Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Mass Media Engagement: Implications for Sociolinguistic Justice

1. Introduction: The Demographic Impetus for Social Justice

The ongoing reconfiguration of the population of the United States in demographic, racio-ethnic, and sociolinguistic terms is well documented by demographers and other social scientists. During the past half century, the U.S. Latinx population has grown rapidly, increasing from 9.6 million in 1970 (Passel & Cohn 2016) to 55 million in 2014 (Krogstad & Lopez 2015), and today the people grouped in this ethnic category make up roughly one-fifth of the overall population of the United States. ¹ Demographic projections suggest that these figures will continue to grow in the decades to come. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau National Projections Report (Colby & Ortman 2015) projects that during the next four decades, the U.S. Latinx population will grow by an additional 115 percent, reaching 119 million by 2060. By the same year, the overall foreign-born population in the United States is expected to grow from 42 million to 78 million, outpacing the growth of the non-foreign-born population, and reaching 20 percent of the overall U.S. population. While the ethnic and national-origin diversity of the foreign-born category will increase in the decades to come, immigration from Latin America will indeed continue, with Latinx becoming the third fastest growing group during this period (Colby & Ortman 2015). At the same time, U.S. Latinx births—the current driver of population increases among U.S. Latinxs—will also continue to increase (Krogstad & Lopez 2014).

What this means for the number of Spanish speakers in the United States is somewhat harder to track considering the forces of cross-generational language shift that promote the gradual loss of Spanish in U.S. Latinx communities (Veltman 1988, 2000). Escobar and Potowski (2015:9-10) estimate that the number of Spanish speakers in the United States today is around 48.6 million. Their figure includes 34.8 million speakers of Spanish aged five years and older as reported in the 2010 U.S. Census, 11 million undocumented immigrants from Latin America (Pew Hispanic Center 2013), and an estimated 2.8 million non-Latinx people who use Spanish in the home (González-Barrera & López 2013). Estimates of the number of Spanish speakers in the United States are always difficult to interpret in the sense that they obscure several different, oftentimes opposing, sociolinguistic patterns. For example, population estimates suggest that the overall number of Spanish speakers in the United States is growing and will continue to grow. While increases in this number give the appearance of larger and more durable Spanish-speaking communities in the United States, these increases owe almost entirely to patterns of new immigration from predominately Spanish-speaking countries. At the same time, the language can also be said to be losing speakers on account of the well-documented three-generation pattern of language shift reported in countless sociolinguistic studies of U.S. Latina/o communities (e.g., Veltman 1988, 2000; Zurer Pearson & McGee 1993; Portes & Schauffler 1996; Zentella 1997; Otheguy, García & Roca 2000). As a result, patterns of Spanish/English bilingualism within U.S. Latinx communities are complex, with individuals from the same community, family, and classroom inhabiting different spaces along the bilingual continuum. These language patterns are central, not incidental, to the linguistic, educational, and sociocultural lives of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinx college students across the country. Institutions of higher education, Hispanic-serving and otherwise, can no longer systematically ignore the sociolinguistic and sociocultural complexities that characterize Latinx communities in the United States, and must endeavor to integrate sociolinguistic perspectives into regular institutional operations, including recruitment and retention efforts, community engagement, and curriculum and instruction. This article thus endeavors on two fronts. The first is to bring into the widest possible awareness basic information about Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) and some of the language-based issues that Latinx-identified students may face on college campuses. The second is to describe how engagement with the mass media can function as a critical response to the language issues that Latinx students face on campus and in the community. The first half of the paper describes the rise of HSIs, the broader sociodemographic impetus for them, and important language and identity issues for Latinx students on campus. The second half of the paper describes how the mass media can be used to address these issues. Because I am a faculty at an HSI and my research focuses on language in U.S. Latinx communities, the media strategies I suggest are explained in this context, but they are portable; thus, readers should be able to apply them to their own professional contexts and adapt them to the needs of the student bodies at their own institutions.

The situation of immigration, language, and education in Miami-Dade County—the largest Latinx (Brown & Lopez 2013) and most Spanish-speaking metropolitan region in the United States—illustrates the kinds of demographic changes more cities in the United States will witness in the years to come. Similarly, more universities will see student bodies resembling the current profile of Florida International University, which is currently the largest HSI in the United States. In Miami-Dade, the sociodemographic changes owing to political crises throughout Latin America, beginning with the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, have resulted in a population that is now 66 percent foreign-born and 65 percent Latinx. In the city of Miami, the latter figure climbs to 79 percent, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, while in major Miami-Dade municipalities such as Hialeah, Latinx people make up more than 90 percent of the population. While Miami’s demographic situation may look remarkably different from the rest of the country by today’s standards, if demographic predictions are to be believed, more cities across the United States will resemble Miami in demographic and sociolinguistic terms as the twenty-first century unfolds. These changes raise important theoretical and descriptive questions for language scholars studying these speech varieties, but they also raise a broader set of questions about the racio-ethnic and sociocultural makeup of the student bodies at our universities, the language backgrounds, needs, and gifts of our Latinx students, the needs of their home speech communities, and the role that linguists can play in helping raise awareness at our universities and in local speech communities about the language issues that contextualize our Latinx students’ experiences. Raising awareness—particularly in ways that are publicly visible beyond the university context—is valuable not only for issues of social justice, which is the focus of this article, but also for its implications in a wide range of professional activities including student recruitment, admissions, retention, program building, curriculum design, and instructional practice.

In section 2 of this article, I provide an overview and brief history of HSIs in the United States, as well as a brief overview of my academic institution, Florida International University (FIU), a large, public HSI located in Miami, Florida. In section 3, I discuss some of the language-related challenges faced by immigrant and U.S.-born Latinx college students on and off campus. In section 4, I introduce the Community-Scholar-University model of media engagement I have codeveloped over the past five years at FIU. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the particular importance of doing the work of mass media engagement within the HSI context, and provide some general tips for doing media work in university contexts.

2. The Rise of “Hispanic-Serving Institutions” in U.S. Higher Education

This section offers a short but detailed description of HSIs in order to situate the ensuing discussion in the appropriate institutional context and to provide readers interested in HSIs needed context for additional inquiry. In contrast to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which were mostly set up after the American Civil War and established as such in the Higher Education Act of 1965, HSIs are a relatively recent and largely unknown designation in U.S. higher education. When it was originally passed, the goal of the Higher Education Act was to improve access to higher education for minority and historically disadvantaged groups. In its original form, the act neither mentioned the ethnic category “Hispanic/Latino” nor conceived of certain institutions as serving “Hispanic” students in particular. This changed when the U.S. Congress voted to reauthorize the Higher Education Act in 1992, at which time Hispanic students were first mentioned, and the institutional designation “Hispanic-serving” was created. Since that time, accredited, degree-granting institutions of higher education are designated as Hispanic-serving if at least 25 percent of full-time-equivalent undergraduate enrollments are Hispanic/Latinx. The HSI designation is therefore based only on the question of contemporary enrollment, not necessarily on historical, curricular, or philosophical orientation to Hispanic students, and no legislation clarifies what it means in curricular terms to be Hispanic-serving. Indeed, what Hispanic-serving means varies greatly from institution to institution. For example, a historically White institution can become Hispanic-serving from one year to the next simply by meeting the minimum enrollment criterion (25 percent Hispanic) but may nevertheless do little to address, plan for, and incorporate the needs and gifts of Latinx students into university life.

Given the demographic changes at the national level set forth in section 1 of this article, it is no surprise that HSIs are growing in number. According to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), there were 189 federally recognized HSIs in 1994 following the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. That number grew to 229 in 2000 and to 311 in 2010. ² By 2014, 435 universities and colleges in the United States and Puerto Rico met the federal Hispanic-serving designation. Those institutions collectively enrolled over 1.8 million Latinx students, mostly in states with historically large Latinx populations. For example, in the 2013-2014 academic year, there were 139 HSIs in California, 75 in Texas, 23 in Florida, 23 in New Mexico, and 12 in Arizona. There were also 296 “emerging” HSIs, which the HACU defines as colleges and universities with a full time equivalent Hispanic undergraduate enrollment of at least 15 percent. “Emerging” HSIs are found across the country, including in states that currently have very few or no HSIs, such as Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Maryland, and others. The number and geographic distribution of emerging HSIs is no surprise considering U.S. Census data showing that regions without historically large Latinx populations are experiencing the greatest population growth in their respective Latinx populations today. In other words, HSIs, and the Latinx population growth that drives their expansion, can no longer be imagined to be a regional issue. Latinx population growth is a national phenomenon and institutions of higher education, Hispanic-serving and otherwise, must be prepared to meet the needs of Latinx students. ³ Sociolinguists have an important role to play in this evolution, not only as scholars who study the language issues that contextualize U.S. Latinx communities, but also as institutional brokers who help integrate sociolinguistic perspectives about these communities into university affairs, and as public intellectuals who help communicate sociolinguistic knowledge about Latinx language issues to the university community and the broader public.

Florida International University is a large urban public research university that enrolled 52,980 students in fall 2013, of whom 62.8 percent were Latinx, 13.7 percent were African American, and 51 percent were Pell Grant recipients. FIU’s Latinx-majority student body is diverse in terms of national origin group, reflective of Miami’s own Latinx diversity. Carter and Lynch (2015:373) note that Miami is “among the world’s most pan-Hispanic places” on account of large numbers of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Argentines, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Hondurans, Peruvians, and others. I provide this description here not only as a way of contextualizing the discussion that follows, but also to point out that all student and community advocacy begins with knowing where the students and their families come from. In the next section, I turn to a discussion of the kinds of language issues Latinx students may experience at U.S. colleges and universities.

3. Latinx Language Issues on Campus and in the Community

The immediacy of Latinx population growth in many parts of the United States, reflected in the newness of the HSI designation itself, means that there are often very few linguistically informed voices of reason to combat the misinformation that circulates about the languages, language varieties, and forms of talk that characterize U.S. Latinx speech communities, both on campus and in local communities. Latinx college students, whether or not they attend HSIs, are more likely than other students to be the first members of their family to attend college. And no matter what kind of college or university they attend, they most likely attended monolingual, English-only schools for all or most of their primary and secondary education. For these reasons, Latinx college students—like students from other groups who are multilingual and/or who speak nonstandard varieties of English or other socially disfavored language varieties—may be ill-equipped to deal with the disaffirming language ideologies that vitiate their ways of speaking. Disaffirming language ideologies may affect not only English of U.S. Latinx students, but also their Spanish and use of code-mixing or “Spanglish.” Latinx college students may therefore face a “triple-burden” of standard language ideology (Silverstein 1996; Lippi-Green 1997), in addition to ideologies of English monolingualism (Macías 1985; Wiley & Lukes 1996; Wiley 2000), nation, nativity, and generation that problematize Spanish-speaking and construct U.S. institutions of higher-education as English-speaking spaces, except in so-called “foreign language” classes.

Language scholars working in U.S. Latinx communities have described the multiple, disaffirming language ideologies operating in U.S. schools that efface Latinx experiences, reduce and problematize bilingualism, and demonize U.S. varieties of Spanish and Spanglish (Urciuoli 1996; Zentella 1997; Valdés 2001; Santa Ana 2002; Carter 2014b). The language ideologies that shape Latinx students’ experiences in primary and secondary educational settings likely extend into postsecondary contexts as well. For example, in the corpus of sociolinguistic interviews we have collected over the past four years with Miami-born Latinx college students, we have come across language attitudes—without even looking for them—that suggest that English in Miami is not “real” English, that Spanish in Miami has been contaminated by English or less prestigious varieties of Spanish, and that the presence of Spanglish bespeaks a population that knows neither language well, is unmotivated to learn, is uneducated, is lazy, and so on. Our research also suggests that rather than seeing community patterns of language shift as owing to structural problems, such as lack of bilingual education in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education, individuals blame themselves for the personal and community patterns of Spanish to English language shift. When we consider the positive role that the maintenance of heritage languages plays in constructing positive forms of ethnic identity (Fishman 1977; Smolicz 1981; Hurtado & Gurin 1995) and the role that the break in transmission of Spanish within families plays in terms of negative psychological and educational consequences for U.S. Latinx students (Tseng & Fuligni 2000; Oh & Fuligni 2009), these issues are not merely esoteric. Zentella (1997) writes about the economic consequences for Puerto Rican adolescents in New York who are told that “doors will open” if they trade Spanish for English. Doors of course do not always open, and bilinguals become monolinguals, oftentimes at the expense of employment in bilingual professions. Zentella (2014) even describes cases in which U.S. Latinx employees were fired for speaking Spanish from jobs for which they were hired explicitly for their Spanish-speaking skills. Scholars in education (e.g., Sólorzano, Villalpando & Oseguera 2005) have described the myriad nonlinguistic barriers that Latinx college students face as they work toward their undergraduate degrees, including underrepresentation on college campuses, hostile racial climates on campus, and lack of financial assistance, among others. Similar factors affect other underrepresented groups (as described in Charity Hudley, this issue). Thus, the linguistic and nonlinguistic issues Latinx students face are not ethereal but rather have measurable, material consequences identified in the scientific literature, including many consequences beyond campus life.

Sociolinguists have written a great deal about the educational consequences of disaffirming language ideologies and how to construct affirming curricula for speakers of nonstandard language varieties at the primary, secondary, and postsecondary levels (Smitherman 1977; Rickford & Rickford 1995; Wolfram, Adger & Christian 1999; Curzan 2002, 2009; Blake & Cutler 2003; Godley et al. 2006; Reaser 2006; Reaser & Adger 2007; Charity Hudley & Mallinson 2011, 2014; McBee Orzulak 2013). Unfortunately, as Charity Hudley and Mallinson note in the introduction to this special issue, most students at the university level do not reach our classes and therefore do not receive the kinds of messages about language we hope that they encounter as undergraduate students. And for Latinx students at U.S. universities, Spanish language classes may disaffirm the national-origin and local varieties of Spanish students learn in the home, first-year writing classes may disaffirm bilingual experiences, and even Heritage Language Spanish classes, when done poorly, can reproduce colonialist, nationalist, monolingual, and standard language ideologies that promote the loss of Spanish rather than its maintenance. For example, Lynch and Potowski (2014) describe a book published by the North American chapter of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (“Royal Spanish Language Academy”) entitled Hablando bien se entiende la gente (“Speaking well, we understand each other”), which provides “correctives” for lexical and grammatical features associated with Spanish in the United States. The book is prescriptivist in nature, cites none of the scholarly work on Spanish in the United States, and in general offers a condescending view of the language varieties of U.S. Latinx speakers. Despite the availability of other texts, Hablando bien se entiende la gente is used in Spanish as a Heritage Language classes across the United States. For this reason, as Childs (this issue) points out, one of the primary fronts for sociolinguistic teaching and activism is the first-year writing classroom.

Latinx college students may also face additional “soft” barriers to success on college campuses. First, they are unlikely to see themselves represented in course materials. Every year I show my undergraduate students the classic documentary American Tongues (Alvarez & Kolker 1988) and every year we discuss the wholesale absence of Latinx people and languages from the film. I ask students to imagine how the film would be different if it were made today. Latinx students also encounter the assumption of English monolingualism, from signage on campus (Ailanjian 2016) to English-only curricula. The presence of Spanish may be limited to Modern Language departments, where Peninsular (i.e., from Spain) interests tend to be overrepresented in terms of faculty research interests and curricula (Herlihy-Mera 2015) and which likely have little to do with the varieties of Spanish and kinds of sociolinguistic practices used in local speech communities. An overwhelmingly Anglo White professorate, even at large HSIs, may reinforce assumptions about the value of English monolingualism and may not be trained to understand the linguistic and sociocultural issues that contextualize U.S. Latinx speech communities. As this article and the others in this special issue make clear, issues of representation critically matter for recruitment, success, and retention of underrepresented students on every college and university campus. In the next section, I introduce the Community/Scholar/University model of mass media engagement, and describe how media engagement functions as a critical response to the language issues on campus and in the community described in this section.

4. Mass Media Engagement as Critical Response

My program of research is situated within the rich language dynamics of U.S. Latinx speech communities and addresses the linguistic-structural, sociocultural, and identity issues resulting from sustained Spanish/English contact in the United States. While this program of research informs my teaching practices (e.g., Carter 2015a), allowing my students to confront disaffirming language ideologies with language data from their own speech communities and critical conversations about language diversity in Miami, I recognized what many sociolinguists have realized before me: while critical teaching can be transformative for our students, its scope is mostly limited to the students who happen to enroll in a given course during a given semester. Published scholarship has the potential to reach a wider audience, but its circulation is still mostly limited to scholarly and student audiences. To reach wider audiences, where the effects of disaffirming language ideologies may be even more pronounced than among college student audiences, sociolinguists committed to issues of social justice must think creatively about other channels of dissemination, including the mass media.

As Sclafani (2013) notes, linguists have long used the mass media to disseminate sociolinguistic knowledge to the general public, which, as Kiesling (2013) reiterates, has been profitable for shaping public opinion about language issues. Perhaps the best-known example of this practice within sociolinguistics is the response to the so-called Ebonics controversy in 1996, in which prominent linguists spoke to the media and wrote in public venues about the linguistic issues contextualizing the Oakland School Board decision (Wolfram 1998; Rickford 1999). These efforts can be thought of as a part of what Wolfram (2016) calls “public sociolinguistic education,” a form of community engagement in which sociolinguistic perspectives are communicated to the public through a variety of channels. Wolfram’s (2016) articulation of public sociolinguistics, rooted in the program of field-initiated sociolinguistic research he and his team have established in North Carolina, includes public lectures, museum exhibits, trade books, and educational documentaries. In this article, I conceive of mass media engagement as a form of public sociolinguistics designed to educate and engage communities, create a channel of communication between local communities and universities, and shape public opinion.

With the support and collaboration of my university, during the past four years I have developed a program of public scholarship designed to introduce sociolinguistic research to the public, to counter the damaging language ideologies and misinformation that circulates about the language forms used in U.S. Latinx speech communities, and to promote public awareness about the educational, policy, and linguistic issues that affect U.S. Latinx. This program and the model of engagement I introduce in this section are visible as such only in retrospect, and were not planned from the outset. My work in the media began when a story about my research on lexical, grammatical, and phonological influences from Spanish on English in Miami was transformed from a single interview with the Miami Herald and local PBS affiliate WLRN to a three-month-long spate of interviews with BBC Mundo, the New York Times, and numerous other print, radio, and television outlets in the United States and in Latin America. ⁴ What I learned from doing over twenty interviews on that topic was how powerful the media can be in making simple yet important ideas about complex language issues stick in the public consciousness. My university was very supportive of my work on English in Miami, and in my engagement with the media. For several weeks, media requests poured in, and the Office of Media Relations helped me organize and coordinate them. Sometimes reporters, interns, or producers contacted me directly; other times requests were made through the Office of Media Relations. In both cases, the office kept a record of the work I did, which is useful for issues of tenure and promotion, and in general helped me manage the commitments.

Seeing the value of the research, and the interest in the topic from local, national, and international audiences, the university produced a three-minute video on English in Miami. In the video, I describe the origins of Miami English in historical terms, the process of new dialect formation, and structural phenomena related to language contact (Perez 2013). While the Office of Media Relations produced the video, including making decisions about which parts of the hour-long interview were included in the video, I had creative input, both by returning to the points I thought were most valuable during the interview and by debriefing with the interviewer at the end of the interview. My interest was in giving viewers a taste of what is unique about English in Miami, without exotifying it, while primarily offering a critical take on language that most viewers would not have previously encountered, namely, that English in Miami emerged from historical conditions, just like all other human language varieties. Much as Mallinson (this issue) describes for the video she produced with her students at UMBC, FIU similarly posted my video on its website and circulated it on student listservs, where it reached thousands of students and helped to start campus and community dialogues about language variation and Spanish/English language contact in South Florida. On the FIU YouTube channel, the video currently has over 12,000 views. ⁵

My experiences communicating information and critical perspectives about English in Miami to the media taught me a great deal about how to communicate effectively with the press, but also showed me the power of the mass media. In the wake of the stories and interviews about Miami English, I saw online news stories get shared hundreds of times and witnessed the kind of discussion these stories generated on social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter. Though reactions to stories about English in Miami in the comments section of news articles were often negative, I also received dozens of emails from people in the community and abroad who expressed gratitude for seeing their language varieties and experiences in language validated publicly. Since that time, I have worked closely and deliberately with FIU’s Office of Media Relations to communicate sociolinguistic knowledge about language issues in Miami to local, national, and international audiences and to promote awareness of the educational, sociocultural, and political issues that contextualize language in U.S. Latinx communities more generally.

My work with the Office of Media Relations has assumed three general forms. First, I meet semiregularly with PR specialists from the Office of Media Relations to describe the findings of my completed research projects and work-in-progress, as well as present other materials related to research projects on language in Miami. The Office of Media Relations then determines which of these are best suited for news stories, either internally through FIU News or externally through the mass media. For example, I appeared on the CNN en español (CNNEE) program Encuentro to discuss perceptions of Spanish and English based on the results of a matched-guise study I conducted on Spanish and English in Miami (Carter & Lynch 2012).

Second, the Office of Media Relations connects me with journalists and producers looking for experts in my areas of expertise to discuss emerging news stories. Recently I appeared on Noticiero Univisión to speak about Donald Trump’s assertion that Jeb Bush should set an example for Latinx people by speaking English while in the United States and on Noticiero Telemundo to discuss a Pew Hispanic Center report (Krogstad 2016) showing that young U.S. Latinx prefer to speak English at home. These stories gave me a platform to communicate information about Spanish in the United States, bilingualism, and cross-generational language shift to a national audience consisting of millions of viewers.

Finally, the Office of Media Relations helps me place op-ed pieces and republishes on the university website pieces having to do with language topics relevant to the university community, such as bilingual education. For example, I wrote an op-ed in El Diario de las Américas (Carter 2015b) on the value of bilingualism in South Florida. The university translated the article to English and posted it on the FIU News website. ⁶

In this model of collaborative scholarship and media engagement, community-based sociolinguistic research is supported by and shared with the university, which promotes linguistically informed perspectives, news stories, and language experts to the media, who transmit linguistically informed perspectives to the public. When done well, the model should be beneficial to all parties, especially the community, whose members gain direct access to the research findings derived from the studies in which they participated, receive public validation of local forms of talk, and experience the disavowal of disaffirming and vitiating language ideologies. The university benefits from having a no-cost presence in the media, while the researcher benefits by receiving media exposure for their research projects, which is increasingly important for internal and external grant funding, impact reporting for grant reports, and so on.

The impact of mass media engagement extends beyond that of the immediate encounter with sociolinguistic perspectives by readers, listeners, and viewers. Mass media engagement also opens up unpredictable and unforeseen opportunities for other kinds of public sociolinguistic education and community engagement. For example, in summer 2015 a local language policy controversy ensued following a proposal by the Miami-Dade School Board to eliminate daily thirty-minute Spanish lessons in order to fund the expansion of Spanish/English dual language immersion programs in a few schools. A grassroots initiative was formed by local educators, activists, and community members who sought to keep daily Spanish in all Miami-Dade public schools. The group, which named itself “Save our Spanish/Salvemos Nuestro Español,” organized a town hall forum to educate parents and community members about the effects of the proposal. Because of my involvement in the media, a leader in the group reached out to me, invited me to the town hall forum, and connected me with local activists and an informal network of people who share information on email and social media about state and county educational policy proposals, demographic information, and news stories about Spanish in the United States, bilingual education, and related topics. The group also put me in touch with the producer of Issues, a show that airs on the PBS affiliate for South Florida and explores current events and public policy in the region. I was invited on the show to discuss the school board proposal and the role of Spanish in economic and sociocultural life in South Florida. ⁷ After the show aired, I was invited to speak to the Miami-Dade Hispanic Affairs Advisory Board about Spanish in Miami, again illustrating the power of the media to circulate sociolinguistic knowledge and create additional opportunities for community engagement. By the end of summer 2015, the school board had backed off its proposal to cancel the daily thirty-minute Spanish lessons in Miami-Dade public schools.

In addition to these kinds of impacts, media resources become community resources. Television interviews and op-ed articles, such as those linked in this article, remain online long after the original news stories have faded. Materials from media engagement also become teaching materials. In addition to using these materials in linguistics courses, some first-year writing instructors at FIU use op-eds I have written about language issues as prompts for position papers. I have heard from many teachers, professors, and linguists who stated that they have used a piece I wrote for CNN.com (Carter 2014a) about a proposal to overturn Proposition 227 in California as a prompt for essays, homework assignments, and in-class discussion. ⁸

5. Conclusion

Media engagement is not a panacea for issues of social/sociolinguistic inequality. And it can have its pitfalls for the person doing it, including personal attacks from the audience, being misunderstood or misrepresented, and lack of recognition with regard to professional advancement, including tenure and promotion. But in my view, these issues are minor compared to the potential good that comes from responsible media engagement. Public scholarship in this form is a potentially productive response to Zentella’s (1996:13) call for “anthropolitical linguistics,” which she defines as the need “to understand and facilitate a stigmatized group’s attempts to construct a positive self within an economic and political context that relegates its members to static and disparaged ethnic, racial, and class identities, and that identifies them with static and disparaged linguistic codes.” Mass media engagement, when used to express affirming messages about community language practices, is “anthropolitical” in the sense that it can challenge mainstream hegemonic messages about nonstandard language forms and ethnolinguistic minority communities that depict them as illegitimate, one-dimensional, and inherently bad or marginal. Work by Santa Ana (2002, 2013) shows that Latinx people suffer doubly negative treatment by the U.S. news media, in that stories about U.S. Latinx people are almost never covered, and, when they are, they are mostly negative and depict Latinx people in ways that construct them negatively. When carried out responsibly, public scholarship in the form of mass media engagement can also be a fruitful response to Wolfram’s (1993:227) notion of “linguistic gratuity,” which states that “investigators who have obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community should actively pursue ways in which they can return linguistic favors to the community.” This is especially true in the case of U.S. Latinx speech communities, which not only remain widely misunderstood linguistically and culturally in the most basic of ways, but which are also subjected to multiple and overlapping, complex language ideologies about Spanish, about monolingualism, about code-mixing, and about English. As illustrated throughout this special issue, those of us who are faculty at HSIs, as well as those who are not, have the opportunity to work against those forces through a collaborative model of community-based research, university partnership, and media engagement. As one reviewer of this article noted, the model I describe here could potentially be implemented at any university. That is precisely the point. All linguists working at universities with press offices are positioned to engage with them—and can do so in ways that promote sociolinguistic justice, are beneficial for campus communities, and broaden awareness of language-related issues on and off campus. In other words, press offices are not only for generating media interest in scholarly work; for those of us interested in sociolinguistic justice, they are also an invaluable link to the media, and as such, to the audiences we hope to reach.

By way of final conclusion, I would like to offer some practical advice for readers interested in implementing the scholar/mass media/university model of public sociolinguistics described here. First, establish a relationship with your university’s Office of Media Relations by requesting a meeting during which you explain your research, how it benefits the university community, and the community at large. If you have experience speaking with the press already, create a media-bio or media resume and take it with you to your meeting. Second, ask that your name be added to the list of media experts that your university makes available to the press. Similarly, if you think that a current event being covered in the media has a language angle that has not been explored, ask your Media Relations specialist to add your name to the list of experts covering that event. Third, write op-eds about the language issues facing the communities you study. Consider writing in the language of the community you study, in addition to English. If you cannot write in languages other than English, hire a professional translator from the community to translate your piece from English into the community language. Try to place your pieces in different venues, not only in major papers, but also in community and student newspapers. Fourth, when giving talks at your university or in the local community, invite the student newspaper to attend and contact your Office of Media Relations to inform them of your community speaking engagements. Archive your media experiences, and make them available as teaching resources for you and your colleagues and as community resources by making them publicly available on your website. Finally, think critically about the message you intend to communicate to the public. Linguists often express dismay about journalists’ misunderstanding of linguistics and their propensity to “spin” stories to create catchy headlines. This no doubt happens, but it may in fact owe to the use of jargon and overly technical language, a focus on issues that are too narrow for a nonspecialist to understand in the course of an interview, and an orientation to issues that may only be interesting or relevant to linguists. In other words, the problem may not be journalistic in nature, but rather what and how linguists choose to communicate to the press. Our words can dissipate into the mass media ether, but when chosen carefully they can contribute to social justice projects that benefit our institutions, local communities, and beyond.