Spanish So White

Reviews

As a Spanish teacher with nearly 50 years of teaching experience, I can definitively state that, in my classes on language and social justice, Adam Schwartz’s marvelous, deeply personal, and well researched text will be de rigueur for reading, analyzing, and understanding topics of language teaching, language usage, and linguicism in the US context.

Adam Schwartz offers a groundbreaking reflection on how Whiteness and White supremacy have shaped his experiences as a student and teacher of Spanish. Part critical autoethnography, part analysis of race and racism in Spanish language education, Spanish so White invites readers to engage with antiracist scholarship in examining their own practices and to participate in a much-needed rethinking of how Spanish is taught in US schools. This is a groundbreaking contribution to our raciolinguistic understanding of Spanish and Spanish language education. Schwartz deftly outlines the weight of whiteness in language education and by doing so points us towards a new kind of Spanish language education. This book will be essential reading for sociolinguists, higher education and school administrators, and language teachers for years to come. This book brings to light how Spanish as taught in US classrooms is, despite the best of intentions, inextricably tied to the ways in which native Spanish speakers are racialized and stigmatized in America. Destined to be essential reading for language teachers and students, the analysis in Schwartz’s book is carried out with sensitivity, insight, humility and erudition, while packing punch after surprising punch.

This is a bold book about racism with a call to action that pushes us to dream beyond institutional limitations and realities [...] The accessible discursive style combined with the deeply critical analysis makes this text an excellent example of how scholarship should be written—grounded in sound theoretical perspectives, yet highly accessible to a wide audience of readers, including researchers and practitioners.

Given the clarity and thoroughness of the explanations regarding the dynamics of racialization of languages and their users, the text could be useful for preservice teachers or undergraduate students studying language and race, in addition to the author's intended audience of secondary and post- secondary teachers and students of Spanish. Schwartz provides a complete picture of the many crucial and urgent themes related to race and racism
that are currently affecting Spanish language education. He explains these complex themes in a way that is accessible and approachable to readers—even sometimes humorous with his various personal anecdotes.

...as a Latino scholar who conducts research on Latinas/os’ identity construction at the nexus of language, ethnicity, and race, I believe this book is an important resource for language teachers, student-teachers, program administrators, or anyone—White or non-White—seeking to identify and challenge racism in language education.

The book is at the same time broadly applicable and highly specific [...] this is a comprehensive work that takes on countless difficult issues in serious yet sensitive ways. Schwartz ventures on an introspective journey in which he is completely forthcoming and vulnerable. He is setting the example for the reader. As the cliché goes, he is being the change he wants to see in the world. Whether White Spanish teachers will follow his lead is another question. For those of us who want to try, his approach—self-reflection, active listening, calling in, and radical love—is our best option.

...one of the most unique, soulful L.A. memoirs I’ve read in years [...] Schwartz tracks his scholastic life with hilarious and touching photos and tales from elementary school to junior high [...] through helping students cope with COVID and Trump. The profe, an applied linguist whose specialty is Spanish language education in the U.S., argues that his journey to becoming an acolyte and advocate for the language of Cervantes is one anyone can take — and one that betters us all.

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