Introducing “Trans~Resistance”: Translingual Literacies as Resistance to Epistemic Racism and Raciolinguistic Discourses in Schools

Abstract

Translingual students’ identities transcend multiple languages and cultural allegiances. Sociolinguistics widely discusses the linguistic and racial oppressions these students face in schools due to epistemic racism, which is often observed in the tension between their multilingual and multimodal communicative styles and language perspectives rooted in monolingual and monocultural ideologies. This paper expands on the literature that denounces epistemic racism, uses Raciolinguistics and New Literacy Studies as theoretical frameworks, and reports on the following inquiries: What are the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students? How do translingual students reject these agents’ marginalization? Critical focus groups, semi-structured and arts-based interviews, and emplaced observations were used to collect data, centering the identities and voices of participants. Two key findings emerged. First, school stakeholders with various roles, social power, and degree of impact epitomize epistemic racism through ideological discourses. Second, “Translinguals” resist through novel concepts for which I have coined the terms "Covert and Overt Transresistance,” enacted by the means of resisting transliteracies. The theoretical, research, and practical implications of these findings, along with recommendations for future research, are discussed.

1. Introduction

Sociolinguistics, language, and literacy scholarship have widely determined the connection between language and race, and how racist structures, processes, and practices deeply impact non-mainstream groups [1,2]. Most recent works, however, have centered around a different facet of racism, one which transcends individual and structural inequities in educational settings [3]. Indeed, epistemic racism positions the knowledge and ways of being and knowing of non-mainstream individuals as non-existent or inferior, and solely values dominant groups’ knowledge by placing them as superior. It only prioritizes, values, and legitimizes their languages, literacies, and cultures [4]. This paper stems from data collected for a doctoral study [5], one aimed at exploring the tensions between legitimizing and delegitimizing discourses and ideologies of social power and hierarchy, as well as their interactions with translingual students’ (“Translinguals,” henceforth) schooling experiences in a U.S. mid-Atlantic community, which the author conducted in 2018–2019. This specific paper focuses on two of the original questions asked and expands on the findings after further analysis of the body of data collected. It provides a foundational framing of perpetuators of epistemic racism in diverse school communities and a conceptualization of Translinguals’ systematic fight against it. In an era characterized by contentious conversations around socio-political issues, justice, educational rhetoric, and policies stemming from nationalistic ideologies [6], it is imperative to denounce philosophies, agents, and structures that impede the social and academic advancement of minoritized individuals and groups in school communities.

1.1. Framing Translingual Experiences with New Literacy Studies and Raciolinguistics

Two opposing understandings of language facilitated my conceptualization of epistemic racism and Translinguals’ response to it. First, New Literacy Studies (NLS) situates language and literacy in an evolving social and spatial context characterized by movements of people within various linguistic and cultural orientations. It centralizes the social power and ideologies embedded within language [7] and defines them beyond their local meanings. NLS positions language and literacies at the heart of interconnections among larger cultural, sociopolitical, and institutional structures [8,9]. Translinguals’ multitudes of ways of expression, language representation, and meaning-making are recognized and valued when examined through the inclusive NLS lens (See Figure 1).

Second, Raciolinguistics theorizes the intersection of race, ethnicity and language [10] by moving toward a deeper examination of the impact of race in conceptualizing language, and vice versa [11]. Raciolinguistics also presents language as an ideological tool used to channel support or disapproval of linguistic and cultural identities through its rules, thus giving dominant social actors the authority to negate disapproved linguistic backgrounds, based on racist and “linguicist” philosophies [12,13]. This perspective allows us to denounce the “vicious physical, verbal, and epistemological abuse; in our media, our streets, in neighborhoods, and even in our schools” [5] that Translinguals endure routinely.

Translinguals are caught within these opposing ways of understanding and doing language in their school communities. Figure 1 below explicates their positioning vis-à-vis exclusionary and inclusive discourses [5] (p. 14).

1.2. The Prefix “Trans” and Translingualism

The historical global movement of people, cultures, ways of being, and expressive behaviors around the word has triggered the re-examination of language as the sole country without borders [14], thus prompting discussions about how it influences literacy practices and their contexts of existence. Translingualism, from the root word “trans”, which characterizes the state of being “across” or “in between” [15] languages, is an example of such debates. The wide use of the term “Translanguaging” in most areas of academic discourse related to diverse multilingual and multimodal practices has surfaced questions about whether it is not just another popularist neologism [3]. However, the term has been legitimized and found to add value to the understandings of language and literacy embedded in its prefix “trans”, which transforms and revolutionizes the concepts of linguistic fluidity, language-based social structures, language user cognition, and the conceptualizations of language as a transdisciplinary matter [3] (p. 27).

Indeed, the prefix “trans” speaks to a view of “languaging” that surpasses and counters exclusionary socially and politically developed linguistic structures that exclude more inclusive views on language. This means allowing for an expansion of “correct” languaging outside of a single way of expression, into a multiplicity of linguistic beliefs, truths, paths, profiles, and modalities. Also, “trans” opens up space for language-based social structures that account for creative practices in several languages, including those other than the user’s primary or heritage language, and pushes back against linguistic and cultural restrictions [16]. It is a path to highlight the transformational capacity of language and revolutionize systems of language, users’ cognition, consciousness, and freedom. Additionally, “trans” forces us to recognize that language is socially, politically, and historically underpinned [17], and that a valid understanding of languaging must take into consideration the social and hierarchical status of the users of the language [18]. Consequently, “trans” explains the transdisciplinary and multidimensional characteristics of language. It encompasses multiple disciplines concerned with the humans who use the language, such as linguistics, education, sociology, and psychology [19,20]. With the possibilities afforded by the prefix “trans”, language becomes an act, a space, and a concept that acknowledges language users who operate within, across, and in-between different languages based on one or more cultures. This includes users whose languaging is atypical when evaluated from a monolingual and monocultural perspective typically deemed the “correct” or “good” way to communicate.

1.3. Epistemic Racism against Translinguals

While Raciolinguistics facilitates our examination of the impact of racism on the linguistic and educational practices of Translinguals based on the intersection of their multifaceted and diverse races and languages [21], an analysis of epistemic racism problematizes racially-based inequities that carry the assumption that the knowledge production of Translinguals is “less than” and shouldn’t be legitimized. Epistemic racism uses the power and privilege of Western knowledge to ascribe a negative status in order to discriminate against the means by which othered identities acquire linguistic knowledge and how they use knowledge; it denies their full humanity by devaluing the knowledge they produce [2,22]. Harsh consequences for Translinguals include a negative self-perception based on the lens of those inflicting epistemic racism. Translinguals may also carry a double consciousness [23], which can result in internalizing a complex of inferiority; denigrating oneself and one’s origins and family; and regarding one’s languages and literacies through a “deficit” lens [24,25].

Additionally, in schools, epistemic racism drives epistemic violence [26,27] and channels its deficit ideologies [28] through acts such as language profiling, “language enregistrement,” imposition of standard language rules, and language policing. Indeed, Translinguals are both racially and linguistically profiled using visual and linguistic cues, such as accents [29]. Through the process of language enregistrement [30], their linguistic “dis-ability” is screened at school and assigned remedial labels such as “not proficient” and “language learner.” Furthermore, epistemic racism assaults translingual identities by creating a dichotomy of opposing actors in the school community. On one hand, there are Translinguals who are victimized and forced into a vulnerable position and status. On the other hand, there are agents of epistemic violence [31], driven by the patriarchic and misogynistic assumption [32] that the epistemological being of the victimized is inexistent or unworthy of value and respect according to colonialist views [33]. These agents could be teachers, paraprofessionals, administrative and professional staff, or even other students [5].

Finally, the hegemonic perceptions of coloniality and whiteness that live within individuals and institutions are both perpetuated through epistemic racism in teaching and learning contexts [34], making it difficult for Translinguals to escape the web of oppression created by epistemic racism. Understanding how epistemic racism works sets us up to discern signs of its existence and its processes in order to create healthy equitable educational environments that are safe for non-mainstream students like Translinguals.

1.4. Translingual Epistemologies as Resistance to Epistemic Racism and Violence

One of the pillars of understandings in sociocultural studies of literacy is that languaging is a true social and ideological practice [7,17], meaning that the act of doing language is closely tied the situational social context in which the act takes place and the identities and perspectives of the actors who take part in the act. As such, the backgrounds of the individuals doing language cannot be disassociated from how they express themselves and the reasons why they do it in a specific way. This is also true for how the communication is perceived by others. As Hodge and Kress [35] (p. 1220) assert, “What the powerful say can often be ‘right’ because it is said by the powerful.” Conversely, what Translinguals say or do while languaging can often be “wrong” because it is said and performed by Translinguals. This unjust double standard is an elucidation of epistemicide [36]: the forceful silencing of non-dominant truths, languages, epistemologies, and linguistic/epistemic self-determination [37] which dare to stand up to a tyrannical linguistic system. This system, driven by ignorance and blindness to others’ vulnerabilities and assets [38] has been found to take away the voice of Translinguals and render them invisible within school contexts. Mignolo [39] calls for a change of the status quo by practicing epistemic disobedience, the incarnation of the spirit of self-love and self-consciousness, as grounded in self-governing independent thought and wisdom, and capable of liberating one’s mind from the imprisoning chains of coloniality and whiteness.

Though some scholars warn that the task of demarking themselves from long-term socializations tending towards believing they are inferior and inapt [36] is difficult and will cause substantial challenges, Translinguals have demonstrated their ability to uphold non-Western literary traditions that are natural to them. In fact, they have been found to espouse and sustain a system of fluid translingual multiliteracies [40,41] despite restrictive and hindering school policies, structures, and processes [42]. Their resilience is striking, and their defiance has been documented as youth activism, civic leadership, and cultural expressions such as indigenous dance, sports, and music [43], as well as arts-based practices [44], assimilating mainstream identities while conserving traditional forms of communication [45,46] and connecting with students with similar funds of knowledge also othered in school communities [47,48]

1.5. Study Purpose and Significance

This paper presents results from two key queries: (a) What are the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students? (b) How do translingual students reject these agents’ marginalization? The purposes of this article are, first, to describe the stakeholders who embody epistemic racism; second, the article defines Transresistance, which depicts the ways in which Translinguals systematically counter epistemic racism.

The significance of this work is rooted in several important contributions. To start, it is timely, as it contextualizes how epistemic racism works in day-to-day interactions in schools at a time where mass migrations due to wars and global health crises bring an increased number of Translinguals in our school communities. Furthermore, this knowledge provides K-12 schools with clarified understandings of social and academic inequities as they work to achieve equitable education. Additionally, higher education researchers and instructors benefit from empirical research conducted through an epistemologically antiracist lens that allows them to better prepare social justice teachers who embrace critical pedagogies and advocacy more conducive to the success of Translinguals. Lastly, this work provides the language, literacy, and sociolinguistics fields ways to leverage translingual identities in social justice and equity-oriented research, and models antiracist community-based collaborative research capable of facilitating the co-construction of justice-based curricula, instruction, and assessment with translingual research participants.

This article aims to describe the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who perpetuate epistemic racism in their interactions with Translinguals and defines the ways in which these students oppose marginalization under the conceptual premise of Transresistance. In the next paragraphs, I will outline the research methods used in this study before discussing the findings. I then engage in a discussion about the findings and conclude with my thoughts about future research and implications.

2. Materials and Methods

This critical case study methodology [49] is grounded in ethnographic methods and a commitment to anti-hegemony research. Participants are met in their natural setting, which honors their identities and communicative traditions to show the value of the knowledge that stems from the details of their authentic social and academic experiences [50] within their educational contexts [51].

2.1. Study Context

The study took place at Williamsburg School (Pseudonym), a diverse rural–urban fringe school community located in the Northeast U.S., with 686 K–8 students, largely from Hispanic/Latinx (72%) and Black (22.5%) ethnoracial backgrounds, and 86% of whom are eligible for a free lunch or a reduced-price lunch (National Center for Education Statistics-NCES, 2023). At the time of data collection, I represented my university as the Professor-in-Residence (PIR), in the context of a professional development school partnership with the school. As such, I oversaw and supported the university community present at Williamsburg School, such as pre-service teacher candidates completing a clinical internship and adjunct faculty supervisors [52]. I also conducted on-site research on behalf of the university, mentored in-service teachers, created opportunities to integrate and support students and family members from minoritized backgrounds, and led professional development events for teachers and administrators. Based on my background of being an ex-elementary English as a Second Language, Spanish, and World Cultures teacher, and a current role of TESOL and bilingual education Teacher Educator, my principal role was to support Williamsburg School’s strategic planning around issues of equitable education for minoritized students and strengthen its mutually beneficial relationship with the university. My position afforded me the status of a member of the school community, especially because I spent a significant amount of time in classrooms and around students, family members, and teachers.

2.2. Participants and Recruitment

The participants of the larger study consisted of me, as a researcher subject/participant, fifth-grade-students, fifth-grade teachers, parents, and community members. The specific data addressed in this paper directly correlate with data I collected as a subject/participant, those from the 8 fifth-grade student participants, and their four fifth-grade teachers.

As a researcher subject/participant, I was included in the case study as an insider who could provide a clearer perspective of the human experience in this case study because of my prolonged presence and deep involvement in the study context [50,51]. My research positionality and my own personal background, as an individual from an immigrant background and a member of several linguistically and racially minoritized groups, allowed the opportunity to leverage my identity in this work. Consequently, it was of prime importance for me to minimize bias and subjectivity [52] by intentionally and extensively using reflexivity and an awareness of my position of authority in the school community.

Many of the Latinx students in this community are children of immigrant and migrant families working in the agricultural industry in the area, including my 8 fifth-grade student participants (See

Table 1. Translingual Student Participants (Fall 2020 [5]).

Student Names	Age	Place of Birth	Response to: What Is Your Nationality?	Response to: What Is (Are) Your Mother’s Tongue(s)?	Response to: What Language(s) Do You Most Use At Home/ At School?
Natalia	10	United States	I don’t know (shrugging)	Spanish	Both
Magdalena	10	United States	I don’t know	English for my dad and then Spanish for my mom	English/Spanish because of my mom
Joalene	10	United States	I was born in New York, so I am American, but I am also Mexican	English	Spanish with parents, English with brother
Dina	11	United States	Mexican-American	English	English
Yaël	11	Puerto Rico	Boricua, like Caribbean because I was born in Puerto Rico	Spanish, I only speak a lot of English at school	Spanish
Julio	11	United States	Mexican	Mexican Spanish and English too	Spanish and English, but English more
Javier	11	United States	I am Mexican and half American because I was born here	Mostly English ‘cause of school and Spanish at home ‘cause it’s easier for my parents to speak Spanish	Both

). They were four boys and four girls, aged 10–11, born in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, who all self-identified as American and Latinx, and who all spoke different versions and levels of English and Spanish. They were chosen using purposeful homogenous sampling [53]; the recruitment criteria were to self-identify as a middle-school Latinx student from an immigrant bi- or multilingual family. In the approved IRB protocol used, parent consent and student assent were required. Students were identified with the support of key school informants who distributed recruitment letters to parents and guardians. Once parental consent was received, and after parents and guardians met with me to ask questions about the project, students attended Q&A sessions to ask all of their own questions before signing assent forms. Both Spanish and English were used during these interactions and throughout the project thanks to my fluency in both languages.

At Williamsburg School, each of the four middle school classes had a homeroom teacher and a homeroom where they started the day. Then, students would rotate to the other classrooms for instruction throughout the day. There were English Language Arts, Math, Social Studies/Sciences, and Specials classrooms. Students would study world languages in the Specials room, led by a Special Education teacher. This room was the homeroom for special education students. The students who were recruited happened to be all from the fifth-grade cohort that year, from the four different fifth-grade homerooms. This is probably because, as a PIR and university representative, I worked closely with grades 5–8 teachers and families, particularly with the fifth-grade classrooms in which many of my professional development efforts were focused, per the needs of the school’s strategic planning. Therefore, I had built trust with these students and their teachers. After student recruitment, I invited their four fifth-grade teachers, who were already aware of the study prior to recruitment, as I had to make them aware that I would observe students in class, to join the study. All four teachers agreed to participate.

2.3. Data Collection

This study asked the following questions: What are the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students? How do translingual students reject these agents’ marginalization?

The selected data collection methods represent appropriate choices for the intended type of research: one that aims to remain critical, democratic, and decolonizing. This is a research orientation that encourages the use of a variety of sources of truths from the perspectives of the participants in safe real life-situations, in culturally-sensitive and sustaining ways, and using linguistic parameters that honor who they say they are and how they prefer to communicate. Based in long-term ethnographic traditions that offer a deeper and realistic appreciation of the things discovered compared to short-term research endeavors [54], the data collection methods used in this work offer the opportunity to measure happenings at the research site in ways that help to identify cultural patterns and behavioral models, as well as covert and implicit structural irregularities, within both “continuity and change” [54] (p. 35). Figure 2, below, illustrates the assignment of collection methods for each type of participants:

2.3.1. Research Subject/Participant

As a researcher subject/participant, honesty and avoidance of prejudices was a priority [55], as was making visible and processing my researcher experiences, thoughts, stances, and biases, or working as a knowing researcher [56]. In particular, I personally produced data while allowing for an inclusion of sensory data associated with the sensation of truly being present in the research context with participants [57] and feeling, tasting, smelling, seeing, hearing, and touching like them [58,59]. I commemorated my roles, actions, thoughts, and observations as researcher, PIR, observer, and member of the Williamsburg School community by writing a series of critical reflections and researcher journal entries stored in an unpublished blog. I baptized the blog Transresistir: For the Rights of Translinguistic Identities…and to Dancing Between Tongues! to mark the participants’ identities, me included, and the significance of their pushback, in this work, against epistemic racism.

2.3.2. Student Data Collection

Several data sources were collected from the students. I collected pictures and video-recorded all student data-collection sessions.

• Four critical focus group discussions:

Participants were invited to join four focus group discussions about their school community experiences in my PIR office, in which we had privacy. Students were presented with provoking prompts, such as images, videos, books, blogs, photographs, artwork, cartoons, speeches, music, or other forms of texts or literacies [60]. Each discussion was centered around a language domain as the source of the prompt provided; the sessions were titled: Watch It (the prompt was a video), Listen to It (the prompt was from a sound clip or a song), Read It (the prompt was an excerpt from a bilingual or multilingual children’s book written by an author from a minoritized background), and See It (the prompt was an image from social media, an object, or regalia). These prompts illustrated current political, social, and academic happenings around the students, and evoked thoughts about social justice and equity. The expectation was for students to express how they felt and what they thought about what they watched, listened to, read, or saw. For example, I showed them an infamous Cinco de Mayo tweet authored by then-President Donald Trump, in which he overtly offends people from Latinx groups. I then asked students to respond using “group talk” [61], which facilitates democratized conversations [62]. In addition to the discussion, students were given the option to also illustrate their response using a graphic organizer in which they could write or draw their reaction to the prompt.

• Semi-structured interviews:

Participants answered demographic questions related to their status, role in the school community, linguistic and cultural background, and perceptions about their own literacies.

• Image-elicited interviews:

Image-elicited interviews consisted of photo-elicited and arts-based methods. With photo elicitation, inserting images in an interview ties descriptions of the self to society, culture, and history. Photographs can evoke profound human consciousness, trigger memory, and lead to renewed perspectives [63,64], supporting the creation of collaborative and dialogical knowledge-seeking and meaning-making [65]. Children were given disposable cameras to take pictures of people, places, and things that represent their linguistic and ethnoracial backgrounds and literacies. They then shared the pictures’ meanings. For arts-based interviews, students completed activities to illustrate their perceptions of their linguistic and cultural identities [66,67]. They then participated in member check-ins.

• Self-portraits:

Students drew self-representations. As a means of self-investigation [68], self-portraits provided space to express feelings about family, nationality, and personal interests.

• Language silhouettes:

Language portraits serve the concept of visual turn [69], which conceptualizes the use of the combination of textual and visual data to facilitate, for multilingual individuals, the process of sharing about their lived experiences [70]. This process makes sense with “their language trajectories, language learning, practices, and use” [71]. Simple outlines of the human body or language silhouettes, in particular, illustrate features of one’s linguistic composition [72]. Participants detailed their expertise, affiliations, and inheritances [62], enmeshed with belonging issues.

• Relational maps:

Relational maps [66] connect people, things, and places for the purpose of identity building. Colors, shapes, and sizes constitute significant markers in marginalized participants’ experiences.

• Timelines:

Timelines create a universe where present and past narratives are loud and bold, and clearly explain key happenings in one’s experiences. They rationalize past, present, and future epitomized narratives. They also represent an interactive strategy to measure resilience in youth and for the youths to self-assess their life quality trajectories [73].

• Emplaced sensory observations:

Sensory observations account for the missed aspects of participants in traditional observations by capturing situated, customary, and nonverbal beings [74]. In particular, emplaced sensory observations are participatory; they use an embodied, sensory, and empathetic lens [75] to place the researcher in the world of the one being observed. All students were observed in their different classrooms and at various sites at school, such as in the school yard, while traveling to different classrooms or on their way to lunch, in the cafeteria, and during class parties. In addition, two students were observed at home during home visits; two during a community Easter celebration and procession; one at a restaurant during a family dinner celebration; one invited me to tour the city in his own eyes with his family; and I observed another one during soccer practice and a Cinco de Mayo town celebration.

2.3.3. Teacher Data Collection

Teachers were observed directly four times, in classrooms during instruction and around the school as they interacted with the student participants, as well as numerous other times indirectly as I visited their classrooms to observe students. I observed them as they accompanied students to other classrooms or walked them to the cafeteria and the amphitheater for school events. I also observed them during grade-level meetings and informal conversations in-between classes. Additionally, each teacher took part in a semi-structured interview, including questions about demographics, their literacies, and their opinions about their students’ cultural and linguistic identities and status in the school community.

2.4. Data Analysis

In this qualitative case study using ethnographic methods, the multiple sources of data collected from different perspectives were triangulated [49] to secure a deep and thoughtful interpretation of the information obtained [76]. To respect Stake’s [49,50] case study orientation in the analysis phase, ascertaining patterns, grouping categories, and making natural generalizations to link discovery with interpretation were important in the overall analysis process. The researcher, student, and teacher data were processed through three consecutive analytical steps: sensory, holistic and pattern coding, and discourse analysis.

First, sensory analysis enabled a second level of knowing [75], producing a thick description of the body of data [49], and giving a holistic view of the data. At this level, all the data collected, including researcher blog journal entries and critical reflections; transcribed student video-recorded focus groups, semi-structured interviews, image- and photo-elicited interview data; teacher semi-structured interviews; and all emplaced and observation data notes were analyzed globally to identify, across the body of data, specific data points that directly responded to the research questions and gave a general sense of the data gathered.

Second, significant data chunks indicating connotations of epistemic racism were isolated for further analysis. Then, data containing delegitimizing discourses against Translinguals, and instances or indications of epistemic racism were isolated; they helped identify and connect agents of epistemic racism to marginalizing discourses reflecting Raciolinguistic and delegitimizing ideologies. To complete this holistic review across the multilingual and multimodal data [77,78], these data chunks were highlighted and ascribed an interpretation in the margin before being further categorized by general patterns which were later grouped into themes [79].

Third, Gee’s [80] discourse-analysis framework, which uses a critical-social lens, aided in dissecting and understanding all forms of communication in the themes that emerged in previous analysis steps, considering the sociopolitical and historical underpinnings of language and literacy. This step helped narrow down the characteristics of the agents of epistemic racism and their discourses. It also facilitated the discovery of the process which Translinguals use to reject the former. Here, three out of the six theoretical tools in Gee’s [80] framework were used:

The situated meaning tool–“tells us what words and phrases mean in a specific context…watch for cases where words and phrases are being given situated meanings that are nuanced and quite specific to the speaker’s worldview or values” [80] (p. 160).

The Figured World Tool–“models or pictures that people hold about how things work in the world when they are ‘typical’ or ‘normal’…can become means to judge and discriminate against people who are taken as untypical or not normal” [80] (p. 178).

The Bid D Discourse tool–“People do talk and act just as individuals, but as members of various social and cultural groups [80] (p. 186) that represent various Discourses, or ‘identity kits’ [7] that symbolize how people act, interrelate, believe, assign worth, think, and communicate. They are the materialization of specific roles or types of people [80].

This analysis concluded with an organized a summary of final emergent themes responding to the research questions (See

Table 2. Emergent Themes and Research Questions (n = 8).

Research Questions	Themes That Address Questions
RQ1. What are the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students?	Theme 1. Agents of Epistemic Racism: Individualities and Ideological Enactment of Epistemic Racism
	Theme 1.a. Individualities of Agents of Epistemic Racism Theme 1.b. Ideological Enactment of Epistemic Racism
RQ2. How do translingual students reject these agents’ marginalization?	Theme 2. Transresistance–Using a System of Transliteracies to Combat Epistemic Racism
	Theme 2.a. Combatting Epistemic Racism with Covert Transresistance and Overt Transresistance Theme 2.b. Transresistance–Resistance Transliteracies

).

3. Results

This paper aimed to discover the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with Translinguals and the ways in which Translinguals reject these agents’ marginalization. Expanding on previous findings of the larger study from which this present analysis stems, two principal findings were uncovered, each with two distinctive themes (See Table 2). First, school stakeholders with various roles, social power, and degree of impact epitomize epistemic racism through ideological discourses. Second, Translinguals combat epistemic racism through Covert and Overt Transresistance, which are enacted through resisting transliteracies rooted in the same types of literacies used to marginalize Translinguals. In the paragraphs below, I present details of these findings.

3.1. Characteristics of Agents of Epistemic Racism

The characteristics of the agents of epistemic racism are reflected in two themes: their individualities and the ideological enactments of their marginalization against Translinguals.

3.1.1. Individualities of Agents of Epistemic Racism

The first theme related to the agents of epistemic racism points to the existence and individualities of school stakeholders who are the agents of epistemic racism against Translinguals. They hold various roles, positions, and statuses in the school community, or “identity kits” Gee [80]. They can be community members, teachers, or even peer Translinguals. Due to their frequent recurrence in the data, I also included school structures, processes, and policies as an “identity kit” worth considering as an agent of epistemic racism. Each of these four agents of epistemic racism holds different ranks in the social power hierarchies of the school community, as well as causing various degrees of impact. Through ideological discourses that delegitimize Translinguals’ identities, including race-based, language-based, culture-based, and literacy-based discourses, they devalue the Translinguals’ beings and assign a community status difficult to rid oneself of. Figure 3, below, explains the individualities of these agents, their degrees of power and impact, and some of their characteristics.

Agent # 1: School Structures, Processes, and Policies. School processes, structures, and policies are very powerful, as they dictate the bases of the interactions other school stakeholders have with Translinguals: what they are taught (curriculum), how they are taught (pedagogy), and how they are managed as students (school policies). Despite their power, they are undermined by the humans who implement them, which lowers their impact. Undeniably, policies that dictate how a school is run are only as accepting and legitimizing for Translinguals as are the people who implement them. For example, the presence of a large number of supportive teachers cannot undercut the massive number of exclusionary and delegitimizing policies mandated at Williamsburg School. Naturally, the presence of an equal number of teachers unsympathetic to Translinguals doesn’t help. For instance, they reinforce marginalizing policies through their pedagogical styles. Figure 4, below, shows an excerpt of a researcher note I wrote in reference to one of the teachers while observing her class. In the note, I mention that the norm for this classroom was “lots of academic words,” noting the emphasis on standardized English and lack of flexibility with pedagogical methods such as translingualism, to the detriment of the children. As Javier mentioned, this teacher doesn’t listen to students when they argue that using their mother tongue helps them to be better students; he said that she thinks: “students cannot be right”. So, though school structures, processes, and policies have high levels of power, they have low levels of impact, since they are implemented by school stakeholders.

Agent # 2: Community. Community members are defined by stakeholders who typically interact with Translinguals outside of the school walls. Members of this group could be the pizza store owner, the mailman, the attending hospital doctor, or a bus driver. Because of the scarcity of their interactions with Translinguals in the school context, Translinguals do not have extended interactions with them. However, they have come up often as an extension of the agents present within the school walls once Translinguals leave school and interact with others within the community after school and during weekends. They are characterized by overt racist tendencies and hold low levels of power and low degrees of influence.

Agent # 3: Teachers. Teachers have emerged as the agents Translinguals spend the most time around in learning contexts. They hold very high power, as their charge in the school community is to not only be instructors, but also mentors, protectors, role models, and more. Delegitimizing teachers are characterized by their shared predisposition to assign an inferior academic status to Translinguals and undermine their academic success by limiting their access to equitable education, as well as by a strong disconnect from Translinguals’ identities, leading to racialization and victimization. They hold high levels of power and highly impact Translinguals’ marginalizing experiences. For example, Joalene mentioned several times in our conversations the manner in which she prefers to “quit down” so that her teacher wouldn’t be upset. Once, she said during a group discussion: “I just shut up, so she is nice to me. If you ask many questions, she doesn’t like it”. Dina’s response was that she had noticed that Joalene had become more and more silent in this particular class, pointing to the fact that the teacher made her become this way, in essence, going from an inquisitive and collaborative student to one who would barely participate in class.

Agent # 4. Peer Translingual Students. As a defense mechanism and for survival purposes, certain Translinguals opt for pure assimilation instead of the acculturation route chosen by most. Acculturation allows a minoritized culture to integrate the host culture while retaining unique native cultural and other markers, while assimilation allows for some modification of the host culture while mostly changing the original identity. Translinguals who chose assimilation to escape the victimization they faced in schools, such as being placed in remedial classes and being ascribed a low academic and social status, chose to highly regard peer Translinguals who remained loyal to their original cultural traditions. Marginalized translingual students have low power but very high influence on their peers, and they have a strong impact on Translingual identity formations in school. I noticed many positive changes in my group of participants over the time I spent with them. Increasingly vocal, integrated students have influenced their peers’ behaviors, prompting them to be more assertive about their wants and needs over the duration of this study. They developed a group and leadership mentality, individuals who must protect each other.

3.1.2. Ideological Enactment of Agents of Epistemic Racism

The second theme concerning the agents of epistemic racism speaks to the types of discourses with which they arm themselves to attack the epistemological freedoms of Translinguals. As illustrated in Figure 5 below, the main discourse topics revolve around the following terms, ranked by level of importance from Level 1 (of highest importance) to Level 5 (of least importance). Note that the size and color of the words in the word cloud define their classification (level 1: racist; level 2: students; level 3: school, practices; level 4: policies, negative, class, assumptions, exclusionary, English; level 5, unjust, colonizing, student).

These words indicate part of the vocabulary that describes the composition of the philosophies incarnated in the agents of epistemic racism. The most important terms (see Figure 5) are “racist” and “student”, underlining the root of the issue, racism against a specific type of student. Then come the words “school” and “practices”, stressing the context and behaviors used as tools to inflict epistemic racism. After these words come several designations and attributes that accentuate the unjust treatment of Translinguals and the deliberate ignoring and devaluing of their consciousness and academic capabilities.

So how do these agents operate? They constantly work in opposition to the students’ identities because of the agents’ own personal beliefs or by perpetuating and reinforcing marginalizing school policies. For example, the sport of soccer is very important in many Mexican families, as illustrated in Natalia’s self-portrait and Javier’s timeline (Figure 6). For these Translinguals, soccer is part of the way they live; it is present in every day of their lives, and it constitutes a way to bond, not only with their immediate families, but also with their Translingual community at large, including their peers in school. For Natalia, it is so important that she decides not to draw herself at the center of her self-portrait; rather, she drew a Mexican flag to show her support for Mexico and its soccer team. For Javier, a look at his timeline confirms how meaningful soccer has been in his life; most of the events noted are about soccer. As important as soccer is to these students, though, I witnessed them being constantly exposed to American football as the sport of choice in their school, especially, in one of the classrooms, because the teacher was a big fan.

There is nothing wrong with loving a sport like American football, which is, in fact, the most popular sport in the U.S. However, this particular teacher missed the opportunity to leverage an aspect of her students’ identities during teaching. Every time she used a football analogy instead of a soccer one, it was a missed opportunity to capture her students’ attention and even gain some level of trust. This didn’t go unnoticed. Julio, who loved soccer as well, mentioned once while complaining about this teacher’s negative behavior towards “kids like him” and questioning her pedagogical capabilities: “soccer is me”; if the teacher bonded with him over it or referred to it in her lessons instead of “teaching everyone the same” as Magdalena called it, it would be best.

Another example of how agents of epistemic racism function is that they are blatantly racist and linguicist. In fact, they voice their racial and linguistic discrimination through divisive and dichotomous discourses, such as “them” and “us” and “you” and “us American” while speaking to the students, ignoring the fact that Translinguals, though operating culturally and linguistically in a manner different from mainstream America, are indeed Americans or “as American as Americans.” Their dissimilarities do not make them un-American or anti-American, nor should their citizenship status or relevant documents determine how American they are. If not born in this country or naturalized to it, they have a strong allegiance to it, which was the case for all of this study’s participants. Social categorizations and group bias only further alienate Translinguals, such as the ones in this study, who are an integral part of American society and Williamsburg School. Magdalena’s language silhouette (Figure 7) illustrates this point, as it shows how she perceives her belonging to both Mexico, where her mother is from and the U.S., where she was born. Telling her otherwise damages her self-esteem and confuses her.

3.2. Transresistance: How Translinguals Reject and Combat Epistemic Racism

The findings indicate that Translinguals combat epistemic racism through Transresistance, or “a fluid system of social and intellectual acts, dispositions, or behaviors, grounded in transliteracies, and aimed at directly or indirectly resisting oppressive ideological Discourses in various times and spaces” (Fall, 2020 [5]). Translinguals achieve this opposition by virtue of strategies reflective of the same literacies used by agents of epistemic racism to marginalize them. Before detailing the features of Transresistance, let me first discuss Covert and Overt Transresistance.

3.2.1. Covert and Overt Transresistance

Covert Transresistance is the manifestation of social and intellectual resisting discourses that signal a desire of the Translingual to keep themselves protected from further marginalization. It is manifested in a subtle opposition to the perpetuator, concealed by a veiled and deceptive tolerance to the agent of epistemic racism. At times, it resembles a suggestion from the Translingual to the agent of epistemic racism demonstrating how the Translingual would like to be treated. For example, in discussing his relational map, below, Julio expressed the sentiment that his “grandma and grandpa from Mexico are like his real parents,” bringing up a discussion about who is family or not family, and the importance of extended family in his specific Translingual culture. Yaël’s timeline makes mention of his Puerto Rican grandmother, who was very influential in his upbringing while she was alive, and whom he venerated. Both students brought up these facts in classroom exercises in which they included mentions of their extended families, as a recommendation to their teachers to adapt their lessons, homework requirements, and discussions to be more inclusive of their families. They didn’t speak their suggestions; they drew them, as they did in their respective relational map and timeline (Figure 8).

Overt Transresistance, on the other hand, is openly displayed as social and intellectual resisting discourses that directly reject marginalization. It is exhibited through an explicit challenge to the perpetuator, in the form of honest and opinionated attitudes geared towards taking a resilient stance of resistance. On occasion, this overt resistance is performed indirectly through others (Fall, 2020 [5]), such as community organizations who fight for the wellbeing of Translinguals immigrants, for example, the Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícoles (CATA). Most of the families of the student participants were members of CATA, which engages policymakers and seeks to lobby for the human rights of its constituents. Figure 9 shows a picture of part of their brochure, which reads: “Todos nacemos con dignidad y derechos” (We all are born with dignity and rights). At other times, Overt Transresistance is nonverbal, such as the times Magdalena insisted on taking out her Virgen de Guadalupe mini-statute during exams and holding onto it while she did her work. This habit noticeably annoyed one of her teachers, who reminded her that nothing, but a pencil and paper were allowed on her desk. However, Magdalena insisted that her Virgen “was special to her” and that “she protected her and calmed her when she was nervous”. Later, as part of her photo-elicited interview, Magdalena shared a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe (Figure 10), a religious symbol of faith and justice, believed to represent the apparition of the Virgin Mary to an Indigenous Mexican. The Virgin Mary appeals to the poor and marginalized in some societies, and to Magdalena, who received her mini statute from her grandmother who passed away, the figure represented love and safety. Despite her teacher’s disapproval, Magdalena brought her Virgen de Guadalupe to class over and over again.

3.2.2. Transresistance: Combatting Epistemic Racism with Transliteracies

Transresistance creates a space for Translinguals to communicate social, academic, political, traditional, and intellectual discourses of resistance using literacies taught to them at school and others that consist of blends of their own transliteracies. They manifest their resistance through learned academic acts such as speaking English and mimicking culturally accepted gestures and constructed verbal and nonverbal linguistic behaviors that carry a defying and confrontational meaning.

Table 3. Covert and Overt Transresistance.

Transresistance in Action	Example	Covert or Overt
Proclaiming the validity of their mother tongue	Speaking Spanish in classrooms where the teacher sternly forbids it.	Overt
Subtly proclaiming pride in translingual identity	Showing off globalized and multilingual identity in writing exercises by using mother tongue and newly learned language (Korean learned from K Pop Music).	Covert
Expressing dual allegiance and complex identity relative to American and Mexican cultures	Telling teacher and classmates that they are both American and Mexican, sharing examples of belonging to both ways of being in class oral report, and voicing that they think it means you are cool and smart.	Overt
Opposing agents of epistemic racism	Translingual direct challenges to teachers and other adults when they feel they have been marginalized because of racism and linguicism.	Overt
Denouncing Raciolinguistic ideologies to ally peers and adults in the school community	Participants using immigrant-friendly political narratives in discussions about politics and current societal issues.	Covert (in safe places only) or overt in public
Affiliating with other minoritized groups in social contexts to avoid enduring marginalization alone	Groups of participants often sitting with Black and other Latinx students with whom they share similarities and using them as a safety net.	Covert
Going along with racist and linguistic oppressive actions and speech when in public	Using attitudes and nonverbal expression to show disapproval of epistemic racism.	Covert

describes Covert and Overt Transresistance acts and behaviors, accompanied by some examples.

One way to understand Transresistance is to comprehend what it looks like when in action. Transresistance is an event that happens in an episode, and which requires an experience, instigator, actor(s), and tool, as well as time and space [5]. The experience is the oppressive experience that triggered the Transresistance episode, the instigator enacts the oppression, the actor is the Translingual heading the resistance, the tool is the covert or overt transliteracy used, and time and space represent when and where this event takes place, explaining why the instigator and actor behave in a specific way, based on social norms and expectations.

Transresistance happens in five phases (See Figure 11: (1) the trigger or start of the episode, (2) the overt or covert resistance, (3) the instigator’s rebuttal, (4) the actor’s counter-rebuttal, and (5) the compromise and resolution, which speaks to the act, and whether the instigator or the actor would compromise or reconsider their beliefs and intentions at the end of the episode.

The image below is an example of an Overt Transresistance episode led by Yaël, in response to one of their teachers. This episode took place in class during independent study, when students perform exercises independently.

4. Discussion

This investigation sought to examine the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students and explore the ways in which Translinguals reject these agents’ marginalization. The two findings that emerged expand on the doctoral work of the original study and other language, literacy, sociocultural, and sociolinguistics scholarship.

4.1. Epistemic Racism Agents and Bad Discourses

First, I found that school stakeholders with various roles, social power, and degrees of impact epitomize epistemic racism through ideological discourses. This finding confirms that discourses are used as vehicles to transfer linguistic racialization ideologies [10]. Their characteristics reveal the stakeholders are mostly adults who routinely interact with Translinguals, and the issue most impactful in their relationship with them is the latter’s race. The words “students,” “exclusionary,” “assumptions,” and “exclusionary” were proximate and below the word “race” as words that labeled the disapproval and disdain that the agents of epistemic racism felt towards Translinguals. This knowledge expands our understanding of racism and linguicism; they are rooted in strategies of condescension [81] and demonizing prejudices [82], targeting the students who are the most vulnerable in the school community and in the country’s political scene, especially around the time this data was collected. These discourses also deepen our understanding of the dangerous nature of everyday discourses in everyday classrooms and schools; they can channel negative ideologies and have the power to ascribe unwanted and low status to Translinguals, hurt their self-esteem, and cause anxiety and depression [83]. These issues tend to be graver for Translinguals who are less integrated into American culture and society, particularly those who happen to be immigrants at the beginning of their immigration journeys [84,85], thus pointing to the need to devise educational and mental health policies that support inclusive pedagogies and provisions for healthier Translingual immigrants in schools. One unexpected finding is the involvement of peer Translinguals in the list of delegitimizing stakeholders and their adherence to delegitimizing discourses. Within the group of participants, I found different levels of privilege amongst the Translinguals: the ones with a higher recognized proficiency in English and more integration into American culture afforded themselves liberties than others could not, despite the palpable solidarity in the group. They appeared to have moved up and away from the lowest ranks of the totem pole of the hierarchy of the school formerly assigned to them when they were new, to what seemed to be an entry into a special club of school stakeholders, affording them the right to also subject others to oppression, and changing from a state of sameness with their peers to difference [86]. This finding contradicts the scholarship that attributes Translinguals and other students’ wellbeing in part to their friendships, intellectual collaborations [87] co-creation of knowledge in the form of “testimonios” [88,89] in a community of fellow racialized Translinguals. However, this finding parallels those of the works that assert that the oppressed can become the oppressor by replicating cycles of marginalization and becoming part of the power and hierarchy structures by which they were initially oppressed [90].

4.2. Transresistance: Types, Components, and Phases When in Motion

Second, I found that Translinguals combat epistemic racism through Covert and Overt Transresistance, which are enacted through resisting transliteracies rooted in the same types of literacies used to marginalize Translinguals. Because being Translingual strongly and inadvertently offends, bothers, demystifies, and challenges monolingual and monocultural customs [83], Transresistance gives an outlet for Translinguals to reclaim their identities and provides a space to fight against language imperialism, which actually means combatting cultural genocide [91] and other broader societal inequities [92]. The significance of Transresistance is in its name. Transresistance is rooted in the prefix “Trans”, which, as defined earlier in this article, embodies fluidity between, across, and within multiple linguistic cultures and traditions; movement of language that challenges strict norms of correctness and appropriateness; and a perspective encompassing broad definitions of language and literacy, including a sensitivity to the social, historical, and political assumptions and contexts in which languaging takes place [3,15,19]. Transresistance also sustains the narratives, epistemologies, and truths of those who live in and within translingualism, transliteracy, translocality, and translanguaging. Furthermore, the root word “resistance” alludes to oppressive acts, discourses, behaviors, gestures, and attitudes geared towards minimizing the value of the “trans” identity and rendering it invisible. The literature on decolonizing education and epistemic freedom has warned that epistemic resistance [35] can be challenged by the deep impact of cognitive imperialism [90] in minoritized worlds and its constant reinforcement in K-12 education systems [1]. This “white washing” might be at the root of some Translinguals’ hesitation to resist openly. Instead, as some of my participants did, they opt for Covert Transresistance, most safely practiced in private conversations with school stakeholders they trust, with allies, and with peer Translinguals who legitimize transliteracies. Since they cannot change their ethnoracial identities, this group is very concerned about molding their linguistic profile to fit standardized rules, as they are aware of how language is used against them. They may be unable to name this phenomenon, but they understand the coloniality of language and language weaponization [91,92]. This group also spends time discussing strategies to dodge the effects of epistemic racism and, within debriefing instances, they covertly responded to it with their Translingual co-conspirators. This information should inspire school administrators to encourage group activities that allow Translinguals to get to know people around the school; cross-classroom projects, peer teacher observations with students assisting, and schoolwide open discussions about sensitive topics such as racism and other “-isms” may tend to be very influential in creating a safe environment for these vulnerable Translinguals [93,94], one in which they are able to identify safe spaces and allies. In such a context, those who opt for Overt Transresistance may also find other children and adults who may support them when they face the retaliation from agents of epistemic racism.

One interesting aspect of discovering Transresistance has been understanding how it is put in motion. Uncovering its five phases following the discovery of its five components: experience, instigator, actor(s), tool, and time and space [5] significantly expands our knowledge about the level of consciousness of Translinguals and the systematicity of the phenomenon of Transresistance. Indeed, in concert with current scholarship, this paper’s findings assert the high level of intelligence and self-consciousness of Translinguals and reiterate their capability to navigate harsh and hostile environments [9], even at an early age. Indeed, when an instigator triggers a Transresistance episode, the Translingual actor instinctively activates a resistance but first decides to opt for an overt or covert type. The same process is repeated when offering a counter-rebuttal and while deciding to compromise or keeping their ground. Watching this happen over and over with study participants was quite fascinating, as this process happens so fast and very naturally. What is important to remember is that Translinguals, though victimized, have such remarkable resilience and incredible creativity with their literacies, like other minoritized youth studied in the literature [95,96]. They perceive their transliteracies as much more than a mere tool for communication. They represent a means to survive, to keep oneself safe, to get along, to encourage each other and to build community, and a weapon to fight back against vicious attacks against the very core of who they are [97,98].

4.3. Implications

These findings concur with numerous existing works of scholarship, but also expand our knowledge by offering alternative conceptualizations of the inner workings of epistemic racism and resistance to it in schools. They warrant implications in theory, research, pedagogy, and policy.

The fields concerned with language, literacy, sociocultural education, equity and justice education may find this work useful in decolonizing and democratizing research design and processes, especially when working with linguistically and culturally minoritized groups. Also, these fields may benefit from the theorization of translingual resistance offered in this paper; this conceptualization of resistance in schools may be built on to discover additional ways minoritized students reject oppression. The recognition of the systematicity of Transresistance could open doors to new ways to prepare teacher educators in higher education classrooms and assist in the forming of social justice and equity-based teachers who are prepared to appropriately interact with Translinguals, who constitute the majority of students in many schools. Moreover, these findings are informative about alternative uses of multimodal and multilingual transliteracies tied to survival and resistance, thus compelling educators to leverage these literacies as valuable assets in their classrooms and as ways to better know their Translingual students. Finally, policy-makers benefit from this work, as it demonstrates several social, educational, and mental health needs of some of the most vulnerable students in our schools.

4.4. Study Limitations

The limitations in this work encompass several aspects of the study. First, as a member of various minoritized groups who has worked extensively in the school community in which the study took place, my presence might have influenced some of the stakeholders. For example, students might have felt more comfortable opening up about their experiences with epistemic resistance or even be more compelled to challenge it because of my presence. Also, because of my public antiracism and anti-linguicism stance, teacher participants might have been more self-aware during observations and interactions with Translinguals. In addition, although student participants were collectively a diverse ethno-racial group, a more diverse group of Translinguals would have enriched this study.

5. Conclusions and Recommendations for Future Research

This paper sought to characterize agents of epistemic racism in schools and cognize how Translingual students contest it. Findings revealed that these agents could be any stakeholder in the school community, even a peer Translingual; oppressive exclusionary discourses about race and unwarranted prejudices are the main sources and tools of marginalization. Translinguals use Transresistance, a fluid system based on transliteracies, put in motion through a process composed of five elements and five phases to resist epistemic racism. Future research with participants of different grade levels and schooling contexts would benefit several fields and advance our knowledge about racism, linguicism, and resisting literacies. Observing and examining Transresistance in action with different types of Translinguals will further our understandings of its practicalities.

The larger implications and significance of this work are concerned with participating in the contentious conversations about who matters and why, in our schools, in our communities, and in our societies. As more and more minoritized individuals and groups are marginalized on the basis of race and linguistic backgrounds, as laws protecting their interests are being reverted, and as new U.S. state-based policies are elected to shut down efforts to teach about these injustices, we are, every day, moving further away from equitable education and the dream of a just society. The hope is that conversations and wonders such as the ones this article has the potential to elicit will grow, and that the human right of Translinguals and other minoritized “folx” to be culturally and linguistically different will be honored.