At a book release celebration today, some of the book’s authors, editors and students will share their “local and personal” experiences of learning and teaching Spanish, offering a different perspective from the typical academic approach to “foreign” languages.
The “Aquí Se Habla” event takes place from 4-6 p.m. today, May 21, at the Centro Cultural César Chavez, 691 SW 26th St. It will feature the book’s co-editors, one of the contributing authors and several students who spent winter term in a seminar built around the ideas discussed in the book.
“Aquí Se Habla: Centering the Local and Personal in Spanish Education” is a collection of essays and conversations that seek to expand Spanish language learning and education in the U.S. beyond the confines of just what is taught in classrooms. That means wrestling with tension points like “institutional knowledge vs. embodied knowledge” and “visibility vs. invisibility,” said co-editor Adam Schwartz, associate professor in OSU’s School of Language, Culture and Society.
“Aquí se habla” translates to “Spoken here,” and examines the tension around why Spanish is considered a foreign language in the U.S., where it’s the second-most common language with about 43 million speakers.
“We have been socialized to understand that this language doesn’t belong here, that this country isn’t ‘Spanish-speaking enough,’ but we know that not to be the case,” Schwartz said. “This book is really a way of implicating ‘foreign-ness’ as dehumanizing the local and personal.”
His winter seminar (SPAN 399 Bilingüismo local y personal) gave students the opportunity to explore this topic in their own lived experiences. Before the book was officially released, the students were able to read it, ask questions directly to the authors and editors, and discuss how they saw the book’s various tension points play out in their own lives.
Among both the authors and the students, many grew up as children of Latin American immigrants or were raised along the U.S.-Mexico border. While they had some shared background, their experiences of bilingualism ran the gamut from being forbidden to speak Spanish in school to having their language celebrated in public and as a basis of their community, Schwartz said.
“We’re engaging in really nuanced conversations about identity, inclusivity, belonging; these tension points of what it means to be bilingual in the U.S., who wins, who benefits from that, and who less so,” he said. “We imagine this book as being an affirmation and also a point of reference for anyone who identifies as a speaker or communicator of local and personal Spanish.”
The May 21 celebration will feature a light meal and discussion with several students from Schwartz’s class; Schwartz and co-editors Devin Grammon and Sergio Loza from the University of Oregon and Dalia Magaña from UC Merced; contributing author and OSU assistant professor Valeria Ochoa, who will talk about her chapter, “Indigeneity in Spanish Heritage Language education: Personal and academic reflections;” and Natalia Fernández, archivist for the Oregon Multicultural Archives in OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center, where new contributions from Schwartz’s students have found a home.
“Aquí Se Habla” is now available at OSU’s Valley Library, in both hardback and ebook options.
Related Stories
