Latin@s and the Intergenerational Continuity of Spanish: The Challenges of Curricularizing Language

This paper focuses on the future of Spanish in the United States and on the tensions and challenges that surround what Fishman (1964) referred to as intergenerational continuity. It examines the teaching of language itself and the role of such instruction in the development and maintenance of Spanish/English multicompetence (Cook, 1996), that is, of the complex linguistic repertoires ofLatin@s in the United States. Because language instruction generally continues to view languages as autonomous codes and systems of rules and structures, the paper draws attention to specific pedagogical questions that must be addressed by those committed to both educational access and equity forLatin@s as well as to their linguistic multicompetence in a context in which members of the new Latino/Hispanic category struggle with issues of race, class, and language, with their membership in the new panethnic category itself, and with the ways in which they are constructed by their teachers and their mainstream peers.