Angélica Amezcua: As a Xicana tenure-track assistant professor and director of the Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) Program, my main priorities are to conduct research and design SHL curricula that promote an equitable and high-level education for Latinx/e students and create spaces of belonging for minoritized students. More specifically, I engage in research, service, and curriculum design that supports Latinx/e, first-generation, low-come students and provide them with tools to reach their academic goals. Similarly important, I use Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth framework to understand and identify the diverse types of capital Latinx/e students bring to the classroom. I use this framework to implement a curriculum that reinforces students’ diverse types of capital, such as aspirational, familial, social, navigational, resistant, and linguistic capital. Community Cultural Wealth is an asset-based framework that shifts and centers the lens on the experiences of people of color and challenges the assumption that minoritized students lack social and cultural capital. Yosso (2005) further delineates that Latinx/e students bring an “array of knowledge and skills [that they use] to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression” (Yosso, 2005, p. 77). Each capital is neither static nor independent; they build upon the other. I have taught Spanish heritage language courses for the past eight years (five years as a doctoral student and three as an assistant professor) and have seen first-hand the impact it could have on students when their capital (knowledge) is recognized and strengthened in educational institutions. Thus, in this talk I will share how a Spanish course is more than a space to acquire language skills; it is an opportunity for students to create a community, sense of belonging, and initiate social change.
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