those meant for foreign-language learners. Interestingly, neither the editors nor the chapter authors attempt explicit definition of heritage speakers, although I concur with Guadalupe Valdés, who states that this term is used to refer to a person “who is raised in a home where a language other than English is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language” (2000:1). The conundrum in this definition resides in what “to some degree bilingual” means in terms of language use and literacy. For example, several chapter authors reference a schema of students who enroll in courses designated “Spanish for native speakers” (Valdés 1997) that categorizes bilinguals along a range of skills in English and Spanish, problematizing the often-accepted modality of the term “bilingual.” This heteroglossia within the Spanish-speaking populations in the United States is the undergirding for all of the chapters in this edited volume. Any serious reader of it will come away impressed with the multilayered complexity of tapping into the linguistic resources of communities.

Rather than summarize and comment on each of the thirteen individual chapters, I will highlight themes that cut across the volume. The book is made up of two parts: theoretical considerations and implications for K–16 instruction. Yet implicit within the theoretical constructs is a strong practice component, and this is the strength of the book.

True to the editors' ideological premise of positively valencing Spanish academic registers, four of the chapters are in Spanish, and several of those in English include untranslated quotations in Spanish, assuming readers who are biliterate.

The theoretical chapter by Andrew Lynch, “Toward a theory of heritage language acquisition: Spanish in the United States,” provides the infrastructure for the other chapters. Nine basic principles are explored that are specific to heritage language acquisition (HLA). Although based on the interface of theory in the fields of second language acquisition and language contact, these nine principles go beyond the traditional reliance on cognitive and psychological models of language learning and take into account the linguistic funds of knowledge of heritage language communities. For example, within naturally occurring discourse patterns in neighborhoods and local social contexts, HLLs will encounter instances of Principle 2, “the incidental acquisition principle.” HLLs will overhear conversations between other Spanish speakers outside the home, will come across media in Spanish, or will interact with immigrant family members. These are opportunities for language learning that are not often taken into account by foreign-language teaching, or even bilingual education programs. The principles that are laid out situate language learning clearly within the social realm, not a phenomenon that happens “between the ears” but one that is context-driven and inherently ideological.

These premises are carried through the other chapters in both Part I and Part II. Although many of the chapters reiterate the demographic imperative for marketing oneself in two languages, the more urgent community-based necessity is that communities not squander their linguistic resources. Language is a form of social capital that can be leveraged into both symbolic and material resources. The chapters that focus on specific pedagogical practices for increasing the academic achievement of HLLs rest on this assumption. For example, M. Cecilia Colombi's chapter, “Un enfoque funcional para la enseñanza del ensayo expositivo,” argues that the informal conversational registers of students are often transferred into expository writing, limiting the development of advanced levels of Spanish literacy. As the metafunctions of textual production are carefully deconstructed, Colombi presents clear and specific strategies for HLL teaching and learning. Similarly, Bernal-Enríquez & Hernández Chávez, in their chapter “La enseñanza del español en Nuevo Mexico Revitalización o erradicación de la variedad chicana?” interrogate the language ideologies of linguistic purism that have permeated the denigration of nonstandard regional varieties of Spanish. Their call for a validation of local forms of language use within the pedagogical practices of academic Spanish is a necessary basis for constructing multidiscursive platforms of language use.

In Part II, “Community and classroom-based research studies: Implications for instruction K–16,” the chapter authors deal with a range of heritage-language teaching and learning, from elementary students in a dual language program, to university students in courses offering Spanish for native/heritage speakers. All deal with issues specific to HLA: “How do we treat the home language? How should we build on it rather than criticize and/or eradicate its nonstandard aspects? Why do Spanish-English bilinguals experience difficulties in typical Spanish classes?”(172). Each of the chapters adopts the stance of critical pedagogy, typified by the statement that “Daily class themes should not be ones like ‘Los participios pasados’ or ‘comparación de los adjetivos’ but rather ones like ‘la inmigración mexicana en California’ or ‘movimientos feministas en Latinoamérica’ or ‘la raza en el Caribe’”(42). In this way, students are active constructors of their own knowledge, marshalling linguistic resources to suit their own academic needs, rather than passive receptacles for ideology-laced prescriptive grammars that deny their competence as speakers of a language.

This book brings together the best in both theory and practice to a field that, given the current political climate, can either flourish or fall by the wayside. By writing to a broad audience of teachers, teacher educators, applied linguists, and, we would hope, educational policy makers, this book carves out a coherent argument for building on linguistic capital and sets the stage for further levels of theoretical and pedagogical development. The development of students who are multidiscursive, who can choose from a range of linguistic repertoires, and who can appropriate discourses for specific ends is the vision of progressive educators. This book takes us one step closer to that vision.