Decolonial Studies as framing epistemic justice in bilingual education

This paper reveals the epistemic justice that bilingual education deserves. Bilingual education has struggled with the narrowing of educational structures and has fought against colonialities of power. Such struggles continue as the political forces shape the programmatic context for bilingual education. To analyze this struggle, we draw from decolonial scholarship of Latin American and Latinx intellectuals, with a specific focus on the construct of totality and exteriority. We describe how bilingual education is linked to civil rights aims and how these objectives often reinscribe and reproduce oppression for linguistically minoritized youth.