'Language Planning is Social Planning': Reflections on the Language Planning Contributions of Richard Ruiz

Teresa L. McCarty

Like many of the contributors to this volume, I was drawn into the field of language planning and policy through the mentorship and scholarship of Richard Ruiz. Having an office adjacent to his for the first years of my academic career helped. In the same way that Nancy Hornberger, in the Introduction to this volume, recalls sitting with Richard in his University of Wisconsin office as he articulated his now-classic formulation of language orientations, I remember him stopping by my office to chat, or vice versa, or talking with him in the hallway (the walls of which he and his wife, Marie Ruiz, had decorated in a lovely shade of green), or sitting next to him in a taxi en route to a national meeting. In these informal settings, I would listen as Richard casually but cogently elaborated the orientations (Ruiz, 1984), the 'official' versus 'national' policy typology (Ruiz, 1990), and his application of the endoglossic-exoglossic-mixed policy types to Indigenous bilingual education (Ruiz, 1995). Sequentially, these notions anchor the first three essays of this section. Underlying all three are the 'threat inversion' and 'safe/dangerous' conceptions about which he would write years later, and that appear in the fourth and fifth chapters in this section (Ruiz, 2006, 2010).

In a footnote to the fifth chapter, 'English Language Planning and Transethnification in the USA,' Richard suggests that notions of 'safe' versus 'dangerous' cultural differences and their implications for language planning had been brewing in his work for nearly 25 years (p. 1). Yet I suspect he had been contemplating – and negotiating – these language ideologies all his life. This realization came to me in the form of a story told to me after Richard's passing by his beloved life partner, Marie Ruiz. With her permission, I share the story here, as it places the essays in this section, and indeed the entire volume, in the context of Richard's life journey. As Marie related: 'I was so struck by hearing Richard tell it, that the whole emotion of the story seemed to come alive.'

The story begins around September 1953 – coincidentally, the eve of the US Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Richard would have been five or six years old at the time. 'Richard grew up in a predominantly Mexican community,' Marie explained. 'There were some Hopi children he remembers playing with but he had very little interaction with "White folk".' She continued:

[H]e remembers his Mom getting him up early one morning, getting him dressed [and taking] his hand as she led him on a walk. She didn't say where they were going and Richard didn't ask. But eventually they got to the elementary school and his mother found the classroom where Richard would start first grade.

Richard did not attend kindergarten, and this was his first encounter with school. He watched as his mother spoke with the teacher, 'a tall White woman' named Mrs Yates. What were they saying, he wondered, since 'his mother didn't speak English and he wasn't sure Mrs Yates spoke Spanish'? But he remembered that at one point his mother, 'still holding Richard's hand, placed his hand in Mrs Yates' hand, and for a few moments, the three hands were clasped together.' Then:

his mother left the classroom and Richard [thought] to himself, 'She's giving me away – what did I do this time?' ... Still holding Richard's hand, Mrs Yates led him to a desk where he was seated.

As Marie explained the significance of this story:

This is such a strong image of a parent willing to entrust the education of her child to a teacher who is a different color but has knowledge that can build upon the values and cultural ideologies and diversity that each child brings to the classroom. Teachers make choices all the time on what they choose to include and ignore. ... Teachers have a world of colors and diversity to build on and that should never be considered a problem, but rather a resource for the good of all.

'Oh, and by the way,' she added, 'Richard's mother did come back for him at the end of the day and every day, and pretty soon Richard became acquainted with the routines of public school'.

I return to Marie's comment and the core lesson of the story: Diversity is 'a resource for the common good.' It is a lesson that rings loudly and clearly through every aspect of Richard's life work. Like all children, Richard Ruiz entered school with an abundance of linguistic, intellectual, cultural and experiential knowledge – resources that, as Marie Ruiz points out, educators can choose to build upon or ignore. This fundamental insight is, I believe, the bedrock of Richard's work – from his penetrating analysis of the 'complex of dispositions' toward languages and their role in society that he called language orientations, to his assessment of the risks to democracy posed by dominant-language officialization, to his calls for Indigenous linguistic self-determination, to his critiques of the discursive and ideological processes that structure linguistic inequality.

In his path-breaking 'Orientations' article (Ruiz, 1984), Richard asks in what way is language a resource? Building on Joshua Fishman's argument that 'monolingualism is bad for business' (1978: 46), Richard first suggests the economic and societal benefits. Yet, perhaps reflecting memories of his first day at school, his concern always returns to the children and the families who entrust their children to the public school. Pointing to scholarship on the relationship between bi/multilingualism and enhanced cognitive growth, Richard obaserved that 'bilingualism can aid in general concept learning and skill (especially reading) development' (Ruiz, 1984: 28). On the question of affording both societal and individual benefits, he maintained that the 'language-as-problem orientation offers no hope' and the language-as-right orientation 'has had mixed results' (Ruiz, 1984: 28). While not without problems, a resource orientation constitutes the best hope for affording universal multilingual opportunities – a policy stance that 'can only contribute to a greater social cohesion and cooperation' (Ruiz, 1984: 28).

Here, we see a second, closely related Ruizian insight: planning language is, in effect, planning society (Ruiz, 2010: 2; see also Ricento & Hornberger, 1996: 415). It is therefore essential, Richard emphasized, 'to keep in mind this larger social context as we try to understand the role of language in it' (Ruiz, 2010: 2). In his 1990 essay, 'Official languages and language planning,' he put it this way: '[W]hile language planning is at...