Dr. Frances Aparicio Oral History

Personal and Academic Journey

Dr. Frances Aparicio was born and raised in Puerto Rico, where she attended a college-preparatory Catholic school. Spanish and English were both important in her education, but she came to understand that English in Puerto Rico was also associated with social class, professional opportunity, and status.

She recalls feeling embarrassed when she could not understand spoken English in a sixth-grade class, despite doing well in written English. That experience, along with her parents’ encouragement to build her English vocabulary, helped her recognize how strongly she had absorbed the idea of English as a language of knowledge and prestige.

After moving to the United States at 19, Aparicio studied at Indiana University. She began in music, then switched to comparative literature and Spanish. Reading Spanish literature, including poetry by Pedro Salinas, helped draw her toward literary studies and criticism.

At university, Aparicio became aware of being treated as an exoticized and sexualized Puerto Rican minority. These experiences introduced her to racism and to the racialization of Spanish in the United States, themes that later informed her research.

At Harvard, despite being a native Spanish speaker raised in Puerto Rico, she had to take a Spanish proficiency exam because she had attended an American university. She describes this as a disorienting example of how institutions can question someone’s linguistic identity and competence.

After decades in the United States, Aparicio describes her identity as increasingly Latina American, shaped by her life, family, and academic career there.

Race, Ethnicity, and Language

Aparicio describes mestizaje, or racial and cultural mixing, as a complicated concept. It can recognize mixed identities, but Latin American institutions and thinkers have also used it to promote “whitening” and preserve European dominance. She contrasts this history with Gloria Anzaldúa’s more critical, anti-colonial approach to mestizaje, which connects race and cultural hybridity with personal experience, sexuality, and other forms of oppression.

Latino racialization differs across national communities and regions. Aparicio also emphasizes the growing importance and visibility of Afro-Latino scholarship and voices.

Spanish has different historical positions in Latin America and the United States. In Latin America, it became a dominant national language that often subordinated Indigenous languages. In the United States, it has commonly been treated as the language of poor immigrants and minorities, while English is presented as necessary for advancement.

Drawing on debates over “English-only” policies and bilingual education, Aparicio argues that bilingual education can help students and that language policy reflects broader racial and social ideologies.

Her students’ linguistic autobiographies revealed contrasting experiences. Many Latino students described Spanish as something they were pressured to lose, while some non-Latino learners viewed Spanish as a practical career asset. These differences show that language can be tied to identity, loss, status, or professional opportunity.

Spanish is not racialized in isolation: its status is linked to the people who speak it, including their perceived race, skin color, and social class. Aparicio and the interviewer note that speaking Spanish can provoke criticism in settings where speaking some European languages may be viewed more favorably.

Heritage Languages and Latino Identity

Some Latino parents chose not to teach their children Spanish to protect them from linguistic racism. Their children may later face the opposite judgment—that they are not “really” Latino because they do not speak Spanish.

Aparicio argues that Spanish proficiency is not the only way to express Latino identity. People may connect to it through music, food, travel, family, or other cultural practices.

She sees English as belonging to Latinos too and describes Latino language use as a broad repertoire that may include Spanish, English, and Indigenous languages. She cautions against assuming that all Latinos have the same linguistic background.

The conversation also highlights the pressure faced by families trying to maintain Spanish while their children encounter contradictory messages, including discouragement from speaking it in public or at school.

Research on Mixed Latino Identities in Chicago

Aparicio’s book, Negotiating Latinidad: Latino Lives in Chicago, grew partly from her family connections to Mexican American communities and her interest in the differences and relationships between Latino groups.

The project examined 20 university students with mixed Latino backgrounds. Aparicio found the interview-based social-science methodology challenging because she wanted to represent participants fairly while also analyzing their accounts.

She organized the book by themes. One insight was that family experiences—including conflict, trauma, and closeness—could shape how participants understood and identified with different national backgrounds.

These identities were fluid: people’s affiliations could change over time and according to the communities around them. The book uses the idea of horizontal hierarchies to examine power relations among Latino groups, which can vary by region. It also considers “passing” and the everyday negotiation of identity.

Aparicio sees the project as a way to make mixed Latino identities more visible in Latino Studies, which has often examined Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other communities separately, even though they interact in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and churches.

She describes Chicago as a changing, diverse Latino city. Migration from different parts of Latin America and the presence of Indigenous languages continue to reshape its neighborhoods and the Spanish spoken there.

Advice for Heritage Speakers

• Do not be ashamed of your Spanish.
• Treat language primarily as a means of communication, not as something that must be perfect to be legitimate.
• Heritage-language classes should affirm and build on what students already know while expanding their linguistic repertoires—not simply correcting them.
• Do not assume your Spanish is inferior to other varieties of Spanish.

Speakers and Sources Mentioned

Speakers

• Dr. Frances Aparicio — interviewee
• Nancy Domínguez-Fret — interviewer

Authors, Scholars, and Works Referenced

• Richard Rodriguez — Hunger of Memory
• Pedro Salinas — Spanish poet whose poetry Aparicio recalls reading
• José Vasconcelos — discussed in connection with mestizaje
• Gloria Anzaldúa — discussed for her theorization of mestizaje and Chicana experience
• Miriam Jiménez Román — associated with The Afro-Latino Reader
• Juan Flores — referenced in connection with Afro-Latino studies
• Ana Celia Zentella — mentioned in relation to English-only debates
• S. I. Hayakawa — apparently the senator discussed in those debates; the subtitle transcription of the name is uncertain
• Mérida Rúa — referenced for an article on Mexi-Ricans and mixed Latino identities; the article title is unclear in the subtitles
• Negotiating Latinidad: Latino Lives in Chicago — Aparicio’s book, discussed in the interview