Spanish for Resistance and Rapid Response: Grassroots Language Learning as Transformative Agency in an Immigrant-Support Network

Community-based rapid response groups are organizing across the USA to provide on-the-ground support, documentation of ICE activities and kidnappings, and engagement and education to immigrant neighbors. In my own community, there is a divide between many of the rapid responders who are English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking neighbors who are most under threat, which creates a lack of communication and trust that impedes efforts and stifles community-building. This paper will use the framework of Transformative Agency (Bajaj, 2018) to examine a grassroots “Spanish for Resistance” collective that emerged organically from the need to address the linguistic divide. The immediate need to communicate provided an intrinsic motivation to engage in a liberatory education project, and this example reveals how language learning can function as a space for transformative agency and its four components of sustained, relational, coalitional and strategic agency. I will include a short history of the development of the collective and will detail the primary outcomes, which include creating phrasebooks for use during ICE encounters and communicating with neighbors; drop-in classes and conversation circles; and efforts to create language exchanges with Spanish-speaking community members who are learning English. I will identify key components for a successful model of using language learning for community building and coalitional agency and as a tool for anti-fascist resistance that can be adapted by other rapid response networks.