"My Language Speaks of Me: Transmutational Identities in L2 Acquisition"

Educational issues involving language minority students and students of color continue to cause much debate and controversy. These students often strive to become "accepted" by mainstream peers, often shunning their primary language or dialect and cultural practices to become assimilated into mainstream society. In the school context, while liberal muliculturalism is promoted in the classroom, current educational practices at the same time promote quick assimilation, exhibiting a contradiction. Discussion focused on the examination of the negative consequences of these practices for minority youths' language and identity development is clearly lacking. This paper analyzes the inherent contradiction of inclusion/exclusion faced by language minority students of color, especially those of Mexican and Vietnamese descent. The contradictions in educational practices that affect these students' identity development have been contributed by the historical conquest, colonization, intervention and coercion observed in the immigration histories for these populations. In this paper, language and identity issues faced by language minority students of color are explored in social and historical contexts, stereotypes and uncritical multicultural education practices are challenged, and changes in education for an equitable society are explored. Introduction Debate and controversy surround educational issues involving language minority students and students of color. This is evident as issues surrounding identity and cultural politics take the foreground in advocating for language minority students and their many experiences in U.S. schools. In effect, assimilation model programs and pluralist, but uncritical, multicultural curriculums have either had negative impacts or have become part of the essentialization of the non-white Other (Kubota, 1999). This is primarily due to the devalued "cultural capital" of non-dominant groups by educational institutions (Bourdieu 1977, Fine 1994, McLaren 1994), often resulting from Western exoticization, colonization, and representation of non-Western cultures (Said, 1978). In schools, language minority students and non-Whites in general are imposed with subordinate identities that are often learned and result in conveyed institutional messages that their language and culture are "defective" or "deficient" when measured against the mainstream standard (Steele, 1992; Tyson 1999). Through educational institutions, stigmatized labels and identities, or the naming that Bourdieu refers to in Language and Symbolic Power (1991:121) make "the person instituted feel obliged to comply with this definition [the name/label given], and with the status of his or her function. " According to Pepi Leistyna (1997:272), the very term minority is problematic for to refer to non-whites as "minorities" and to use hyphenations is already a "marker of low status" that has "historically been used to categorize `other' racial groups. " The coercive push to conform to the hegemonic rhetoric of the dominant culture is prevalent in the discourse of U.S. schools (Darder, 1991). Clearly, the push to become a "good U.S. citizen" implies that students of color are "expected to assimilate to white "American" standards and in so doing discard the values of their primary language, breaking free of all bonds to a cultural or ethnic identity" (Darder, 1991). However, this is not so easy a task for non-white students who will remain marginalized simply for the color of their skin. The result is a paradox of contradiction in which language minority students are often confused as they strive to become "mainstream," while encountering the hurdles and barriers imposed by systemic racism. Language minority students and non-Whites in general are coerced to attain the unattainable--that of becoming like what is perceived as "true Americans" through false images presented by the media, school texts, and other sources that shape the popular notions of what "Americans" should be. …