With the rise in visibility of AfroLatinidad and the global reach of the Black Lives Matter movement, non-Black Latinxs have increasingly considered anti-Blackness as an inter- and intra-community issue. Accordingly, attention has been placed on the subtle ways in which anti-Blackness within Latinidad permeates the very discourses that construct a Latinx identity as Brown, resulting in ideologies that displace AfroLatinidad and render all Latinxs as “people of color” who cannot contribute to anti-Blackness. This thesis highlights counter discourses of Blackness and Latinidad that were redistributed by a Chicanx/Latinx podcast called the Bitter Brown Femmes (BBF). Specifically, I focus on episode 11 where hosts Cassandra and Ruben discuss a controversy surrounding a tweet that actress Gina Rodriguez posted after the trailer release of the film Black Panther. I begin with an analysis of the outrage that Rodriguez’s tweet erupted, linking it to the conceptual mutual exclusion of Blackness and Latinidad. I continue with an analysis of one of Rodriguez’s interviews in which she defends herself against being anti-Black by evoking discourses of mestizaje (racial mixture in Latin America), linking it to the denial of anti-Black inclusivity. I finish with a juxtaposition of how the BBF podcast uses their platform to deconstruct “subtle” (i.e., non-overt or seemingly non-violent) forms of anti-Blackness via community-internal discussions, using two major strategies that I call “highlighting the micro” and “collecting (y)our people”. In doing so, I highlight various discursive strategies that the hosts rely upon to move towards productive allyship for Black communities or what I title, Black accompaniment which requires the renegotiation of ideologies surrounding Latinidad.

Sociolinguistic approaches have become increasingly popular in Spanish language education (SLE) in order to implement curricula and assessment practices that build learners’ communicative competence. With this goal, researchers and educators are tasked with deciding how to represent the massive sociolinguistic diversity that exist in the Spanish-speaking world to learners who come from a range of sociolinguistic backgrounds. These goals precipitate new research on how learners’ embodiment, positionalities, and subjectivities influence the sociolinguistic variation they encounter, how they make sense of that sociolinguistic variation, and the types of sociolinguistic variation they wish to adopt or reject. Such processes are underexplored for L2 Spanish learners, and particularly for L2 Spanish learner of color. This dissertation collects ethnographic interviews from Spanish learners of color in which they recall interactions, discourses, and participation within communities of practice in which they have encountered terms of self-identification (or identity labels) and vocatives (or terms of address). Through an embodied sociolinguistic framework (Bucholtz and Hall, 2016), I examine how learners used their indexical fields – or the range of context-based social meanings attached to linguistic forms – in order to (1) decipher the meanings of identity labels they used or the vocatives they were called, and (2) decide how to integrate these terms into their own linguistic repertoires. For terms of self-identification, I find that learners with the same raciogendered identities may have overlapping and divergent ways that they discursively orient to terms of self-identification in Spanish. Moreover, their choices to adopt or reject particular terms reflect a desire to align with or challenge the discourses of how they are racialized in the Spanish-speaking world to which these terms are – or seem to be – connected. As for terms of address, I find that this intersubjective process requires learners to navigate agency with their native Spanish-speaking interlocuters. Similar to raciogendered labels, learners who were called vocatives that conflicted with their embodiment, positionalities, or subjectivities relied on their English indexical fields to justify the inadequacy they perceived these terms to have. This dissertation demonstrates that learners across proficiency levels sociolinguistic training, and interest in Spanish-speaking cultures continue to face complex processes of understanding how their embodiment is interpreted in Spanish-speaking contexts as well as how to ascribe social meaning to the terms that are used to capture their embodiment. As such, I conclude with a pedagogical intervention that draws upon (auto)ethnography and centers the learner as the expert for gathering and attempting to make sense of the sociolinguistic variation they encounter based on their embodiment.