Earlier this week I found myself driving down the interstate, at the start of two glorious weeks working an Orff Summer Teacher Education course, struck with a sense of nostalgia. (As one tends to do instead of focusing on the concrete of the highway).  A song from my adolescence played – “Dreaming of You” by Selena. (Stop reading if you’ve never heard this perfect encapsulation of 1990s innocence and listen to this gem with the streaming service provider of your choice. I may or may not be writing to this song on non-stop loop… Am I there? Am I?)

For those of you who do not know the music of Selena Quintanilla-Perez, or more commonly known, Selena, she was a South Texas Tejano music goddess, murdered in 1995, forever immortalized as talented, young, and full of unanswered promise. “Dreaming of You” was to be her crossover to mainstream pop. And she was touted as the Mexican American manifestation of American pop chart success, in the vein of what Gloria Estefan was doing with the Miami Sound Machine in the 80s and 90s. All of this to say, Selena and her music was ubiquitous during my upbringing in Victoria, Texas, a city about 45 minutes from the murky, salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and 2 hours away from Corpus Christi, where Selena lived most of her short life. 

On March 31, 1995, word spread to my high school that she had been killed. Our answer to this was to converge on the band hall, push all the chairs to the walls, and cumbia to Selena’s music for several hours. I cannot visit the Riverwalk during the Texas Music Educators Association Conference and not look at the distinct and unique bridges connecting one bank to the other without (shamefully) thinking of Jennifer Lopez portraying Selena, sitting dangerously on the rail, the flat bottom tour boats below, talking about people dancing to her music and wearing her clothes. Many years later I interpret that scene differently. I see Selena’s music as a metaphorical Riverwalk bridge that should have connected the music found in South Texas separated by language. I was also struck by another aspect of Selena’s upbringing that resonated with my own. Code switching. Selena was not a fluent Spanish speaker when she began singing Tejano music. She learned the words phonetically and eventually gained fluency. 

I grew up one of the only Asian Americans in my class (there were maybe 5 of us across the school population and we typically ignored each other, as if we knew we would draw too much attention if we were in the same place at the same time). With no model, I learned what it meant to be American by the movies and radio (yes, I used those portable torture devices that had the nerve to make you wait for your favorite song).  It was in the few representations of Asians and Asian Americans in movies and radio that I internalized the belief that survival (which for a teen is largely predicated upon peer acceptance) depended on my ability to blend in or to be so undeniably perfect as to be untouchable (this could also backfire as being good at something usually meant being teacher’s pet, which sadly is also a way to be targeted).  So I learned how to code switch before the linguistics term was applied to sociocultural contexts. 

When asked about my identity, I am a heterosexual, cis-gendered woman, who is the daughter of immigrants who came to the states in the 1970s from the Philippines. I am an older sister. I have a graduate degree and I am completing a terminal degree. The funny thing is… I never get asked about my identity like that and it’s never asked point blank. Occasionally, I get knocked about with microaggressions of the “Where are you from?” (wink, wink) variety, which I like to answer with, “Texas.”  Mostly just to see the look of disappointment or of sheer embarrassment, when someone realizes the offensive undertones of the question. (Nowadays, I experience more often, exasperation from a well-meaning white person wondering, “Why would that be an insulting question?” when they have never considered how other-ing it is to be asked to legitimize why you are in the United States because you look different. For more information, see additional writings on white fragility. Robin DiAngelo has a great book on this.)

But my point in all this is to state – I believe identity, like so many things now on the discussion table, is fluid and comprised of many parts. I have found my identity changes with the current environment I find myself in and with the people who are around me. This is a fundamental code switching concept in the sociocultural sense. In school, I am a researcher and academic. While I teach, I am a teacher and a musician. I dress differently on days I teach undergrads compared to the days I’m there solely as a graduate student. I speak and conduct myself one way amongst one set of teacher friends (they are not music teachers), another way amongst musician-friends (they are all secondary band directors, while I am an elementary music teacher), and in a completely different way among colleagues in my Ph.D. program (we are all training to be higher education professors). Socially, there are instances where I find myself “more Asian” because I happen to be the lone Asian face in the room and therefore nominated to represent an entire continent (to illustrate the absurdity in this, consider: there are over 2,000 spoken languages in Asia, of which I am fluent in 0) and in the rare times I find myself in a community of transplanted Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, I am the least Filipino person there. My identity shifts constantly throughout the day, throughout my life.

My experience with code switching is as follows: I find value in it and credit it with allowing me to inhabit certain spaces, so I have an opportunity to show my outright expertise. I consider self-awareness, understanding social settings, and knowing how to exist in different spaces, valuable skills to possess. And for my brown students, I think of code switching as an invaluable skill to have in their tool kit. Though in my internal monologue I find that the use of code switching is ultimately a sign of the broken systems we brown people have to exist and struggle in. So as a teacher, I wonder what is the outcome of teaching code switching, even though I do it. Because, if by teaching it, am I signing off on how broken the institution is instead of breaking down the institution in the first place?  Am I teaching my students how to persist in a broken system instead of using my energies to fix the system for my students? Is code switching tending to the symptoms instead of curing the disease? I used my ability to endear myself to people who held power over me in my youth (teachers, popular peers) by mastering the common cultural language and playing by the agreed upon procedures. It was an agreement I nonverbally signed to get a foot in the door.  I want my students to get a foot in the door, too. I just want them to know the implications of what they have to do to get there if they play by those rules.

As a result of code switching, I sometimes find myself struggling with who I am. Or if I am somehow ingenuine to the person I am supposed to be. I don’t want my students to struggle with this same thing when they are older and have more agency. It saddens me to think I am more at home with any other culture than the one that is my birthright, the ones my parents knew. Afterall, I came from them. So, when asked the question, “Where are you from?” Sometimes I want to answer, “From where do YOU want me to be? Which place is the most relatable to you and therefore would be more advantageous for me? Because chances are, it’s in my repertoire.”

But, here’s the rub. Maybe this was enough for me some of the time, but it is not enough for everyone, all the time. I cannot discount the fact that being multilingual in cultural languages (not to be confused with spoken languages) grants entrance for some people, but the implicit biases people hold towards certain identities can cancel that out. That those implicit biases go beyond granting entrance to spaces but is a legitimate concern for safety and life. I have entered spaces where I had to code switch, but ultimately acceptance is dependent on others in that space. Because of strongly held prejudices, not everyone is as well-received, no matter how eloquently they use the colloquialisms or diligently they follow the norms of the group.

Placing this in the context of the music classroom, I wonder how often we make snap decisions that affect how we approach our students based on salient characteristics, such as how they are dressed, how they speak, or how brown they are? When our students inhabit their identities and all that comes with the culture of their identities, how often do we make judgments on ability and creativity, simply because we do not speak the same language?  How often do we unfairly compare progress among students with different cultural and social capital and demand they assimilate to a model that is itself imperfect? And how often do we allow this system to persist because, “It’s just the way things are?”  I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of how the way things are. 

Do we diminish the activities our students prefer – their music, the way they cultivate communication, and unwittingly place what is being taught in the music room (mostly Western Euro-centric repertoire, philosophies) as above what they experience in their everyday life?  I argue, in doing so, we destroy the bridge that enables trust and understanding between the people standing on opposite sides of the river.

I advocate for code switching, but maybe it’s the educators in the classroom that should become skilled at this, not the seven-year old sitting in class, wondering where her music belongs in school.