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Critically assessing the 1968 Bilingual EducationAct at 50 years: Taming tongues and Latinxcommunities

Ofelia García & Kenzo Ka-Fai Sung

To cite this article: Ofelia García & Kenzo Ka-Fai Sung (2018): Critically assessing the 1968Bilingual Education Act at 50 years: Taming tongues and Latinx communities, Bilingual ResearchJournal, DOI: 10.1080/15235882.2018.1529642

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Published online: 15 Oct 2018.

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Critically assessing the 1968 Bilingual Education Act at 50 years:Taming tongues and Latinx communitiesOfelia Garcíaa,b and Kenzo Ka-Fai Sung a,b

aThe Graduate Center, City University of New York; bRowan University

ABSTRACTAs the 1968 Bilingual Education Act (BEA) reaches its 50th anniversary, weprovide a critical historical review of its contradictory origins and legacy. Bydistilling the BEA’s history into three periods that we label “power to thepeople,” “pride for the people,” and “profit from the people,” we demon-strate that the bill was never meant to fully support 1960s Latinx activists’goal for a race radical bilingual education to confront racism and structuralinequities, yet it offered a transitory moment in which aspirations for suchgoals were partially realized. This finding is significant, as the article con-cludes by exploring what possibilities there are to create new moments toimagine more in this neoliberal multicultural era of dual language educa-tion, where bilingualism and cultural diversity are too often commodifiedoff the proverbial backs of Latinx youth.

Introduction

Current bilingual education supporters in the United States often highlight the importance of the1968 Bilingual Education Act (BEA) on its now semicentennial anniversary. However, this articledemonstrates that the BEA’s passage was never meant to fully support the 1960s Latinx activists’goals for bilingual education as part of a broader agenda to confront the racism and structuralinequalities in U.S. society, a key point to critically assessing its contradictory origins and under-standing its problematic trajectory over the past 50 years. Borrowing a metaphor from Anzaldúa(1987/2012) as subtitle to this article, we illustrate that despite widespread Latinx support for a moreradical version of bilingual education as a tool to culturally and politically empowerment, the BEApromoted bilingual education programs that too often tamed the tongues and silenced the voices oflanguage-minoritized communities.

We first review the historical context surrounding the BEA’s passage, paying particularattention to the Chicanx and Puerto Rican community struggles for bilingual education as away of claiming some power over their children’s education. We refer to this as the period ofPower to the People. We then discuss how policy makers coopted these goals, providing insteada BEA that at least initially seemed to offer Latinxs pride in being bilingual and bicultural. Yetwe note that in this subsequent Pride for the People era, even this idea of pride was contested,as White nativist blowback pushed bilingual education programming toward English-onlyinstruction and immersion. Finally, we reflect on how bilingual education has changed in

CONTACT Ofelia García ogarcia@gc.cuny.edu Graduate Center, CUNY, Urban Education, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016.Ofelia García is a professor in the Ph.D. programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Centerof the City University of New York. García has published widely in the areas of bilingualism and bilingual education, the education ofemergent bilinguals, sociology of language, and language policy. She is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Kenzo Ka-Fai Sung, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Urban Education and Education Foundations, and affiliated faculty with AfricanaStudies and American Studies, at Rowan University. His research areas include urban education and policy, bilingual education, ethnicstudies, critical race theory, history of education, political economy, and social movements and reforms.© 2018 the National Association for Bilingual Education

BILINGUAL RESEARCH JOURNALhttps://doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2018.1529642

the decades leading up to and since the BEA was abolished with the 2001 No Child LeftBehind Act. In doing so, we consider what has been lost or gained in this current Profit fromthe People neoliberal era, where debates tying bilingual education to linguistic and culturalpride are giving way to a commodified bilingualism built on the proverbial backs of Latinxyouth through so-called dual language programs.

In this article we focus on Chicanx and Puerto Rican communities, the largest Latinx groups inthe United States at the time of the passage of the BEA. This choice is not meant to diminish theimportant role that Native Americans played in the original struggles over language education andthe continued efforts to develop meaningful bilingual education programs among many othercommunities, including, for example, other Latinx, Chinese, Haitians, Koreans, Russians,Vietnamese, and Arabic speakers. Rather, our emphasis on the Chicanx and Puerto Rican commu-nities merely acknowledges the important historical role that they have had, and continue to have, inthe contestation over current federal bilingual education policy.

Power to the people: La educación bilingüe y civil rights

The demands to provide Latinx children bilingual education in the United States did not start duringthe passage of the 1968 BEA. Its roots have a much longer history born of war, conquest, andresistance. In the Southwest, the history goes back to the period following the Mexican-AmericanWar (1846–1848) and the annexation of all or parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, NewMexico, Texas, Utah, and small sections of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming (Menchaca, 1999). Thismilitary conquest was followed by an explicitly raced language policy formation in which Spanish wassubstituted for English as the official language of school instruction, including in Texas by 1858, inCalifornia by 1855, and in New Mexico by 1921 (Hernández-Chávez, 1995).1 In the Northeast, itsorigins start with the gradual demands of the Puerto Rican community, citizens by virtue of the JonesAct (1917), which cemented Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. colony. Puerto Ricans clamored for anadequate education for their Spanish-speaking children following their migration to New York Citystarting in the early 20th century and accelerating after World War II (Meléndez, 2017).

U.S. Southwest: El Movimiento

In the Southwest, scholars have documented how Mexican Americans advocated for Spanish in theirchildren’s education throughout the 19th and early 20th century (Blanton, 2007; San Miguel, 1987,1999). As migration from Mexico increased during the 20th century (Gutierrez, 1995),U.S. politicians responded by doubling down on the imposition of English and annihilation ofwhat was perceived to be the “Mexican problem” of Spanish language and Mexican culture(González, 2001). Mexican American children too often were not allowed any access to local schools(González, 1990), and if they were able to enroll, their education was substandard at best. Mexicanancestry and the speaking of Spanish, which was perceived as “language deficiency,” were used ascriteria for segregating Mexican American children into separate classrooms and schools that largelyfocused on Americanization and industrial education to maintain the existing socioeconomic order(Berta-Avila, Revilla, & Figueroa, 2011; González, 1990; Ochoa, 2016; San Miguel & Valencia, 1998).

Against this oppressive backdrop, Mexican American families fought back. Beyond other orga-nizing efforts (Urrieta, 2004), parents began challenging school policies through the courts (SanMiguel & Valencia, 1998; Valencia, 2008) within what has recently been labeled the “long civil rightsmovement” that began during the 1930s alongside the Great Depression and New Deal (Hall, 2005).For example, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) came into being in 1929 tofight the racialized social, economic, and political exclusion that Mexican Americans were experien-cing. LULAC viewed schooling as key to this goal, as evidenced in its first major legal initiative, Riov. Salvatierra (1930), in which LULAC sued Texas’s Del Rio Independent School District for racialsegregation that resulted in partial victory (Kaplowitz, 2005). Mexican Americans also agitated

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outside of formal organizations, including the 1931 Lemon Grove Case in California, where parentsrallied and won the first Mexican American district desegregation ruling (Alvarez, 1986). These winsculminated in the Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947) ruling that Mexican American youthin California’s schools could not be segregated, providing a key precedent for Brown v. Board ofEducation (1954) (González, 1990).

The 1954 Brown decision to racially desegregate schools heralded the beginning of the CivilRights Movement (CRM) that challenged the racial injustices, discrimination, and segregationexperienced by African American communities. The CRM produced a variety of legal wins, includ-ing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, ornational origin; but continued outrage over slow progress and entrenched inequities moved protestsinto new directions in urban cities across the United States (Pulido, 2006). The fact that thesesupposedly official antiracist advances were largely understood as inadequate by the late 1960s beliedwhat critical theorist Jodi Melamed (2011) describes as the rise of an insurgent racial formation(Omi & Winant, 1994) of race radicalism upon which new social movements arose and to whichstate policy makers were forced to respond.

Within this framework, the legal wins from Westminster to Brown—while rightfully celebratedand important to Civil Rights history—still represented what Melamed describes as a “racial liberal”racial formation where the White political elite was able to ensure that antiracist demands were“depoliticized and secured in advance of the differential value-making processes inherent to ColdWar Americanism and state-oriented transnational capitalism” (2011, p. 22). In doing so, the courtvictories represented an interest convergence that also benefited U.S. Cold War antiracist propa-ganda by evading recognition of the collective material responsibility of White America and byinstead blaming racism as an interpersonal issue premised on “inadequate knowledge, flawedreasoning, and the isolation of whites from blacks” (Melamed, 2011, p. 24; see also Bell, 1980;Dudziak, 2002).

However, the racial liberal order fell apart during the 1960s as a new range of race radical socialmovements arose. Symbolic of this shift was the much-publicized 1965 Watts race riots and 1966formation of the Black Panther Party, based on a Black Power platform in Oakland, CA (Bloom &Martin, 2016) that took a “race radical” stance in which assertions of race and racismwere reconsolidatedto explicitly challenge the “cultural, ideological, political, and material forces” as embedded withinAmerican society and “the genealogy of global capitalism” (Melamed, 2011, p. 49). Drawing inspirationfrom the Black Power and allied struggles, Mexican American and Puerto Rican communities in the1960s also asserted a new movement framework based on a race radical political consciousness thatrecognized their history as a colonized people who were minoritized through race and language (Ortiz,2018).

TheChicanomovement,ElMovimiento, grew out of this new consciousness amongMexicanAmericansand included the struggle over land grants, farm workers’ rights, voting and political rights, as well asbilingual education (Muñoz, 1989). Prominent figures of the early Chicano movement organized in ruralcommunities included César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, who cofounded the United Farm WorkersOrganizing Committee in 1962 and led the 1965 national grape boycott, and Reies López Tijerna, whofounded La Alianza in 1963 to fight for original Spanish land-grant rights. Yet by the mid to late 1960s, ElMovimiento clearly shifted focus toward organizing of urban Chicanx communities, where a majority ofMexicanAmericans now lived as farming jobs dried up andwhere unequal access to schooling continued tobe a key organizing issue that tied economic struggle to cultural survival (Sung, 2017).

Based on how prior civil rights organizing also shifted toward young, urban Black leaders whosemotto was Black Power, Mexican American high school and college students were similarly centralto the new generation of urban Chicanx organizing. Chicanx students organized around educationalissues tied to broader collective economic and cultural empowerment, since many students werebeing pushed out of their underresourced schools where Spanish was outlawed and they felt invisible(Donato, 1997). Indeed, despite the fact that roughly 80% of Mexican Americans were American-born (Sung, 2017), as of 1960 only 13% of adults had a high school diploma and only 6% attended

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college (García, 1997). Rodolfo “Corky” González helped define a new Chicano Movement identityin his 1967 poem “Yo Soy Joaquín”:

Yo soy Joaquín,perdido en un mundo de confusión:I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion,caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes,suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society.My fathers have lost the economic battleand won the struggle of cultural survival.And now! I must choose between the paradox ofvictory of the spirit, despite physical hunger,or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,sterilization of the soul and a full stomach.… .I refuse to be absorbed.

González’s (1967, reprinted, 1972) poem begins by expressing the struggles of being lost/perdido,confundido, scorned, suppressed, destroyed by modern society in which his ancestors lost aneconomic battle and thus now “won” the struggle for cultural survival. Chicanxs must suppo-sedly make a Faustian bargain between “victory of the spirit despite physical hunger” orcontinuing to “exist in the grasp of American social neurosis” to supposedly subsist. Gonzálezrejects this framing as a false choice, refusing to be absorbed, as he highlights the necessity forChicanxs to continue fighting for economic and political self-determination so that the nextgeneration may not be forced to live in such contradiction. It was in this refusal that theChicano Movimiento gained force and within which the fight over schooling and bilingualeducation was originally imagined.

Among the many Mexican American student groups being formed, none was more recognizedthan the Brown Berets. Starting as a Los Angeles, CA, high school group in May 1966, the YoungCitizens for Community Action evolved into the Brown Berets over the following year, as they took amore militant race radical stance toward confronting racism and supporting political and economicself-determination (Pulido, 2006). Within this broader framework, the Brown Berets saw meaningfuleducation as a key component. Cofounder Carlos Montes recalls the Brown Beret’s 13-point politicalprogram, which viewed self-determination as the goal, and agitating “for bilingual education, betterschool conditions, Chicano studies and more Chicano teachers” as one element within a broaderagenda that included “a return of our land, release of prisoners, jobs, education, housing, an end tothe destruction of the environment by the capitalists, open borders, solidarity with all revolutionarypeoples engaged in the struggle for self-determination” (Montes, 2003; also see “Thirteen PointProgram,” 1970).

As one of the first major initiatives, the Brown Berets helped spearhead the “Eastside Blowouts.”Predicted by the Los Angeles Times that the protests “could spell the beginning of a revolution”(McCurdy, 1968, p. c1), in March of 1968 over 15,000 Chicanx students, faculty, and communitymembers walked out of seven East Los Angeles high schools—leading to similar Mexican Americanstudent marches across California, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado (Chavez, 2002; Navarro, 1995; SanMiguel, 2001). As blowout organizers noted, the protesting Latinx students and parents alsoperceived bilingual education within larger educational and economic concerns (Bernal, 1998).Among the demands made by protesters to the Los Angeles Board of Education were the following:

(1) Compulsory bilingual education in all schools where there was a majority of MexicanAmerican students.

(2) The teaching of Spanish and Mexican American history, traditions, and cultural contribu-tions to all faculty and staff as in-service education.

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(3) The removal of all administrators and teachers who showed prejudice toward all MexicanAmerican students.

(4) The development of textbooks and curriculum to show Mexican American contributions toU.S. society and the injustices they have suffered. (McCurdy, 1968)

Although these demands were not met, many credit the walkouts with giving the MexicanAmerican community a sense of possibility and of sociopolitical consciousness. One of the studentparticipants, Joseph Rodríguez, recalls that although his high school, Garfield, had a 57% dropoutrate, one of the worst in the nation, “Until that day, it never crossed my mind that Garfield High wasrun-down, overcrowded and lagging behind public schools in wealthier white neighborhoods. Allthat changed after the blowouts” (Sahagun, 2018). Furthermore, as student organizer Vickie Castroexplained, school board grievances compiled from blowout protestors went beyond individualconsciousness raising to creating a new community base from which other Chicano Movementactions and organizations arose (Bernal, 1998; Trujillo, 1998).

The Mexican American community thus viewed bilingual education as one tool to help empowerthe community (Ochoa, 2016). To the extent that El Movimiento espoused bilingual education, it wasalways with connection to the broader race radical political economic project of self-determinationas tied to alleviating inequality, exclusion, segregation, racism, and poverty. Bilingual education wasnever meant to be isolated from the structural racism and material oppression that needed to bealleviated in the larger U.S. society, as well as in schools. The same was true for the other large Latinxcommunity of the 1960s––Puerto Ricans in New York.

U.S. Northeast: La Coalición Pro Educación BilingüeWhile the “Great Migration” to New York during the decade prior was beginning to ebb by the1960s, the struggles of Puerto Ricans only amplified as they faced racism across various institutions,including the public school system (Del Valle, 1998). Educationally, by the mid-1960s Puerto Ricansmade up roughly 10% of the total New York City population (Colón López, 2001; Sánchez-Korrol,1994) and constituted 21% of all New York City public school students (Castellanos, 1983). Despitetheir overrepresentation in the city schools, only 331 received high school academic diplomas, andonly 28 went on to college among the total 179,000 enrolled Puerto Rican students in 1963 (Lavietes,2002). This pattern of academic struggle was representative; as of 1966, 87% of all Puerto Ricansadults 25 years of age and older in the United States had dropped out without graduating from highschool, and the dropout rate for eighth grade was 53% (García, 2009, 2011).

So it was no surprise that Puerto Ricans, likeMexicanAmericans in the Southwest, also drew inspirationfrom the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to demand a more equitable education for their youth,as tied to a broader agenda of political and economic self-determination. Two Puerto Rican women inparticular were instrumental in demanding equal rights for Puerto Rican citizens that incorporated school-based issues. One was Antonia Pantoja, who founded the community organization ASPIRA in 1961 tocombat the student dropout rate by encouraging cultural pride, educational attainment, and leadershipdevelopment among Puerto Rican youth (Pantoja, 2002). The message of inspiring self-determinationthrough cultural awareness was popular. ASPIRA clubs spread to 13 city high schools by 1964, whenPantoja shifted her efforts toward structural reforms of the school system by helping draft an antipovertygrant request for $12.5 million to establish various programs, including bilingual prekindergarten classes,afterschool programs for at-risk students, and adult education classes (Lee, 2016).

The other woman was Evelina Antonetty, who founded United Bronx Parents (UBP) in 1964.Originally stemming from her work with the parents association at Public School 5, the purpose ofUBP was to “overcome theories of Puerto Rican inabilities and incapabilities” and “to free our peoplefrom being colonized in the educational, political, economical and social institutions” (Kaplan, 2018,p. 105). UBP offered the community, especially mothers, bilingual classes in adult basic educationand high school equivalency, political science, history, journalism, literature, law, Spanish, andEnglish as a second language. From this base, Antonetty established La Coalición Pro Educación

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Bilingüe and taught parents to defend bilingual education as a right for their children, which wasarguably her biggest legacy. As former UBP board member Vicky Gholson stated,

She was the spirit and the force behind bilingual education in the United States, to put it simply. It would nothave happened in the quick form and fashion that it did if it were not for her energy and her organizing.(DeBenedetto, 2011)

Soon enough, the early organizing efforts of Pantoja, Antonetty, and others, including GilbertoGerena Valentín and Manny Diaz, spilled into the foreground. In 1964 the National Association forPuerto Rican Civil Rights (NAPRCR) joined Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin to boycott theNYC Board of Education’s failure to enforce “mandatory integration and academic excellenceprograms” (Puerto Ricans Gains, 1964). Nearly half of the city’s public school children participated,with 464,361 students boycotting schools on February 3, 1964, including three-quarters of thestudents in Black-dominant Central Harlem and Washington Heights, as well as heavily PuertoRican-populated Lower East Side and East Harlem (Lee & Diaz, 2007, p. 52). Similar to the 1968Blowout grievences, NAPRCR demanded the teaching of Spanish in elementary schools and inte-grating a multicultural Puerto Rican-centered curriculum for all students, requiring all teachers topossess a basic knowledge of Spanish, appointing a Puerto Rican to the Board of Education, andeliminating English standardized aptitude tests.

As with the Eastside Blowouts, whereas the demands were largely left unfilled, the protest shaped a newrace radical consciousness among Puerto Ricans—and particularly Puerto Rican youth. Of the post-1964organizations, the best knownwas the Young Lords (Lee, 2016). Modeled after the Black Panther Party andBrown Berets, a New York City branch of the Chicago-based Young Lords formed in June 1969 (Morales,2016;Wanzer-Serrano, 2015). Their demands, which drew from a similar 13-point program, including jobsand housing, independence for Puerto Rico, and political and economic control over their lives, also stated:“We want a true education of our Creole culture and Spanish language… . The culture of our people is theonly true teaching” (Wanzer, 2010, p. 10). Beyond protesting issues from police brutality to students’ rights,the Young Lords also began programs such as free breakfasts for children, a health clinic, and Puerto Ricanhistory classes in New York City—as did branches in other cities across the East Coast and Midwest(Abramson & Morales, 1971/2011; Wanzer-Serrano, 2015).

The goal of this article section has been to highlight the often-minimized historical context withinwhich Latinx organizing and demands for bilingual education connected to a broader agenda ofrecentering power to the people through political and economic self-determination. Likewise, as wewill illustrate in the next section, the Bilingual Education Act’s passage cannot be divorced from itshistoric context—as the contradictions that limited its effectiveness and eventually led to its downfallwere the same aspects that allowed its widespread Congressional support and eventual passage in thefirst place. Indeed, the BEA’s contradictory legacy began in 1968, the same watershed year in whichthe Civil Rights Era moved into a new phase marked both by tragic ends and inspired newbeginnings, ranging from the assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and RobertKennedy and the Vietnam War My Lai massacre, to student protests for a Third World College atSan Francisco State College and against racist policies at Columbia University, and Miss Americacontest protests that sparked national recognition of the feminist movement.

Pride for the people: The Bilingual Education Act and liberal multiculturalism

Substituting power for pride

As images of people protesting and cities burning flashed across television screens throughout the1960s, educators and politicians also began to strategically support ending segregated English-onlyschools for Latinx students. In 1966 the National Education Association (NEA) released The InvisibleMinority, a report on the status of Latinx education that was influential in the BEA’s 1967Congressional hearings. The report detailed how underresourced, English-only schooling negatively

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shaped Latinx students’ academic and cultural identity, and it proposed bilingualism to improve self-esteem and school success (NEA, 1966). The findings were seen as groundbreaking in how theyhighlighted discriminatory school practices and challenged assimilationism. However, despite pro-moting Spanish as a tool to improve self-esteem and achievement, the report still echoed a culturaldeficit framing that referenced speaking Spanish as a “handicap” to be overcome by learning Englishat the expense of Spanish and ultimately appreciate an “American” way of life (San Miguel, 2004).

This seeming contradictory explanation of Latinx linguistic and educational struggle capturedboth the possibility and limitations present during the BEA’s passage and early legacy. Just as theshift from racial integration to political and economic self-determination was symbolic in 1960sorganizing, state representatives were forced to shift their response in the face of these newdisruptions to the social order. As Melamed (2011) explains, the need for the state to legitimateitself anew forced a shift from the postwar “racial liberalist” stance focused on blaming racism on theWhite individual prejudices toward and social isolation from Blacks that marked policy-makerresponses to early Civil Rights struggles for integration and antidiscrimination policies. In doingso, a new “liberal multiculturalist” position arose supposedly aligned with the rise of Black Powerand allied race radical movements that demanded cultural recognition as tied to political andeconomic self-determination. It is within this shifting liberal antiracist state position that the BEAarose as an explicitly racialized language policy formation.

While Melamed historicizes the “liberal multiculturalism” period in the 1980–90s, we reenvisionthis era to begin earlier and to have two distinct periodizations. The first “aspirational liberalmulticulturalism” period from the late 1960s to late 1970s focused on “representation and culturalrecognition [that] screened off differential power, dematerialized conceptions of race, and margin-alized antiracisms that addressed material disparities in racial outcomes” (Melamed, 2011, p. 34).While movement activists continued a race radical critique, among policy makers liberal multi-culturalism was a nearly uncontested hegemonic ideology during this period. The second “opposi-tional liberal multiculturalism” 1980–90s period aligns with Melamed’s literary cultural wars, whereopposition to, and debate over, liberal multiculturalism is legitimated in mainstream discourse, andprior policies that supported minoritized cultural pride are challenged. As this section will illustrate,the BEA’s trajectory can be understood within this periodization from its initial 1960–70s birth andexpansion to its later retrenchment and fall in the 1980–90s.

Like the 1966 NEA report, the 1967 Congressional hearings on the BEA promoted bilingualeducation as a means to improve Latinx students’ self-esteem through finding some pride in theirlanguage and culture. Yet policy makers did so within the War on Poverty’s leaning on “learningtheir way of poverty” (Silver & Silver, 1991) that divorced the bill from Latinx activists’ broaderpolitical and economic struggle and instead tied it to a cultural deficit discourse of handicaps thatLatinxs must overcome to find work and improve their economic standing. For example, whenSenator Ralph Yarborough (D-TX) began the BEA bill hearings, he stated that Latinx students werevictims of “the cruelest forms of discrimination” and that “English-only policies, no-Spanish speak-ing rules, and cultural degradation have caused great psychological harm to these children andcontributed to their poor performance in schools” (Bilingual Education: Hearings, 1967, pp. 599–600). Yarborough continued that bilingual education could help overcome this linguistic and culturaldiscrimination, thereby improving self-esteem and school achievement.

Yet promoting student cultural pride did not mean that policy makers inherently viewed Spanishas an asset. Rather, as initiators of the Senate and House BEA bills Yarborough and Rep. EdwardRoybal (D-CA) explained in another 1967 proceeding, “Children with knowledge of anotherlanguage” are “handicapped … and in need of immediate and aggressive remedial action to helpovercome this handicap” (Calvo, 1968, p. 34). Within this framework, bilingual education allowedpolicy makers to redirect Latinx economic and political self-determination demands into self-helpreforms. Cultural pride was seen as a tool to help Latinx students economically by building humancapital and social mobility through school success, and bilingual education programs allowed theinstitutional recognition of particular Latinx leaders to maintain social control of their youth by

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becoming middle-class state-authorized role models to both support and discipline potentially“problematic” urban Latinx families and communities (Sung, 2017).

While Latinx activists recognized the problematic framing, they hoped the BEA would still offer achance to address some genuine educational, economic, and political concerns. As Latinx povertycontinued to rise during the 1960s despite legal civil rights victories, strategically allying with policymakers where agendas seemed to overlap seemed worthwhile (Sung, 2017). Activists also believedthe BEA would galvanize Latinx communities toward other efforts, highlighting what anthropologistRenato Rosaldo (2003) called “cultural citizenship” that went beyond individuals’ discrete civicactions to include collective organizing of minoritized groups to make political demands. Thus,activists offered conditional support that did not simply echo policy makers. For instance, whenLULAC president Alfred Hernández finished his BEA hearing testimony, Senator Yarborough asked:“If these children learned English, you don’t think they would have any difficult getting a job or fullyintegrating into our society in an economic way?” (Bilingual Education: Hearings, 1967, p. 401).Hernandez answered only that “This has been a definite barrier for the Mexican American,”reiterating his stance that learning English was important but not the only nor primary barrierLatinxs faced to economic or social integration.

While the BEA passed, Latinx activists’ hopes for bilingual education were ultimately coopted bypolicy makers who redirected the discourse toward a liberal multicultural framing that offeredcultural pride as divorced from broader political economic critiques. And so the BEA came intobeing with the Latinx community and the state mostly at odds about its goals. Although Latinxactivists still hoped that bilingual education held the possibility of educating their own children witha historical consciousness of who they were as conquered and colonized people, and with their ownbilingual practices at the center, mainstream educators largely tolerated it only as a more effectiveprogram to teach English and to Americanize—this time using the Latinx community as theeducators and agents of Americanization.

This is not to say that the bipartisan support for its passage during a period of intense partisanstruggles over other civil rights and educational initiatives was no small victory in itself. Indeed,President Lyndon B. Johnson’s public statement upon signing the BEA (Title VII of the Elementaryand Secondary Education Act) that now “thousands of children of Latin descent, young Indians, andothers, will get … to believe in themselves, in their basic worth as human beings, and in their nativecapacities” (cited in Andersson & Boyer, 1970, p. 1) provided a new version of liberal antiracistimagining—and provided minoritized communities the opportunity initially to make further strides.Without Latinx activism the BEA would not exist, but its creation was as much a response to providea genuine concession as it was to offer an additional tool to channel more radical Latinx demands.

This contradiction in the BEA’s origin would become its downfall in the coming decades, but inthe immediate term there were more pressing issues. For one, there was no federal bilingualeducation funding provided for the first year and a half. Second, once funding was finally appro-priated, the law’s wording of providing “financial assistance to local educational agencies to developand carry out new and imaginative elementary and secondary school programs designed to meetthese special educational needs of the large numbers of children of limited English-speaking abilityin the United States” (PL90–247) led to even more questions, as it did not require districts to providebilingual education nor define what bilingual education should even look like. Even so, the federalBEA opened the door for other policy changes at the state level, and between 1968 to 1974 sixteenstates either passed bilingual education bills or repealed English-only laws (San Miguel, 2004).

In addition, the BEA’s support for “imaginative” programs fueled the early hopes of Latinxcommunity leaders, who often rushed to prepare themselves as bilingual educators and open upcommunity-based programs where viable to do so. Despite these “maintenance” bilingual educationprograms often being relegated to school basements (Flores & García, 2017) and hallways, the idea ofat least being able to create culturally affirming school spaces for Latinx students was still appealing.Alicia Pousada recalls, “Bilingual education was on the agenda of every Puerto Rican school boardcandidate or politician… . Besides a pedagogical reform, it was a source of ethnic cohesion and a

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source of community control” (1987, p. 19). In 1972 New York City opened the Office of BilingualEducation with Hernán La Fontaine, a Puerto Rican educator and principal of the first bilingualschool, PS. 25, as director (Kaplan, 2018; Pousada, 1984). That same year, District 4 in East Harlem,El Barrio, became the first Puerto Rican-controlled school district in the city’s history, and in 1974East Harlem was declared a “bilingual school district” (García, 2011).

Cultural pride to culture wars

Yet the initial excitement among Latinx and other minoritized groups advocating for bilingualeducation was obviously tempered by challenges across many quarters. While there were somehopeful beacons, one of the first national studies evaluating bilingual education programs found thatroughly 80% actively discouraged use of the child’s native language (Kjolseth, 1972). Likewise, insome communities the struggle to create bilingual education programs was met with resistance fromlocal districts. The first major legal challenge to reach the U.S. Supreme Court was initiated in 1968by Chinatown families and community activists suing San Francisco schools for inadequate educa-tion being provided to their children. The resulting 1974 Lau v. Nichols ruling was germinal for tworeasons: (a) it found English-only education to be a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act equaleducation clause, and (b) it required schools to provide special assistance for students to learnEnglish, beyond just providing equal access to schools, textbooks, curriculum, etc. (García &Kleifgen, 2018).

In 1972, ASPIRA also filed a federal court suit to demand Spanish bilingual classroom instructionin New York City for struggling Puerto Rican students, who still had only a 30% high schoolgraduation rate (Reyes, 2006; Santiago, 1986). After Lau was decided, the ASPIRA Consent Decreewas signed in 1974, requiring that children with “English language deficiency” be given a “plannedand systematic program” to develop English, but also: instruction in substantive courses in Spanish(e.g., courses in mathematics, science, and social studies) … [and] a planned and systematic programdesigned to reinforce and develop the child’s use of Spanish” (Aspira v. Board, 1974a, para. 2, cited inSantiago, 1986, p. 160, our italics). Thus, like civil rights activists of a generation prior, community-based bilingual education advocates were initially able to use the federal courts to help maintainmomentum in the face of increasing resistance to helping their children be “bilingual and bicultural,as well as economically, socially and politically able to function in U.S. society” (Pousada,1987, p. 20).

Applying judicial pressure seemed wise, considering what the 1974 BEA reauthorization offered.While finally defining what bilingual education was, the new act stepped even further away from theLatinx activists’ initial intentions. Bilingual education was instead recast as transitional, with“instruction given in, and study of, English and (to the extent necessary to allow a child to progresseffectively through the education system) the native language of the children of limited Englishspeaking ability” (quoted in Castellanos, 1983, p. 120), with the goal of transitioning from homelanguage to English rather than developing both languages. The 1974 reauthorization and Laudecision expanded bilingual education, increasing funding from $58 million to $135 million andprogram numbers from 383 to 565 between 1974 and 1978 (San Miguel, 2004). However, thisinstitutionalization arose within debated expectations over the purpose of home-language supportinstead of how bilingual education could meaningfully build toward self-determination, the hope1960s Latinx activists had for the original act (Flores, 2016).

If the original BEA offered aspirations of liberal multiculturalism in which cultural affirmation ofLatinx children in bilingual education classes and pride in the symbolism of legitimating the Spanishlanguage offered hope, however diminished from 1960s Latinx activists vision of self-determination,then the 1980s were marked by the increasing conservative backlash toward even this limitedframework. The opening salvo at the federal level happened in 1980 when President RonaldReagan stated,

BILINGUAL RESEARCH JOURNAL 9

It is absolutely wrong and against American concepts to have a bilingual education program that is now openly,admittedly dedicated to preserving their [non-English] native language and never getting them adequate inEnglish so they can go out into the job market and participate. (Democrat-Chronicle, Rochester, 1981, p. 2A)

Putting bite behind his bark, Reagan’s first Secretary of Education withdrew the existing LauRemedies by April 1982, and now even the “basements” to which the bilingual education programshad been relegated started to lose oxygen.

Conservative critics were now emboldened, and bilingual education became one of the front linesin the new “culture wars” that fundamentally challenged the ideology of liberal multiculturalism. Aswith the 1960s, political economic changes challenged the social order, as mounting poverty becamea concern amid the economic downturns of the 1970s and early 1980s. However, instead of PresidentJohnson’s liberal War on Poverty, President Reagan’s policies scapegoated immigrants with a focuson detaining undocumented workers alongside increased funding for detention centers and militar-izing border control. This newly ascendant nativism also targeted bilingual education, and in 1981the first constitutional amendment to declare English the official language of the United States wasintroduced in the Senate, alongside a wave of 29 state laws declaring English the official languagepassed between 1978–2007 (Bale, 2009).

In response to conservative attacks on bilingual education, supporters shifted toward an evennarrower platform of trying to legitimate itself by both professionalizing the research to showpedagogical effectiveness and the training of bilingual education teachers in hopes of programmaticsurvival. In doing so, the bilingual education profession suffered two losses. On the one hand, manybilingual educators lost their jobs, as teacher certification requirements demanded passing standar-dized tests that measured mostly norms of written English, instead of content or pedagogicalknowledge; on the other hand, the growing professionalization of bilingual education and itseducators distanced it from its beginnings in minoritized communities and commitment to them(Flores & García, 2017). This followed the shift in mainstream educational policy and researchdebates over bilingual education that now shied away from prior goals of cultural pride andaffirmation to instead focus on implementing programs that most quickly were said to teachEnglish regardless of other potential effects.

Not surprisingly, starting in the 1980s every subsequent reauthorization of the BEA showed amovimiento in retreat, moving toward its own annihilation. The 1984 BEA reauthorization openedthe door to funding English-only programs, although it imposed a quota of no more than 4% of thetotal of programs funded. That quota was raised to 25% in the 1988 reauthorization. Finally, thatquota was lifted in the last reauthorization of the Bilingual Education Act in 1994. And for the firsttime, serious attention was given to two-way immersion programs, a type of program that tookprimary attention off the educational needs of minoritized youth and communities. In place of theliberal multiculturalist aspirations that originally drove 1960s policy makers, there was now anascending neoliberal trend in bilingual education that distancing itself from its beginnings hascome to be called “dual language education.”

Profit from the people: Neoliberal “dual language” education

The move to channeling BEA funds into English-only programs accelerated throughout the 1980–90s, and bilingual education’s end, as we had known it up to then, came in the state where theEastside Blowouts occurred 30 years prior. In 1998 California Proposition 227 won on an anti-immigrant, nativist campaign and effectively dismantled bilingual education programs by mandatingEnglish immersion instruction in nearly all cases. Subsequent antibilingual education laws werepassed in Arizona (2000), Massachusetts (2002), and almost passed in Colorado (2002) and Oregon(2008). This wave of state-level legislation had a chilling effect on federal education policy. In 2001,the BEA was replaced with a new Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act (PL 107–110), now titled“Language Instruction for Limited English Proficient and Immigrant Students.” In doing so, the

10 O. GARCÍA AND K. K.-F. SUNG

word “bilingual,” what Crawford (2004, p. 35) has called “the B-Word,” was progressively silenced.With NCLB, every federal office with the word “bilingual” in its name was renamed, substituting“bilingual” for “English language acquisition” (García, 2009).

At the same time, a type of bilingual education called “dual language” education (DL) started tomake inroads nationally. DL programs, as Lindholm-Leary (2001) explains, are “similar in structureto immersion programs, but differ from the previously mentioned variations of immersion in termsof one very important factor: student composition” (p. 30). She states that unlike other Englishimmersion programs, in DL classes “English-dominant and target-language-dominant students arepurposefully integrated with the goals of developing bilingual skills, academic excellence, andpositive cross-cultural and personal competency attitudes for both groups of students” (p. 30).Modeled after Canadian immersion programs, DL is purposely geared toward language-majoritystudents and the teaching of two languages.

Yet the reframing of bilingual education to focus its benefits for language-majority students twists theoriginal intentions of both 1960s Latinx activists and liberal multiculturalists who viewed bilingualeducation as specifically attending to the needs of linguistically minoritized youth and communities.Instead of the prior bilingual education lens of educational equity and cultural affirmations, regardless ofwhether they were connected to a broader agenda of self-determination or not, an ideology in whichneoliberal marketization of everything, including the ideas of multiculturalism and culture itself, nowforms the new basis undergirding social consciousness and formations. Melamed (2011) has referred tothis ideology as “neoliberal multiculturalism.” According toMelamed, neoliberal multiculturalism offersa type of consumerist diversity in which “diversity has been cast as the essence of neoliberal exchange”(p. 42) and where multicultural “experiences” and multilingualism are seen as valuable assets that cannow be commodified in educational settings such as DL classes.

DL programs thus remove the historical contexts from which bilingual education programs wereoriginally offered and instead focus on how bilingualism can benefit those who are already languagedominant. In doing so, the race radical and liberalmulticultural imaginations of social equity forminoritizedcommunities through bilingual education are replaced by DL programs that promote the accumulation ofmulticultural/lingual capital through the “hyperextraction of surplus value from racialized bodies”(Melamed, 2011, p. 42) in the form of authentic “diversity” experiences—most often in the form of learningSpanish with and from low-income Latinx students. As Pimentel (2011) reiterates, in many of these DLprograms, Latinx students become “commodities that can be consumed by White, English-speakingstudents” (p. 351) insofar as they maintain their profitable value as authentic Spanish-speaking models.

Although DL programs are gaining in popularity throughout the country, and despite research thatacknowledges some gains for bilingual students in programs that are implemented well (Li, Steele,Slater, Bacon, & Miller, 2016; Lindholm-Leary & Hernández, 2011; Thomas & Collier, 2002), manyscholars have decried the abandonment of an equitable education for language-minoritized studentsand increased focus on bilingualism for neoliberal economic interests and global human capital (forexample, see Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Flores, 2013; García, Menken, Velasco, & Vogel, 2018; Palmer,Martínez, Mateus, & Henderson, 2014; Valdés, 1997; Varghese & Park, 2010). Early on, Valdés (1997)had issued a cautionary note about this danger. It is precisely the attention to bilingualism as aneconomic resource for those who already hold power that has fueled the 2016 reversal of California’sbilingual education restrictions with Proposition 58. Flores and García (2017) have called attention tothis shift from what were previously perceived as “basement” programs to now being showcased as“boutique” programs where everyone can supposedly invest in diversity; but yet, limited access to theseprograms maintains a social hierarchy too often built on the backs of Latinx students and communities.

Yet many Latinx families all over the country, anxious to educate their children bilingually, havegone along with the DL wave knowing that it is often the only opportunity they have to do so. Tothis end, Latinx communities have mostly accepted DL programs as the only way to educate theirchildren bilingually—in the worst cases, in programs where their children are being used as linguisticresources for White children; in the best cases, in programs that provide instruction in Spanish, aswell as English, without raising their children’s consciousness of the raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores

BILINGUAL RESEARCH JOURNAL 11

& Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017; Sung, 2018) to which they are subjected. Furthermore, to providethis educational experience for White students, DL programs must maintain a dislocated conscious-ness (Sung, 2015) among minoritized students who simultaneously need to “buy” into the value ofDL education and sustain an “authentic” otherness culturally and linguistically. In this way, Latinxstudents in DL programs many times become commodifiable in DL programs that White mono-lingual families, motivated by a neoliberal multicultural ideology, aim to profit from.

Conclusion

Following the BEA’s origin and trajectory over the past 50 years illuminates two key points. First, theNEA Invisible Minority report, BEA’s passage, and early subsequent victories represented an aspira-tional stage, in which the bilingual education was meant to selectively respond to Latinx demandsand assuage civil unrest. The BEA thus offered a genuine concession that also allowed policy makersto legitimate a liberal multicultural stance of celebrating cultural pride while trying to divorce it fromthe broader race radical political and economic agenda that 1960s Latinx activists were fighting for.By coopting the political economic dimensions, policy makers were able to tame Latinx demands forthe material power of self-determination and instead reframe bilingual education as a compensatoryprogram where “linguistically deficient students” could find enough pride in their home languageand culture to build their self-esteem, learn English, succeed in school, and be productive Americancitizens (Flores, 2017; Flores & García, 2017).

Second, the opposition to this liberal multicultural brand of bilingual education produced a newideology in which bilingual education became divorced from the concerns of educating minoritizedstudents and instead became a tool for language-majority students to gain cultural capital in theform of a second language and “diversity experience.” As Sánchez, García, and Solorza (2017) state,“The difference between teaching students bilingually and teaching two languages lies at the heart ofthe change” (p. 39). Within this new version of bilingual education, the word “bilingual” disappears,and community connections and cultural relevancy are replaced by a neoliberal multiculturalimaginary in which bilingualism itself becomes a commodifiable educational choice within a con-sumerist version of diversity. Latinx families are now also increasingly choosing DL programs,creating a seeming interest convergence in which conditional consent is offered because of thevery limited other options they have to educate their children bilingually.

While the BEAwas never designed to fully support 1960s Latinx activists’ goals for bilingual educationwithin a broader agenda for self-determination, the BEA’s legacy does not have to end here. Just as DLprograms breathed new life into how bilingual education could be imagined, the history of the 1960s hasshown that this can be done again if Latinx communities can galvanize anew for collective action thatlearns from past struggles. For example, Sánchez et al. (2017) have called for dual language bilingualprograms, bringing back the community’s dynamic bilingualism into perspective and emphasizing theeducation of bilingual children aware of racism, injustice, and struggling for possibilities that Latinxactivists originally imagined. Action informed by historical consciousness is a powerful tool from which1960s Latinx leaders drew strength in their organizing. We hope this article can make a small contribu-tion to untaming the next generation of Latinx and other minoritized community leaders so they can jointogether in light of #familiesbelongtogether, #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, #occupy, #noDAPL, and otherallied movements, that are critiquing the current social order.

Notes

1. We recognize the incomplete account offered here, as we do not have the space to include a longer history thatrightfully highlights how indigenous peoples and languages across the Americas were also colonized andextinguished as a product of settler colonialism enacted by the United States, as well as by Spain andMexico. For more on this important layered history see (Lowe, 2015; Wolfe, 2006).

12 O. GARCÍA AND K. K.-F. SUNG

ORCID

Kenzo Ka-Fai Sung http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0244-293X

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