Racializing language, regimenting Latinas/os: Chronotope, social tense, and American raciolinguistic futures

•Invocations of language and the future pervade representations of U.S. Latinas/os.•Processes of racialization organize chronotopes of the American future.•Chronotopes promote future Latina/o monolingualism and White multilingualism.•Spanish language loss is seen as key to successful futures for Latinas/os.•The deferral of Latina/o inclusion is a social tense that reproduces inequalities.

In this article, I introduce a race-based reconsideration of chronotopes that frame conceptions of language, Latinas/os, and the American future. Specifically, I argue that conceptions of the pastness and futurity of the Spanish and English languages differ depending on language users' ethnoracial positions. Focusing on a range of recent popular cultural representations of language and Latinas/os, I suggest that these space-time narratives reflect a racialized social tense that perpetuates the marginalization of Latinas/os by continually deferring their claims to societal inclusion to an unnamed future. I argue that these Latina/o-oriented time-scales characterize the contemporary political economy of racialized language and identity.