Heritage Speakers of minoritized languages experience linguistic discrimination and lack access to public services in their home language. Their linguistic identity is not always recognized. In the case of indigenous immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico the situation involves another layer of complexity. Their linguistic rights and identity are not respected and they are constructed as speakers of Spanish (Romero 2022). In the presentation, I will discuss possible avenues to address these issues.  

Liliana Sánchez is a Professor at University of Illinois Chicago.  She has published Bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world with Jennifer Austin and Maria Blume (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus: Minimalist Inquiries in the Quechua Periphery (John Benjamins, 2010), and Quechua-Spanish Bilingualism. Interference and Convergence in Functional Categories (John Benjamins, 2003) as well as articles in journals such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Glossa, International Journal of Bilingualism, Languages, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Lingua, Probus, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition, among others. In 20-22, she received a collaborative National Science Foundation Grant to study how information on COVID-19 reached speakers of indigenous and minoritized languages