#HispanicHeritageMonth Dear Spanish Teachers and colegas in general, as I mentioned before, I believe World Language classrooms are the perfect environment for praxis and I want to challenge you to create decolonized curricula and engage in hard ABAR pedagogy to teach Spanish.

What to do instead of the superficial #HHM activities based on gringuería?
Apply best practices:
*by humanizing speakers (not stereotyping/tokenizing) enough of dressing yourselves up in sombreros, ponchos, etc, or letting your students use our cultures as a costume #langchat

Our cultures are not a costume! Our cultures are not props! This so called innocent, fun games are extremely harmful in the long term.

*by de- gringoeing (de-centering whiteness of our language variations.)This especially, is terribly troubling.

It is not about language perfection at all (as I’ve heard folx claim when this gets pointed out) It is about non-native speakers who intentionally propagate a white-washed gringo version of our language that does not sound, look, or feel anything like our geolects. #langchat

Anglicized, made-up words, English grammatical structures, and mockery are not entertaining to us. They are not productive to intercultural communication or real language proficiency #langchat

Non native Educators who teach Spanish, should be perfecting and getting better at it by exposing themselves to the original sources. I’m not saying in any case here, that only native speakers should teach the language #langchat

I’m saying that if you belong to a hegemonic group, you must honor the speakers of said language by trying to teach our versions of it. Not your own. We belong to a minoritized community who is currently at peril in your country #langchat

You, thinking your anglicized version is better than our geolects is a form of supremacy. It is language colonialism.

*by using authentic resources
*by going beyond fun facts and the colonized calendar of US Schools (that biography pack/kit you bought to make a check on your to do list, is not enough)

*by centering curricula on native speakers voices, language & idiosyncrasy not what you think it is or looks like #ownvoices
*by presenting social justice issues in a non-anecdotic way (the goal being dismantling inequity of an oppressive system)

*by de-centering yourselves from it (if you do not belong to the Latinx/Hispanic community)
*by not appropriating or profiting from our legacy, heritage and language
*by including the voices of those who live in the margins within our Latinx world

*by not homogenizing us with the use of random sombreros, tacos, cacti, llamas or random Latinx or Spanish music conveying to your students the idea that we are all the same. A monolith.

That is dehumanizing!

We educators, are such a gift to the world when we decide to be en route for love & justice! any person regardless of their ethnicity can base their praxis on gringuería. I’ve seen many teachers of color falling for these old tired gringo tropes. Don’t do it, por favor!