149 SEVEN Beyond Registers of Formality and Other Categories of Stigmatization: Style, Awareness, and Agency in SHL Education Claudia Holguín Mendoza University of California, Riverside Numerous experts in the feld have advocated for the incorporation of socio- linguistics in Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) curricula as a way to vali- date students’ home and community varieties while also helping them become profcient in standard varieties and formal registers in order to achieve social, academic, and professional success (Valdés 1981; Potowski 2005; Beaudrie, Ducar, and Potowski 2014). However, not only does this tension between val- idating students’ linguistic varieties and imparting an understanding of real- world language expectations perpetuate dominant sociolinguistic and cultural hierarchies—by relegating students’ own varieties of Spanish, and hence a good deal of their authentic selves, to informal contexts (Villa 2003; Leeman 2005)—it also confates notions of register and notions of style and mischarac- terizes these simply as questions of formality and informality (Leeman 2005, 2018; Leeman and Serafni 2016). Tus, pedagogical resources among SHL language educators that use the notion of appropriateness in order to explain sociolinguistic variation to students difer from critical language and literacy approaches in the sense that the former do not question our linguistic choices, nor our cultural assumptions immersed in structures of power and diference in relation to class or ethnoracial categories, among others (see Freire 1973; Fairclough 1995; Lippi-Green 1997; Martínez 2003; Leeman 2005; Cho 2018). In addition, this SHL pedagogical discourse often omits questions of prestige and stigma and fails to consider style as a “dynamic resource for identity per- formance” (Mortensen, Coupland, and Tøgersen 2017, 2).