Owning up: When you studied a language and earn your living from it, but it is systematically denied to others

Learning languages and becoming a language teacher are common activities around the world. Many people learn languages that are not spoken in their homes. They might study a new language at school, or they might move somewhere for a short or long time and learn a new language. It is also true that an estimated 60% of people are bi/multilingual; some of them live in communities that use two or more languages every day.

It is important to acknowledge a case like mine in the U.S., which also exists in other parts of the world. I was raised monolingually in English and started learning Spanish in school at age 11, and in adulthood I lived for periods of 1+ years in Spain and in Mexico. I learned it well enough to eventually become a linguist and a professor of Spanish.

However, many children in the U.S. whose families originally spoke Spanish did not get the opportunity to study it. They were required to take classes only in English; they and their families were mocked or bullied for speaking Spanish; they often experienced other kinds of structural racism and hardships that prevented them from developing Spanish proficiency.

Non-Latinx people need to acknowledge this. Especially the particularly painful irony that so many of us end up teaching Spanish to the very people it was stolen from.

I don’t believe that this constitutes an argument against learning other languages; it does not suggest that your white high school Spanish teacher ‘stole’ Spanish from anyone; nor does it deny that many people worked very hard to acquire their language abilities and now make excellent teachers, linguists, writers, scholars, etc. What I am saying is that I believe we should think very hard about our role in the system that allows us to earn money using a language that we had the privilege to add (and if we are white/white passing, we likely do not experience bullying for speaking it) while others who arguably have more of a right to that language cannot do so.

We should be working to put ourselves out of a job by building structures within which Latinx children and families have abundant access to high quality education in Spanish should they choose it. This says nothing about combatting structural racism, economic marginalization, and the xenophobic ideologies that plague this country, but it is a start.