¿Soy Acaso Negra?: A Testimonio on the Erasure of Black Latines Within, and Beyond, Bilingual Education

Join a talk with Dr. María Cioè–Peña, given as part of the BU Wheelock Language Education Speaker Series. Dr. Cioè–Peña is a bilingual/biliterate education researcher and educator from the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education who examines the intersections of disability, language, school–parent partnerships, and education policy.

Black erasure remains a large issue within bilingual education with the standard association of Blackness in the U.S., often, equated with African American identity and English monolingualism. Conversely, most bilingual programming in the U.S. serves Spanish-users, and bilingual education research tends to center Spanish-using Latinx students and communities. Across these contexts, the focus is on language and an imagined mixed-race (i.e, mestizo) collective, centering culture to circumvent race and treating language as connective yet racially neutral. As a result, addressing issues of anti-Blackness is often viewed as beyond the scope of bilingual education.

However, as critical scholars have shown, language and perceptions of language users are not racially-neutral and practices that are rooted in this ideology create more harm than good. Black people exist within Latin America, the Latin American diaspora, and bilingual education settings. Thus, Black erasure in bilingual education upholds anti-Blackness and model minority narratives in education overall and results in tangible exclusion and oppression for Black bi/multilinguals.

Supported by theory and history, Dr. Cioè–Peña “makes visible the internal and external pressures that have contributed to silencing [her] voice” as a bilingual Black Latina to shed light on the continued erasure of Black students in bilingual education programs and research.