Counter-hegemonic language practices and ideologies: Creating a new space and value for Spanish in Southwest Texas

This article examines how local norms for Spanish use in a multilingual Southwest Texas border setting respond to and contest dominant monolingual ideologies. The analysis focuses on notions of what languages are legitimate for use in the public sphere in this community and on the benefits of engaging in particular communicative practices. The corpus analyzed comes from interviews with key members of the university (president, program director, professor) and from newspaper articles published in the local newspaper. The article shows how institutional actors from the media and education contest dominant monolingual language ideologies by situating these views historically and connecting them to key conceptual metaphors that encapsulate language ideologies. In doing so, these institutional actors challenge national ideologies that construct monolingualism and standard ‘English’ as the natural and only option connected to social and economic success, offering Spanish and bilingualism as legitimate alternatives.