UC Santa Barbara

Over the past twenty years, in educational settings throughout the United States, young people who are members of minoritized linguistic and cultural groups, especially Latinxs, have been subjected to legalized bigotry via the banning of their language and culture from the classroom. In the face of such systematic marginalization, Mexican-heritage youth in California have been engaging in a variety of efforts both within and beyond the school setting to demand linguistically based social and educational justice for themselves, their families, and their communities. This chapter discusses the work of some of these youth, who have collaborated with the authors in a special program, SKILLS, that combines academic outreach, original research, and social justice. In these collaborations, young people’s positionality as agents, and not merely beneficiaries, of social change, is central to the work of fostering sociolinguistic justice. Acknowledging and learning from youth agency is central to efforts to make teaching and research about language, culture, and society more inclusive, just, humanized, and culturally sustaining.