With over 50 million Spanish speakers, the United States has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico, surpassing Spain itself.1 By 2050, the US will surpass Mexico, and become the country with the largest speaking Spanish population in the world. Yet Spanish-speakers in the US encounter language prejudice and discrimination in the broader culture and unfortunately with more dire consequences in the healthcare setting. As ACPE Certified Educators, native-Spanish speakers, heritage language speakers, second-language speakers, we want to address the grief and hope that emanates from our experience in the 2021 ACPE National Conference “Creating Room to Breathe”—making room to speak, adding our voice in the midst of malaise, violence, and social fragmentation.
We, the Latinx/Hispanic Spanish-Speaking Community of Practice want to share our expertise based on our collective experience of language discrimination and linguistic bias. We believe that our experience can help ACPE Educators and ACPE Psychotherapists address the ethnic, racial, cultural differences they encounter with their English-as-a Second-Language students/supervisees. Consequently, this workshop will:
- Present vignettes of personal journeys of Latinx Educators through the ACPE Certification Process.
- Outline the emotional and spiritual importance of a persons’ native language,
- Illustrate the trauma of segregation or less-than categorization based on English proficiency and accent, and
- Propose possible supervisory interventions that would be helpful when working with students/supervisees from this background.
