In both classes, students experienced translanguaging as a form of BCC that provided opportunities for interrogating the complexity of power relations. The fluid mixing of linguistic forms that could be classified as either English or Spanish was a staple of our discourse community. I especially eased my regulation of students and myself in exclusively practicing the “Spanish” area of students’ repertoires when this area was unlikely to let them adequately process the complexity of the issues at hand. These complexities were often subtle nuances of the operations of power. As an example, in my January 22nd field notes of Fourth Period I wrote,
I put up a picture of [the Andean god] Ekeko to see if anyone recalled from last year who he is. There are several comments resembling [one student’s]: es el diablo [it’s the devil]. Me: Now let’s step back and do a little bilocal culture crossing. I think from their perspective he looks like a happy guy offering prosperity. Let’s not just stick him in to our own system of things immediately. [This same student] and others: no, he’s scary, he’s creepy, etc. Me: “well, can’t you imagine what he might look like to the people celebrating the festival? This is a good BCC moment for us.” Many: no! but they got the point…
This was a fairly typical teachable moment that I took advantage of to forward the idea of BCC as being able to consider another cultural perspective without a rush to judgement from one’s own. Notice that “English” is employed to “step back” and do an analysis of contrasting perspectives, yet students were able to express themselves with the “Spanish” in their repertoires and did so with “Es el diablo.”
Interestingly, translanguaging issues and politics were also some of the complex topics we translanguaged about, so I will provide a few of these as examples. In the first example, from my April 8th fieldnotes of Sixth Period, students are arguing during a
game that translanguaging itself is a form of BCC:
mine. One was when [an experto] translated a sentence I made with an apostrophe S rather than X of owner. I dismissed it as “Spanglish.” His teammates,
motivated by the desire for two rather than just one point…argued that it was BCC, a natural mixture. I asked [the student], “En realidad tu familia usa apostrophe S en espanol? [In reality your family uses apostrophe S in Spanish?]” He nodded, sort of, but he was smiling so much I couldn’t feel like I’d gotten a straight answer. “En serio lo dicen asi en su casa [Seriously they say it like that in your house].” His team sort of overpowered his voice and argued that it was a faster way to say it, repeating that it was BCC.
I was using the discourse of the undesirability of Spanglish to challenge expertos to prepare to function in monolingual “Spanish,” yet ultimately I used the standard of whether their families also translanguaged in that way to grant legitimacy to moves they made in the classroom to try to ensure these were not motivated by a desire to
underchallenge themselves. In the following Fourth-Period exchange on lexical variation stemming from the “Spanish” word sandwich, fieldnoted on November 18th, we see
several alternations between language”s”:
[Student A]: “realmente es la palabra para sandwich?” Yo: es uno. Depende de la región. I look at [Student B] who’s in the corner next to me, “en mexico es torta, no?” Si. [Student C]: “torta no es cake?” me: “si, food words get all scrambled around based on the region. Torta es sandwich en mexico pero cake en espana. Por eso yo no enseño las comidas, porque hay tanta variación entre regions.” [Student D]: “puede preguntar algo en ingles?” [it’s so ironic that his question about using english is so impeccable and yet he doesn’t dare venture much farther into Spanish.] si. [Student D]: “you say that we aren’t learning about foods, but you’ve told us a lot about different foods, especially Mexican foods.” Yo: “sí, but I have really focused heavily on it cuz it’s just so confusing. Varía mucho por región. Que significa, clase?” many: “it varies by region.” Someone: “so how do we survive in a restaurant?” me: [Student E] and i meet each others gaze in
agreement, “You point to what you want and say, como se llama?” he finished my thought, “damelo por favor.” Yo: “si, exactamente.”
We see in this excerpt how translanguaging was taken up in the classroom to clarify the word “sandwich” in Spanish but also to deepen their understanding and discussion of a topic they sought to make meaning about—regional differences in the use of vocabulary to identify a sandwich. This discussion allowed students to view the bilocal culture
crossing that is needed linguistically to make oneself understood.
Two other examples from Sixth Period are illustrative of how we translanguaged around languaging politics itself. The first was fieldnoted on April 8th and narrates what
happened after I reminded the class that a so-called double negative is how things work in “Spanish.”
Rainy raised her hand super high and insistently. Rainy: “puedo usar ingles [may I use English] (si) Now you do know that when you use a double negative you’re basically saying a positive, right? You’re saying it’s not nothing, so it’s
something.” Me: “well, I disagree.” [Student A]: indignantly, righteously, “Oh, Sr. D, you disagree with the meanings of words?” me: “Well, the way I see it, it depends on the tone of voice.” Several were trying to insert their opinions here but I finally got a chance to explain further: “I would say that if you said, “I didn’t do nothin’” then you’re just adding extra emphasis to the nothing, but if you said, “I didn’t exactly do “nuh-thing [slowly pronounced]”” then you’re showing that you’re implying that you did do something.” [Student A]: “that’s an
interpretation, but that’s not the meaning.” Me: “but see the way I see it words have meanings only because communities agree that’s what a word means, and if one community makes a different decision than another, well then that’s just how it is.” I was about to bring it around and connected it to [two expertos’] versions of Spanish that we’d found out about, but [Student B] started standing and shouting, “This class is a community, and we think your double negatives don’t make sense.”
Here and in the next example we see some students mounting fierce resistance to a discourse of abandoning language standardization. On April 21st I fieldnoted on Sixth
Period:
[Student C] who said brung instead of brought and there was laughter and mockery, but I defended it as a regional variation and repeated my claim that correct language is decided by the members of a community and that
unfortunately school oftentimes tries to call the way the powerful people do it “correct” and other ways incorrect. [Students D and E]: “It’s bilocal culture- crossing.” [Student F] with permission: “So where is this community that uses brung?” me: “We’ll google it.” It came up as “dialect.” Me: “See, dialect is another way of saying regional variation.” [Student G] with permission: “Well then if write that I done got me some apples on the Sages [high-stakes end-of-year tests] and fail, it’s your fault.” [Student F]: “But that’s just what google says it is, but you haven’t convinced me cuz you haven’t shown me a real community that talks that way.” [Student G]: “By your logic ‘yo watz up homes how’s my chicken’ is correct grammar.” Me: “I think it is.” Others chimed in with
stigmatized phrases. I felt we didn’t have the time to delve and that my BCC point had been made.
In hindsight, I wish I had immediately addressed the question of race in the bolded phrase, but there was so much discursive power being channeled by these several White, male, upper middle-class “gifted” students that I found it hard to counter it all at once. Had we relied merely on students’ “Spanish” repertoires, these complex debates would have been stunted and perhaps never been initiated.
Finding 2: BCC interpreted and applied as