Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education Noticiario Noticiario_Summer2017 | Page 14

My Mother’s Language History: Lenguaje de la Familia
By Amanda Cordova, Doctoral Fellow
Discussion
The language history of my mother is complex and strongly tied to the connections
between her home and work demands. Her language history begins by speaking a
neighborhood dialect of Spanish, and learning to speak, write, and read in this type of Spanish
prior to her formal schooling years. Her language learning was strengthened by authentic
relationships in organic environments of her neighborhood including her family, her teaching
neighbor, and her church. Her neighborhood life actually resembles more of what Valdes (1998)
refers to as qualities of immigrant communities in that her neighborhood was more ethnically
segregated, speaking their native language, and functioning in more of a collective manner.
Language functioned more as an element of one’s heritage (McCarty, Romero-Little, Zepeda,
2006) bound with cultural collectivism. Throughout her formal school years her language
became divided between speaking neighborhood Spanish at home and school and English at
school. There were no bilingual programs in her school during elementary and she fell into the
English-only instruction movement extending from the early 1900’s to current time (Callahan &
Gandara, 2014). Despite the legacy of English-only instruction she became trilingual by the time
she finished high school continuing to speak a dialect at home, English at school, and learning
formal Spanish in her later high school years.
Her early language learning years were marked by poverty and her desire to make
sure she could get a good job to help her family, eventually leading her to decline a college
opportunity. She deviates from the concept of the Latino educational pipeline (Sólorzano,
Villapondo & Osegura, 2005, p. 279) in that she was a graduate with funding for college, but
chose to fulfill family obligations instead of entering college. This also deepens an
understanding of her language as tied to cultural practices above a tie to academic or
occupational trajectories. Her language was bound in family and church that may have lessened
her ties to language as a means of individual economic gain. The economy of her language was
to support her family, but not of her own gain.
Upon marriage her language life shifted to primarily English because her husband,
working conditions, and church all communicated in this language. She also believed better
jobs were obtained and less schooling problems occurred if English was spoken leading her to
have her children speak English first. This falls in line with the phenomena of non-English loss
(Gandara & Hopkins, 2010) in which succeeding generations do not consider themselves
Spanish dominant. After her work retirement, she returned to a Spanish speaking church while
also living in a predominantly Hispanic city where Spanish is commonplace. It seems she has
returned to her roots of Spanish after a lon