In May 2020, Illinois State University published a heartwarming human-interest news story about a recent Latine graduate. 1 The alumna, a mass communication major, had landed a broadcasting job in one of Chicago's regional television stations, and the goal of the story was to celebrate her success.In telling the story of the success, however, the article stated that "When she was 13 and spoke no English, her family packed up their life in their native Colombia and immigrated to the Chicago area for new opportunities."In time, the story went on, the student learned English and excelled academically throughout her K-12 and university studies.In featuring her life story, the article sought to illustrate the student's immigration and linguistic journey to give more credence to her success-and rightly so in my view.The problem was what the article saw, or failed to see, in the immigration story: only a lack of English, not the presence of Spanish, Colombian culture, and the tenacity to immigrate that would be the foundation of her success as a bilingual broadcaster. 2Dismayed by this deficit-minded framing, a small group of Illinois State University faculty members in the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program started a conversation about the arti-1 Normally a footnote here would refer the reader to the name of the publication and to the article in question, but the point of this anecdote is to explain the organic, grassroot origins of Illinois State University's COBAS initiative, not to impugn ISU marketing or the writer of the news story in question.For this reason, I have withheld publication details. 2 Generally speaking, and from the point of view of education, deficit thinking is the noxious notion that students from underrepresented populations are responsible for the (academic, linguistic, economic, etc.) challenges and inequalities that structural hierarchies (underfunded schools, dominant monolingualism, discrimination in all its forms) impose on them, with no regard for the social, cultural, and cognitive strengths students possess.For a survey of the ways in which the term has been defined and discussed, see Davis and Museus (2019).
Alejandro Enriquez (Mon,) studied this question.