KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Dr. Elizabeth Gonzalez
Dr. Elizabeth Gonzalez is an executive leader and scholar-practitioner known for advancing educational access and researching Indigenous Mexican youth. She has led major grant initiatives at UC Santa Cruz and San José City College, securing over $3 million for UCLA programs. A graduate of UCLA (B.A.) and UC Santa Cruz (M.S., Ph.D.), she bridges leadership, scholarship, and advocacy.
Community Is the Currency: Indigenous Perspective on Institutional Transformation at Hispanic-Serving Institutions
With the recent defunding of the federal Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) program, campuses across the country are asking: how do we continue the HSI mission of institutional effectiveness without federal support? While many institutions were never engaged in this work for the money, the moment calls for reflection on what truly drives transformation. In this talk, Dr. Elizabeth González offers an Indigenous perspective on institutional change grounded in a Ñuu Savi worldview and practices of community and sustainability. Drawing from a decade of leading HSI efforts, she introduces the Indigenous practices of guelaguetza—a reciprocal exchange rooted in belonging and collaboration—and tequio—a collective responsibility to one’s community—as guiding principles for reimagining servingness in higher education. Through the story of the Latinx Student Center at an emerging HSI, Dr. González illustrates how deep change emerges not from titles or funding alone, but from decades of student advocacy, staff labor, and faculty vision aligned through shared purpose. She invites participants to explore how institutions can move beyond symbolic inclusion to foster authentic, community-driven transformation that endures—regardless of federal funding.
Dr. Diego Pascual y Cabo
Dr. Pascual y Cabo is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Director of the Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Florida. A leading expert in Spanish heritage speaker bilingualism, he founded the Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language (2014) and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Spanish Heritage Language Journal. His work bridges research, advocacy, and education in heritage language studies.
Unexpected Benefits: How Spanish Heritage Language Instruction Transforms Students
In the 1970s and 80s, Guadalupe Valdés’ seminal work fundamentally challenged traditional models of Spanish language teaching in the United States. Not only did she question the applicability of traditional foreign language pedagogies to the distinct linguistic and socioculturalrealities of heritage speakers, her pioneering vision also laid the foundation for what we now callSpanish Heritage Language (HL) education: a pedagogical approach that is centered around students’ linguistic identities and that connects language learning to their lived experiences, aspirations, and opportunities for engagement.
Despite the field’s significant progress, a considerable number of instructors and institutions continue to rely on traditional foreign language teaching methods and materials. In these settings, classroom time prioritizes grammar drills, prescriptive correctness, and metalinguistic explanations. Students’ home language varieties and linguistic experiences are frequently disregarded. These teaching practices are justified by the belief that HL learners must acquire “real”, “pure,” or “appropriate” Spanish to be able to succeed academically or professionally and that time spent on activities not directly related to academic language development is a waste of time. Though well-intentioned, this is a deeply misguided assumption that implicitly devalues students’ everyday bilingual practices. Drawing on recent research, in this talk, I will show thatHL instruction does indeed support students’ language acquisition and literacy development, sometimes even in indirect or unexpected ways.
Dr. Rachel Showstack
Rachel Showstack (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Wichita State University, Co-Director of the Academic Center for Biomedical and Health Humanities and Founding Director of Alce su Voz (ASV). Dr. Showstack’s current scholarship addresses language and health equity and community-based learning and research methods. Her work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited collections, and she is co-author of the books Health Disparities and the Applied Linguist and Language Ideologies and Linguistic Identity in Heritage Language Learning.
Spanish Heritage Speakers and Multilingual Community Engagement for Health Justice Beyond the Language Course
Service-learning in heritage language courses, a pedagogical practice that is known to increase students’ investment in language study (Pascual y Cabo et al., 2017), often involvesproviding assistance that a community organization cannot offer professionally, e.g., interpreting or tutoring. However, structuring service-learning as charity work can prevent disadvantaged groups from advocating for social change (Stoecker, 2016). In contrast, when framed as social justice work, students can discover their potential to leverage their language skills and cultural capital to support community agency (Showstack, 2024). In the area of health justice, one particular type of cultural capital that many heritage speakers share is the experience of serving as language brokers for their family members in healthcare encounters; these experiences often impact their investment in healthcare-focused activities within educational contexts, cultivating a desire to improve healthcare communication for patients with non-English language preference (Martínez & Schwartz, 2012; Showstack, 2021). Engagement with Latino communities to advance Latino health is a promising area for the advancement of students’ linguistic repertoires and awareness of the value of their translanguaging skills (Belpoliti & Pérez, 2019).
In this keynote address, I will explore how engagement in community partnerships for health justice can enhance the impact of heritage speakers’ educational experiences and I will provide practical recommendations for building enduring community ties while engaging students throughout their course of study. The community-engaged health equity program Alce su Voz (ASV), housed within the modern language department at Wichita State University,focuses on the amplification of community health narratives, workshops on patients’ rights, and policy improvements to ensure meaningful access to health care for all. Heritage speakers of Spanish have played key roles in implementing the work of ASV since its inception in 2020. I will discuss the ways that this program includes Latino students from across the university and how they learn from each other as they collaborate on different types of projects. Then, I will present findings from a study that explores how six heritage speakers from a range of sociolinguistic backgrounds draw on their cultural capital to contribute to ASV’s activities, and how they perceive the connection between their roles in the program and their desire to support their own communities. To conclude, I discuss how long-term engagement with a health justice program can allow heritage language students to leverage and develop their multilingual skills to support community resilience and policy improvements while at the same time building their investment in their own multilingualism.
