Background: Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students' racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students' experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools. However, students' experiences with instruction for Emergent Bilingual (EB) students interfered with seeing language segregation as a proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination. Methods: The first author collected three days of classroom field notes, conducted 15 student interviews, and collected 177 student work samples. The authors used a grounded theory approach to identify how students' racialized experiences help or hinder their historical analysis. Findings: The findings suggest that students' racialized experiences interplay with the disciplinary concepts of contextualization and presentism. Our findings complicate how disciplinary concepts alone do not sufficiently help students analyze how systemic racism manifests differently across historical moments. Contribution: This paper offers implications for how historical thinking skills can make space for students' racialized and linguistic experiences. Incorporating raciolinguistic analysis in tandem with historical thinking skills can lead to more nuanced conversations in the classroom about race/ethnicity and language in the past and present.