Profile

Sonja Burrows' research interests include Spanish Heritage Language pedagogy, Spanish-English bilingualism, Spanish in the U.S., and U.S. Latino literatures. She has researched reader reception of U.S. Latino-authored narratives that engage in varying degrees of textual code switching and bicultural belonging. Her analyses build on the argument that these narratives, as part of a larger body of minor literatures, play a role in revolutionizing traditional Anglo-American discourses of knowledge by marginalizing the monolingual and monocultural reader historically positioned as the prototype of cultural literacy in the United States. That marginalization is achieved by a textual appropriation and structural weakening of the dominant language and culture via the creation of a narrative space that privileges code switching to articulate bicultural identities.