María Eugenia De Luna Villalón, PhD
Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics · University of the Fraser Valley
I study how societies draw the lines of belonging through language. My work follows that question across three worlds: the farms of rural Canada, where Mexican agricultural workers arrive for the season; the Spanish classrooms of Hong Kong, where I taught for three years; and the signage on the walls of my own university, on Stó:lō territory in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, Canada. Across these settings, I trace how language grants, withholds, and negotiates the right to belong.
What I work on
Reading the walls
Public signage quietly records who counts as part of a community: which languages are present, which are absent, and which appear only as decoration. I read the walls of small Canadian towns for Spanish and, in a current project, the walls of my own campus for the visibility of Halqʼeméylem, the language of the Stó:lō, on whose territory the university stands. My interest is in what these landscapes reveal about recognition and belonging.
Language and migration
Mexican workers come to rural Canada season after season through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, a scheme that is temporary by design and makes no provision for them to learn the languages spoken around them. My doctoral research in Ontario and Quebec followed what that means for daily life: how people build dignity, community, and belonging in a country whose languages they are never given the chance to acquire. I have since carried this work to British Columbia.
Rethinking the Spanish classroom
I treat students as knowledge-makers, and I build assessment around that conviction. In practice that means creative, authentic evaluation (social-media kits, podcasts, and infographics rather than only exams), community-service learning that puts their Spanish to work locally, and a decolonial turn in how I assess. Drawing on Indigenous evaluation frameworks, I am moving from measurement toward accompaniment: from grading as a verdict to assessment as support.
Sustaining Spanish in Canadian universities
Spanish programs across Canada keep getting cut, and I argue this is not a budget line but a structural pattern: curricular minoritization, the slow squeezing out of language study from the university. My current work asks what critical pedagogy can do in response: how teaching that is relevant, community-connected, and critical can make the case for Spanish as essential rather than expendable.
Background
I hold a PhD in Hispanic Studies (Linguistics) from Western University, where my dissertation traced how Mexican temporary agricultural workers in Canada live inside linguistic borders. Before that I completed an MA in Applied Linguistics at Universidad de las Américas Puebla, with a thesis on the home literacy practices of four Mexican immigrant families in Canada, the study that first took me into people’s houses and into this field. Earlier still I trained in communication sciences at the same university, a first degree that ended in a thesis and ethnographic documentary about papermaking in San Pablito, and that probably explains why I still think research should be something you can look at.
I have taught Spanish and linguistics at Western University, Alvernia University, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, the University of Hong Kong, and, since 2020, at the University of the Fraser Valley, where I earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2025. Along the way I coordinated a university-access program for non-traditional learners, and I have kept working with migrant communities in every city I have lived in.
I am Mexican and Canadian, I work in Spanish and English, and I live in Chilliwack, British Columbia.
Selected work
2026 Más allá de la supervivencia: Repensar la sostenibilidad del español en la universidad canadiense — LXII Congreso de la Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas, Universidad de Salamanca. Why Spanish programs keep getting cut, and what critical pedagogy can do about it.
2025–26 Mapping Halqʼeméylem in the Linguistic Landscape of a Canadian University — SSHRC Explore Grant, Principal Investigator. An interactive map of Indigenous language visibility across two UFV campuses. Project page
2013 Uso del español en el paisaje lingüístico de una pequeña comunidad canadiense — Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada, 58, 9–28. The study that started my linguistic landscape work.