Necropolitical Language Oppression From the Delegitimization to the Promotion of Local Spanish on the Texas Borderlands

Abstract

Drawing on what Roche (2022) refers as the necropolitics of language oppression, this article explains how the ideologies of language (Faltis, 2022b) come into play to delegitimize the bilingual languaging practices of Spanish speakers in Laredo, a city of 250,000 residents, most of whom are bilingual,
and who use local Spanish along with English throughout their days. I write this article for global Spanish teachers, heritage Spanish teachers, and bilingual teachers, all of whom hold views about the value and intellectual worth of local Spanish used in bilingual communities. In this article, I use the terms necropolitics (Roche, 2022), soft linguistic terrorism (Mena, 2023), global and local languages (García, 2014) and introduce the term Espancano to describe local bilingual practices. The goal of the article is to provide readers with ideas and actions that can be used to identify and counter necropolitical language oppression especially along the borderlands, but also in Spanish and bilingual programs situated in other areas of the country, where Spanish and bilingual teachers may also unknowingly incentivize necropolitical language oppression by positioning global Spanish above local Spanish.