Description: Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. This book challenges that framing by pointing to the ways that the foundations of modern approaches to bilingual education have their roots deficit perspectives of Latinx communities. It connects these deficit perspectives with a broader shift in discussions of race that framed racial inequities as a product of cultural and linguistic deficiencies of racialized communities as opposed to structural barriers produced by centuries of racist policies. It then examines the ways that Latinx professionals who entered the field of bilingual education were expected to adopt this deficit perspective in ways that served to maintain racial oppression.
Review Quotes: "Becoming the system charts the rise and fall of bilingual education in the US from the race radical activism of the 1960s up to the 2010s and the neoliberalisation of multilingualism into a global skill for the middle classes. Flores documents in meticulous detail the consequences of community-led challenges to legislation over languageeducation policies and practices impacting diverse Latinx communities. The power of the book is in the genealogical method that educates readers on the consequences of migration, poverty, ghettoisation, deindustrialisation, and 'white flight'. It offers a panoptic analysis of specific communities, their schools and children, enabling Flores to argue persuasively that raciolinguistic ideologies are central to the new political order." -- Victoria Odeniyi, Language in Society