Linguistics and Education 50 (2019) 1–12 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Linguistics and Education jo ur nal ho me page: www.elsevier.com/locate/linged But mom! I’m not a Spanish Boy: Raciolinguistic socialization in a Two-Way Immersion bilingual program Sofía E. Chaparro * Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education, School of Education and Human Development, University of Colorado, Denver, United States a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 25 March 2018 Received in revised form 31 January 2019 Accepted 31 January 2019 Available online 19 February 2019 Keywords: raciolinguistic ideologies socialization bilingualism TWI programs a b s t r a c t This article is about the ways in which race and class impact socialization in a Two Way Immersion classroom - a process I refer to as raciolinguistic socialization. In line with the concept of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa, 2015), the term raciolinguistic socialization captures the ways in which race and class impact how language and literacy abilities are perceived and evaluated. I illustrate this pro- cess through the ethnographic stories of three Kindergarten students. Weaving together observations, recorded interactions, and parent interviews, I show the impact of raciolinguistic expectations on Lat- inx children; how class and race privilege influence how language development is evaluated positively, and how a disadvantaged socioeconomic position negatively impacts perceptions of linguistic ability.I conclude by discussing implications of this work for both TWI programs and for understanding how raciolinguistic ideologies impact children’s socialization more broadly © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Before the school year began, Ms. O – the Kindergarten teacher – was required to interview all children and their parents. In a con- versation one afternoon, as we were getting her classroom ready, Ms. O told me the story of Santiago and his mom Jane’s interview. Santiago is the son of professional parents: Jane, who is a white American bilingual woman, and Esteban, a dark-skinned Latino man from Costa Rica. During the interview Jane told Ms. O to please push Santiago to speak more Spanish, since he refuses to at home. Santiago quickly objected: “But mom, I’m not a Spanish boy!” Ms. O wondered whether Santiago, whose family will bring him from a wealthier area outside the catchment of the school, associated speaking Spanish only with Mexican immigrants. In this introductory vignette, Santiago, already at a young age, has made an association between speaking Spanish and a particular kind of person – or in this case a particular kind of “boy”; one with whom he does not identify, nor with whom he wishes to identify. This kind of link – or association between a way of speaking and a particular kind of person, is an example of a linguistic ideology that ties a way of speaking to a racialized person, in other words, a raciolinguistic ideology (Flores and Rosa, 2015). Santiago is part of a Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program that offers both Spanish and English speakers the opportunity of * Correspondence to: 1380 Lawrence St, Office 735, Denver, CO 80204, United States. E-mail address: sofia.chaparro@ucdenver.edu a dual language education. Two-Way Immersion programs are becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. (Collier and Thomas, 2004; Lindholm-Leary, 2012; Thomas and Collier, 2012). With this increase, there has been a concomitant growth in critical qualita- tive scholarship that stresses the importance of attending to issues of power and privilege between the students and families served by these programs (e.g. Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Fitts, 2006; Flores & García, 2017; Palmer, 2009; Valdés, 1997). Among this scholar- ship, recent interventions have sought to connect race and language in explicit ways. I aim to contribute to this literature by adopting a raciolinguistic perspective (Flores and Rosa, 2015;Rosa & Flores, 2017) on the language socialization of children in a Two-Way Immersion program located within a US public school. Specifically, I analyze the cases of three children, Santiago, Zoe and Larissa, and consider how race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status are factors that contribute to the way their bilingual development is perceived. By thinking with race/class/language, I explicitly contend with the ways in which race and class affect the perceptions and evaluations of students’ languaging, language abilities, and language develop- ment within a US public school context. The dichotomous framing of children as either “English dom- inant” or “Spanish dominant” – neither of which fits Santiago’s experience – has been one of the critiques leveraged on Two- Way Immersion (TWI) programs. This framing, along with the practice of strictly separating languages of instruction, adheres to a monoglossic perspective of language and ignores the complex communicative practices of bilinguals (García, 2009, 2012; Flores, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.01.003 0898-5898/© 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.