Decolonizing American Spanish

Decolonizing American Spanish is a superb analysis of the coloniality at the core of hegemonic representations of Spanish in the United States today, both inside and outside the academy. It engages critically the overwhelming perception of Spanish as foreign language in the country as well as the overrepresentation of Spain in Hispanic Studies, among other ideologies and practices that reproduce racist linguistic and social structures. Most importantly, this wonderful text demonstrates what is to be gained by delinking from Eurocentric perspectives and from nation-based and dominant area studies approaches: the engagement with language as a living reality at the heart of communities, many of which provide magnificent examples of countering and combatting coloniality.

Spanish is one of the six imperial/colonial languages of Western modernity since 1500. Currently, it shares with English the second/third places of most-spoken language on the planet after Mandarin. It is the national language of Spain and of all former colonies of Spanish America and the Caribbean, and it is already a national (not a foreign) language in the United States. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera makes a compelling argument underscoring the coloniality of language hierarchies in higher education and, by implication, the scholarly and racial consequences of such hierarchy as well as the subjective and emotional impact of such hierarchy in students, faculty, and administrators as well as in the public sphere. Because of it, the argument of Decolonizing American Spanish has to be made in English.