Pláticas on deportation: Bilingual teachers’ movidas countering entangled discursive violence through sociocultural critique

Abstract

We describe and analyze bilingual teacher discursive moves in an out-of-school cultural enrichment program, La Academia, highlighting their discursive moves, or sociocultural movidas de plática, which gave greater discursive space for teachers to engage in sociocultural critique through personal narratives and collective dialogue. La Academia is an out-of-school, Mexican American Studies program in central Texas for 3rd – 5th grade Latinx students using teacher pláticas as discursive spaces to socioculturally critique their working environment. We ethnographically and qualitatively analyze these pláticas as discursive spaces that worked to resist the deficit and violent institutional and societal discourses which dominated the schools. We use an ethnographic sample of a teacher plática in which teachers discuss their diverse approaches to addressing student fears of family deportation. We argue that a key component of these pláticas were the counter discursive movidas that the teachers practiced that helped the teacher group critique these discourses by promoting personal narratives and collective sociocultural critique. We describe these discursive moves as sociocultural movidas de plática, discursive strategies that teachers used to open up the discursive space to critique the affective and epistemic violence they experienced as bilingual teachers and instead promote a more culturally revitalizing discourse.