http://amaejournal.utsa.edu ISSN: 2377-9187 Volume 12 Issue 2 2018 AMAE Invited Special Issue Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse in the Borderlands Guest Editor Brendan H. O’Connor Arizona State University Editors Patricia Sánchez The University of Texas at San Antonio Antonio J. Camacho AMAE, Inc. Associate Editors Julie L. Figueroa Sacramento State Lucila D. Ek The University of Texas at San Antonio Association of Mexican American Educators Journal A peer-reviewed, open access journal http://amaejournal.utsa.edu/ O’Connor Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 6 Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse in the Borderlands Brendan H. O’Connor Arizona State University “Where there is power,” wrote Foucault (1978), “there is resistance, and yet … this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (pp. 94-95). Foucault’s (1978) well-known formulation is as good a place as any to begin, since it speaks to the central concern of this collection of articles: the multiplex ways that the imposition of discursive power, and efforts to get speakers to consent to the marginalization of their linguistic practice, also “[depend] on a multiplicity of points of resistance” (p. 95). Famously, Foucault warned that power should not be mistaken with simple acts of domination or coercion but argued that it must be seen as “an intricate web of constraining interrelationships” (Prado, 2000, p. 73). Within this web, power relations are defined as much by individuals’ and communities’ acts of resistance as by others’ efforts to intimidate, constrain, or coerce them (Prado, 2000, p. 73). The articles in this invited special issue of the Association of Mexican-American Educators Journal on “Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse in the Borderlands” confront this duality head-on, testifying to the destructive effects of discursive power while simultaneously documenting the bravery and ingenuity of people’s counterhegemonic practice, or the myriad ways that speakers use language to push back against hegemonic forces. In each contribution, members of a borderlands community of practice—Indigenous Mexican teachers undergoing professional development in the U.S., Ysleta de Sur Pueblo tribal members on the Texas- Chihuahua border, bilingual teachers and students in South Texas and Paraguay, dual-language students in an inquiry-based science and engineering program, transfronterizo (border-crossing) university students, and Mexican-Americans throughout the history of the U.S. Southwest— encounter historicized, situated forms of linguistic hegemony y al mismo tiempo se enfrentan a esta hegemonía lingüística al desarrollar sus propias formas de responder, resistir, y persistir. Importantly, the contributors’ aim is not just to explore the interplay of power and resistance in people’s language experiences, but to call our attention—as teachers, scholars, administrators, and parents—to the possibilities that exist for unmaking linguistic hegemony through individual moments and enduring traditions of counterhegemonic practice. Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 7 The invited special issue came about as the result of a panel that Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez organized for the 77thAnnual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) in March 2017, inspired by his recent book Hegemonies of language and their discontents: The Southwest North American Region since 1540 (2017), and for which Patricia Sánchez, who contributes a commentary to the special issue, was the discussant. Four of the articles in the special issue (Debenport; Mortimer; O’Connor; and Vélez-Ibáñez) were originally presented at the SfAA panel; the other two articles (Anthony-Stevens & Griñó; Esquinca, de la Piedra, & Herrera) were subsequently invited in order to flesh out the special issue and diversify the range of research contexts, participants, and issues represented. The contributors include anthropologists of education (Anthony-Stevens & Griñó; Sánchez), linguistic anthropologists of education (Mortimer; O’Connor), educational linguists and literacy researchers (Esquinca, de la Piedra, & Herrera- Rocha), a linguistic anthropologist (Debenport), and a cultural anthropologist (Vélez-Ibáñez). While there is clearly a family resemblance among the authors, who belong to closely related fields, there is also a variety of disciplinary perspectives, meaning that some articles pay relatively more attention to educational and pedagogical issues, while others engage more closely with the details of language and discourse in the borderlands. The contributors include people who are lifelong (trans)fronterizo/as from Arizona-Sonora (Vélez-Ibáñez) and Texas-Chihuahua (Esquinca, Herrera-Rocha, Sánchez). These researchers have dedicated their scholarship and teaching to persistent questions of linguistic and educational equity in the borderlands, many of which they first encountered as emergent bilingual/intercultural students in border schools. Several of the other authors position themselves as what Mortimer (this issue) refers to as “invested newcomers” in the communities where they conduct research. Mortimer defines an invested newcomer as “someone lacking historical knowledge and experience compared to others while also engaging with long-term purpose and multiplex, intertwined personal and professional ties in the communities.” This definition is useful for resisting the hegemonic expectation to frame oneself either as an “insider” or “outsider” in the context of anthropological and educational research, in that it acknowledges that many researchers find themselves in a gray area between those two extremes. Several of the contributors (Anthony-Stevens, Debenport, Mortimer) are White, non-Indigenous scholars with long-term relationships with Indigenous communities, varying degrees of proficiency in Indigenous languages (Tiwa and Guaraní), and, in Anthony-Stevens’s case, Indigenous children and O’Connor Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 8 family members. Some of the authors (Anthony-Stevens, Mortimer, O’Connor) have spent their professional lives as proficient L2 Spanish speakers in different parts of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and elsewhere in Latin America, despite having grown up as monolingual English speakers in the U.S. Still others (de la Piedra, Griñó) are native Spanish speakers from South America who have focused their research and teaching on issues of linguistic and cultural hegemony in the U.S. and Mexico. The following sections provide background on the concepts of linguistic hegemony and counterhegemonic discourse, sketch their genealogy with reference to related keywords in linguistics and anthropology, and clarify how they are used in the articles that make up this special issue. Linguistic Hegemony and Regimes of Language Vélez-Ibáñez (2017) glosses “language hegemony” as “all of the diverse processes seeking to end, bend, and twist a conquered population’s means of communication,” and goes on to specify that his usage of the phrase refers to “language suppression and replacement of a people’s language” (p. 17). Like Foucault, he insists that understanding impositions requires simultaneous attention to the “contradictions and oppositions” that result from the colonial encounter, because of which attempts to sever people from their history by “render[ing] [them] mute” are inevitably “messy” and incomplete (Vélez-Ibáñez, 2017, pp. 16-17). Vélez-Ibáñez, like other scholars of language and social relations, reaches back to the Italian linguist and political thinker Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) foundational work on hegemony. While imprisoned by the Italian fascists, Gramsci argued that domination may be pursued either through coercion (i.e., brute force) or consent. Hegemony refers to the latter method of subordinating a group of people by getting them to consent to their own domination, most often by naturalizing power relations and masking them as “common sense.” The cultural and linguistic means used to achieve this have been of intense interest to scholars of language and education, including the contributors to this special issue. In their recent, magisterial overview of the intertwined histories of language studies, capitalism, and colonialism, Heller and McElhinny (2017) explain: Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 9 Consent involves convincing all participants in relations of domination that things are the way they should be; achieving such consent requires shared frames of interpretation, and thus is a profoundly cultural and communicative process. Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony suggests how ruling interests elaborate as “common sense” ideas that support their own position. (p. 8) In the realm of political science, Sonntag and Cardinal (2015) have recently considered how distinctive language regimes, or “shared frames of interpretation” masquerading as linguistic common sense, take shape within specific state traditions, institutionalized structures tied to modern nation-states (p. 9). Like Vélez-Ibáñez (2017) and Heller and McElhinny (2017), however, they also argue that “the robustness of the concept of language regimes advances the analysis of counter-hegemony” (p. 8): in effect, hegemonic discourse practices work to conceal relations of domination, while counterhegemonic responses seek to reveal them in order to challenge the “common sense” assumptions undergirding the language regime. A simple, effective illustration of this can be found in Esquinca, de la Piedra, and Herrera- Rocha’s study (this issue) of the implementation of a problem-based engineering design curriculum at Ramos Elementary, a school in El Paso, Texas with a vibrant Spanish-English dual- language program. The authors’ major finding is that, during implementation, “the [dual-language] program principles were soon discarded in favor of English instruction” for engineering design, in what they term a “purposeful” decision. When the authors asked the dual-language teacher about this decision, however, she suggested that it was merely common sense to rely on English for the engineering curriculum—the only rational and, indeed, feasible course of action—since the teachers lacked written engineering materials in Spanish. The authors reminded the teacher that such materials did, in fact, exist, and had been used by a small group of Spanish speakers in the first year of the program. The teacher then commented that she and the other teachers involved had “made [engineering] fall on [English] day” (in this dual-language model, English and Spanish were used as languages of instruction on alternating days) in order to avoid having to locate materials in Spanish. While the authors are careful not to criticize the teacher, who was constrained in her supporting role, they nonetheless argue that her comments reveal a “monolingual habitus,” and that the outcome of many individual decisions, guided by such a habitus, is a hegemonic O’Connor Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 10 arrangement that allows English to stand unchallenged as the language of science and engineering and underscores the uselessness of Spanish by comparison. The researchers’ counterhegemonic contribution is to unmask these relations of domination, to point out how they have infiltrated contexts that would seem to treat bilingualism as a resource, and to suggest how similar curricula might be implemented in ways that defy linguistic common sense. This discussion of language regimes is indebted to Kroskrity’s (2000) pathbreaking edited collection Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, which draws on the tradition of research on language ideologies (Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998) to examine relations of domination and subordination in various discursive fields. Kroskrity (2000) observed that language ideologies always “represent the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group,” such that even widely shared “traditional” practices, while naturalized as cultural knowledge, may serve the interests of “particular elites who obtain the required complicity” (p. 8). Thus, scholars are at risk of misrecognizing linguistic and cultural practices “controlled or regimented by [an] … elite,” such as language purism (an aversion to linguistic innovation and language mixing) as cultural features of the community as a whole. Debenport (this issue), who, like Kroskrity, works with Tewa/Tiwa- speaking Pueblo communities, provides a fascinating example of such a situation and its practical effects on her research collaborators. Following the 1680 Pueblo Revolt against Spanish rule and the eventual Spanish reconquest of Pueblo lands in northern New Mexico, the people of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo ended up in El Paso, Texas. Just how they ended up in El Paso, however, is the subject of considerable debate between Ysleta del Sur community members and members of other Pueblos: the former insist that they were taken to El Paso as Spanish captives, while the latter accuse them of cooperating with the Spanish to betray other Pueblos during the Revolt. Debenport’s paper focuses on Ysleta del Sur members’ contemporary attempts to “set the record straight,” as she puts it, or to engage in counterstorytelling in order to speak back to discourses that undermine their authenticity and sovereignty. These discourses include criticism from other Pueblos as well as state and federal governmental attempts to define which groups can assert legitimate Indigeneity, not to mention who is allowed to assert membership legally within Indigenous groups. This analysis is significant for a couple of reasons: first, and most basically, it foregrounds and re-centers Indigenous presence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where the logic of Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 11 elimination (Wolfe, 2006) targeted at Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Mexico is often joined with a simplistic, binary view of borderlands culture to overwhelm counternarratives of Indigenous persistence. Second, it is a compelling example of border thinking (Mignolo, 2000) in action: in contesting linguistic and cultural purism as the basis for Indigenous authenticity and arguing for fluid English-Spanish bilingualism as a legitimate form of discursive practice (in addition to heritage learning of Southern Tiwa), Ysleta del Sur members unmask the mapping of European “one nation, one language” ideologies onto Indigenous communities. In so doing, “they work within a multilingual, ‘post’ colonial context to assert sovereignty and belonging” (Debenport, this issue), transforming the language regime even as they attempt to set the historical record straight. Trans-Indigenous Learning and Translingual Practice as Counterhegemonic Responses Two of the other papers in the invited special issue also bring Indigenous presence and survivance (Vizenor, 2008) into the conversation about discourse, culture, and pedagogy within and across the borderlands: Anthony-Stevens and Griñó’s research with Indigenous Mexican educators involved in Transformación Docente, a U.S.-based and U.S.-funded professional development program, and Mortimer’s comparative study of ideologies of language separation in bilingual classrooms in Paraguay (Spanish-Guaraní) and El Paso (English-Spanish). In different ways, both articles grapple with longstanding tensions around the “modernization” of Indigenous languages—and, by extension, Indigenous peoples—that are endemic to the colonial encounter. Bringing the “pre-modern” Indigenous peoples of the Americas into modernity (Wolf, 2010 as cited in Vélez-Ibáñez, 2017, p. 17)—i.e., re-making them into suitably “modern” subjects of colonial states by dehistoricizing them, or erasing their prior history—involved making Indigenous languages suitable for modernity (alongside the imposition of European languages). In Mignolo’s (1992) discussion of European scholars’ grammatical approaches to Indigenous languages, he observed: One of the logical consequences of the complicity between language, letters, and territoriality is the fact that the consolidation of states and nation will depend on the homogenization of language and that the homogenization of language will depend a great deal on the control that the letter can exert upon the sounds of a language. (p. 187) O’Connor Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 12 Thus, dehistoricizing social processes depended on linguistic processes of commensuration and reducción, colonial interventions that were seen as necessary to tame the disorganized multiplicity of Indigenous literacies and ways of speaking (Hanks, 2010 as cited in Heller & McElhinny, 2017, p. 40). Vélez-Ibáñez’s (2017) analysis of filiaciones, brief genealogical sketches of Indigenous conscripts into the imperial Spanish military, provides a concrete example of how the making of colonial subjects relied on specific technologies of inscription, or what Mignolo (1992) called “the complicity between language, letters, and territoriality” (p. 187). But Vélez-Ibáñez also shows that these forms of inscription—the Crown’s means of recording who, exactly, was being brought into the Spanish imperial cosmos—were tied to incipient processes of racialization, of boundary work based on distinctions among different kinds of bodies. And yet, as González (2005) reminds us, looking “more closely into how language completes us as unfinished subjects” entails attention not only to the role of education in “reproducing dominant discourses of power and control” (p. 173), but to its potential as a site for advancing diverse repertoires of identity and discursive practice (p. 174). In this vein, Anthony- Stevens and Griñó consider the many contradictions of Transformación Docente (TD), the professional development program they studied (and for which they worked as program coordinator/co-PI and graduate assistant, respectively). Not least among these contradictions is the fact that TD brought Indigenous teachers from Mexico, where educational discourse has recently shifted to support Indigenous languages and ways of knowing (in principle, anyway), to the United States, “where Indigenous students are the least served by systems of education, and the most at risk of academic failure” following centuries of outright efforts to exterminate Indigenous peoples and suppress Indigenous knowledge systems. Anthony-Stevens and Griñó acknowledge that TD might have developed as merely another teacher education reform effort focused on standardizing teacher knowledge and pedagogy, paying lip service to linguistic and cultural diversity but failing to challenge the hegemony of Spanish and Westernized knowledge in Mexican schools. However, their analysis shows powerfully how TD became a space where maestros indígenas were supported in their efforts to “destabilize dominant policy discourses” (McCarty & Lee, 2014, p. 103) about intercultural education and, especially, to advocate for Mexican Indigenous languages in schools. In spite of the contradiction of participants’ coming to the U.S. to learn how to teach Indigenous students better, the authors document how the “unofficial goals” of program staff, coupled with Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 13 the maestros’ own readiness to engage in decolonial praxis, led to a form of border thinking manifested as “trans-Indigenous learning.” By comparing experiences across contexts of Mexican Indigenous schooling and interacting with Indigenous communities and educators north of the border, the maestros could experiment with new possibilities for putting Indigenous languages and funds of knowledge at the center of intercultural education. In this way, Anthony-Stevens and Griñó argue, the TD staff and participants “complicate[d] [the] neoliberal agendas” of program funders as they challenged each other “to examine and deconstruct colonial relations in education.” Mortimer also centers Indigenous presence in her comparative analysis of ideologies of language separation and language mixing in Spanish-Guaraní bilingual programs in Paraguay and English-Spanish dual language programs in El Paso, Texas. She takes a somewhat different and original approach to the question of hegemony, however, in focusing on how speakers may denigrate their own hybrid language practices even as their behavior affirms the utility and value of those practices. In Paraguay, the recent introduction of Guaraní—an Indigenous language that has been associated with Paraguayo nationhood throughout the country’s history—into schools yields seemingly endless opportunities to distinguish academic or “real” Guaraní (Guaraní- Guaraní) from Jopará, or Guaraní “mixed” with Spanish elements. The use of Jopará is said to index an uneducated, backwards persona, but, Mortimer observes, it is also the variety of Guaraní that many students, parents, and, indeed, teachers spoke in their everyday lives. The teachers’ studied avoidance and policing of Jopará features in classroom discourse, then, had the ironic effect of devaluing the linguistic resources of the community that the national language policy was intended to support. Mortimer unravels the contradictions of hegemony as common sense: in both contexts, while teachers’ lived experience provided ample evidence that translanguaging could serve important functions in the classroom and community, the unquestioned desirability of language separation meant that teachers did not have the resources to defend what they and their students were already doing as legitimate and academic. Teachers, in other words, often walked the translanguaging walk without being able to talk the talk, in the sense that they did not have the support or training to articulate a counterhegemonic, non-purist stance (as Debenport’s participants were able to do). As Mortimer comments, “Despite teachers’ enacted discontentment with the hegemony of language separation, ways of overtly recognizing, talking O’Connor Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 14 about, naming their discontentment were harder to find” (my italics). Nevertheless, TexMex and Jopará speakers’ enacted discontentment with language purism sometimes spilled over in “exuberant eruptions” (Combs, González, & Moll, 2011, p. 194) of translanguaging at public events, where teachers, parents, and students drew flexibly on their linguistic repertoires in “the formal public display of knowledge and success” (Mortimer, this issue). Mortimer argues that this is a hopeful development: such verbal performances lend themselves less easily to the tired binaries (educated/uneducated, authentic/inauthentic, formal/informal) that undergird hegemonic ideologies of language in education, and, thus, hold potential for disrupting hegemony. More broadly, Mortimer’s analysis recalls Ruiz’s (1991) observation that introducing students’ mother tongue into schools in no way guarantees that students will be able to find their voice. Rather, as here, the presence of a prestigious, nationally sanctioned variety of the Indigenous language can, in fact, be used to frame mixed or “impure” discourse practices as deficient and inferior. According to Ruiz (1991), it is necessary to distinguish language—as a general, abstract phenomenon—from the “particular and concrete” uses of language that we refer to as voice: “To deny people their language … is, to be sure, to deny them voice; but, to allow them ‘their’ language … is not necessarily to allow them voice” (p. 220). This means that analyses of linguistic hegemony and counterhegemonic discourse cannot take an autonomous view of language and literacy practices; instead, they must always examine such practices through an ideological lens (to borrow a distinction from the New Literacy Studies; Street, 1984). Translanguaging is neither hegemonic nor counterhegemonic by nature, and neither are practices that reflect an ideology of language purism. On one hand, as was mentioned above, “translanguages” can refer to “languages joined through the process of conquest,” as European scribes sought to make Maya “commensurate” with Spanish—and, by extension, linguistically appropriate for the process of Christian conversion (Hanks, 2010 as cited in Heller & McElhinny, 2017, p. 40). Here is a case of translanguaging harnessed to a project of reducción, of taming Indigenous languages for colonial purposes, and certainly not with the goal of allowing subjugated people their voice. Likewise, while Debenport and Mortimer both discuss the hegemony of purist attitudes in their respective sites, such attitudes probably emerged as an earlier counterhegemonic response (e.g., among Tewa/Tiwa speakers) to similar attempts to make Indigenous languages and peoples “commensurate” with modernity and colonial rule. (Recently, a number of scholars (e.g., Hamman, 2018; Jaspers, 2018) have cautioned against the uncritical Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 15 celebration of contemporary translanguaging and urged greater attention to its complex role within language-minority education; see also Vélez-Ibáñez, this issue). On the other hand, in Mortimer’s study, moments of public, academic translanguaging clearly emerge as powerful, potentially transformative exceptions to the dilemma Ruiz (1991) described, a dilemma that is still evident in El Paso and Paraguay: that “the language of the child is rarely spoken in the classroom, much less taught in formal lessons” (p. 219), whatever the stated goals of bilingual programs. Narrative Inequality and Pretextual Gaps Dell Hymes (1996), like the contributors to this special issue, held that questions of language are inseparable from questions of educational equity and social justice, exhorting his readers not to mistake the potential equality of languages and language varieties for an actual equality that does not yet exist. In other words, in our eagerness to affirm the dignity and value of different languages (or nonstandard or hybrid varieties), we run the risk of overlooking the actual relations of inequality that shape who can do what, with which language, in which context, with what degree of success. Hymes (1996) admonished scholars of language not to “take for granted that what we take for granted” about language “is known to others” and mused that we may never finish “the task of confronting misconceptions about the status of languages” (p. 208). Hymes (1996) singled out oral narrative as a primary indication of “the relation between potential and actual in language, the dialectic between potential equality and actual inequality” (pp. 218- 219)—or, put differently, he suggested that storytelling events can expose the gap between people’s inherent potential to shape their experience in narrative and the conditions of reception for such stories, or the place that each community or context affords their storytelling (p. 219). The long story told by Araís, a transfronteriza undergraduate from Brownsville, Texas, which is analyzed in my (O’Connor’s) article, can be understood as a counterhegemonic response to the phenomenon that Hymes (1996) called “narrative inequality.” Inequality in language does not necessarily refer to inequality between languages (as in Anthony-Stevens and Griñó’s, Esquinca et al.’s, and Vélez-Ibáñez’s articles), or even to inequality between varieties of language (as in Mortimer’s article), but instead, recalling Ruiz (1991), can refer to the conditions under which people attempt to claim voice, or use their repertoires to assert their identities and experiences in ways that are seen as legitimate (as in Debenport’s and O’Connor’s articles). O’Connor Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 16 Araís’s virtuosic, heteroglossic performance raises fascinating questions about selfhood, language use, and cultural practice in the borderlands, as she mobilizes a kaleidoscopic array of voices to tell a story (and several smaller stories within the story) that criticizes mass-mediated representations of life in Mexico. In her chosen mode of telling, however, Araís anticipates the conditions of the story’s reception and displays her recognition of narrative inequality, the discursive hegemony that promotes a “megascript” (Vélez-Ibáñez, 2017) of the borderlands as dangerous, poor, and out-of-the-way and disregards firsthand accounts, like Araís’s, that do not square with the dominant narrative. The potential of her narrative unfurls in explicit contrast to the actual inequality that threatens to overwhelm it. Her narrative, then, can be seen as a form of critical pedagogy, a “teachable moment” oriented to the author (O’Connor, her teacher) but also aiming beyond the immediate circumstances of its telling to insist that there be a place (Hymes, 1996, p. 219) for stories that upend common sense understandings of the borderlands. In closing, I would like to propose that Maryns and Blommaert’s (2002) notion of the “pretextual gap” is a useful analytic strategy for making sense of the various forms of narrative inequality, linguistic hegemony, and counterhegemonic practice discussed in the articles in this special issue. Hegemony rears its head in many guises in these studies; as we might expect, the corresponding points of resistance are equally diverse across the articles. In each case, however, it holds true that linguistic hegemony attempts to mask relations of domination—to coax people into accepting a fundamentally unequal situation as common sense, as “just the way things are”— while counterhegemonic discourse seeks to expose these power relations (Sonntag & Cardinal, 2015, p. 8). Maryns and Blommaert (2002) argue that the site of this encounter—between hegemonic common sense and counterhegemonic resistance—is often a “pretextual gap,” which is to say, a gap in understanding and expectations that indicates “a tension between what is recognized and what can be produced in communication” (p. 14). That is, as people try to figure out what is going on in particular speech events—a Jopará- speaking mother’s speech at a school event, an Ysleta del Sur Pueblo narrative that attempts to correct the historical record, Spanish-English bilingual students’ participation in an engineering lab activity, etc.—they cannot help but bring along “a package of socially preconditioned knowledge articulated in speakers’ personal ‘baggage’ and assessments of what is meaningful” (Maryns & Blommaert, 2002, p. 13). Thus, even before an interaction begins, there may exist a pretextual gap, a predisposition to respond in a certain way, based on what speakers already believe is Linguistic Hegemony and Counterhegemonic Discourse Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 17 appropriate, legitimate, and meaningful. In developing this concept, Maryns and Blommaert (2002) build on Briggs and Bauman’s (1992) discussion of intertextual gaps, or gaps between people’s expectations of particular speech genres and individuals’ relatively idiosyncratic performances within those genres, which rarely map neatly onto “the tradition,” but tend to diverge from it in highly suggestive ways. In much the same way, Maryns and Blommaert (2002) argue, thinking of interaction as pretextual means staying attentive to “conditions on sayability, differential distribution of access to these conditions, and social evaluations attached to such differences” (p. 11) in any given communicative situation. In other words, as Ruiz (1991) insisted, in order to understand how people claim voice—which we should not confuse with the use of particular codes, named or otherwise—in situations of hegemony, it is necessary to inquire into who can say what, using which resources, in which situations. It also entails looking at how language users expect their contributions to be heard, recognized, and understood, or, as often happens, misheard, misrecognized, and misunderstood (remembering Araís’s story, from O’Connor’s article). Close attention to such pretextual gaps allows us to get an analytical grip on the forms of narrative inequality (Hymes, 1996) that permeate social life in different language regimes. Maryns and Blommaert (2002) suggest that one way of exposing and challenging linguistic hegemony is to focus our analyses on discursive phenomena that “fall in the gap between what is recognized and what can be produced” (p. 14). Each of the articles in this invited special issue does just that, in diverse and thought-provoking ways, using a wide range of theoretical and analytical tools to chip away at the edifice of language regimes, in and out of school. In shining a light on the pretextual gaps that exist in each situation, the contributors also celebrate speakers’ counterhegemonic efforts “to emerge fully as complex cultural beings” (Vélez-Ibáñez, this issue) who refuse to consent to the marginalization of their voices. O’Connor Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2018, Volume 12, Issue 2 18 References Briggs, C. L., & Bauman, R. (1992). Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2(2), 131-172. Combs, M. C., González, N., & Moll, L. C. (2011). The metonymy of language policy: U.S. Latinos and the learning of English. In T. L. McCarty (Ed.), Ethnography and language policy (pp. 184-203). New York, NY: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1: An introduction. R. Hurley (Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon. González, N. (2005). Children in the eye of the storm: Language socialization and language ideologies in a dual-language school. In A. C. 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