UCLA

The Los Angeles Unified School District has undertaken an experiment in the education of immigrant students learning English. Over the 2021-2023 school years, the district opened three new high school Academies for recently-immigrated students explicitly tasked with centering their home languages to support their success in school. The students and educators in these Academies are predominately Latinx and 25% of students reported a Mayan language as their home language. Recognizing that Indigenous languages and the home languages of young people from racialized communities represent knowledge- and value-systems historically excluded from and suppressed by schools, this dissertation asks what language policy in “newcomer” schools teaches about the futures we build with and for marginalized young people. Based on two years of ethnographic research across the three Academies, this study examines the official and practiced policies governing students’ home languages and the possible futures those policies facilitate or constrain.

By analyzing classroom observations, student work, more than 75 interviews with students, educators, and district leaders; and participant-observation in a youth-organizing group, this study engages the concept of relationality to argue that the enrollment of Indigenous, immigrant young people in U.S. public schools to achieve their self-determined goals is an insurgency against the colonial design of schooling. Drawing on the critical ethnography of language policy and raciolinguistic ideologies, this dissertation describes how progressive language policy can operate as a form of state counterinsurgency against immigrant young people’s claims to citizenship by operating as a flexible enclosure that works in concert with carceral institutions to control the mobility and sociality of immigrant young people. Thinking with abolition, the study identifies how educators develop subversive solidarity with immigrant educational insurgency through transnational teacher organizing. These insights demonstrate contemporary interrelations between language, race, and schooling from which we can identify the specificities of shared struggle and imagine anticolonial relationships between schools, educators, and racially minoritized communities.