Description:

U.S. Black Vernacular Spanish(es): Endarkened Storywork as Linguistic Method and Theory

This talk introduces U.S. Black Vernacular Spanish(es), a book project mapping the linguistic and cultural practices of Black-identified Spanish speakers across the United States. Focusing on one chapter, the presentation examines 45 sociolinguistic narratives shaped into six Endarkened counterstories, illuminating the heterogeneity of Black Spanish—not as a fixed dialect, but as a fluid, context-responsive practice.

Rooted in Endarkened storywork (Toliver 2022) and critical race counterstories (Yosso, 2013), this work blurs the lines between method and theory. Analysis is guided by a Black networked consciousness—a relational, nonlinear mode of interpretation that prioritizes resonance, silence, gesture, and interruption over traditional thematic coding. Stories are not treated as extractable data, but as living theory and communal memory—what Toliver (2022) calls Black deciphering technologies: meaning-making rooted in experience, resistance, and cultural knowledge. This epistemological framework draws from Smitherman’s (1986) Black communication system, emphasizing continuity over standardization and centering African diasporic worldviews. Language is approached as a tool for survival, identity formation, and home-making in spaces of racial, national, and linguistic dislocation. Each story functions as a situated event, contributing to an intertextual archive of Afro-diasporic presence.

Ultimately, through this innovative analysis, I argue that community alignment influences both the production and reception of Black Spanish as a locally situated ethnolect. It positions linguistic expression as a site of ethno-racial solidarity and resistance to dominant identity regimes, laying the groundwork for future research on Black Spanish varieties and their role in shaping alternative cultural and political imaginaries.

Bio: Dr. Aris Clemons is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Culture in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Having completed her doctoral studies in Spanish and Portuguese alongside Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, her expertise spans the fields of linguistics, education, anthropology, and Black and Latinx studies. Importantly, her work questions the ways that race is created and maintained through social discourses in education and mass media spaces. In doing this work, Dr. Clemons has received several prestigious grants and research awards, including large grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and the Department of Education. With these grants, Dr. Clemons has written curricula for the teaching of Spanish to Black students in the United States as well as over twenty publications about Black languaging populations across the Americas