“Smack in the Middle”: Filipino American High School Students Negotiating Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in New York City

• In Event: Roundtable Session 101
  In Roundtable Session: Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans: Roundtable Session on “Invisible” Groups

Abstract

This project focuses on how Filipino American students in a northeastern urban high school negotiate discourses to construct racial and ethnic identities. A cultural analysis of discourse (Quinn, 2010) suggests that institutional discourses on diversity shape the way faculty, staff, and students talk about and engage racial, ethnic, and cultural matters. Students create, recreate, and act upon discourses that frame and structure their figured world of high school. In particular, data suggest that discourse that normalizes diversity for students structures racial and ethnic understandings as stereotypes expected to be interpreted as harmless jokes. Additionally, Filipino students actively placed themselves on a racial continuum either by describing themselves as somewhere in the middle or by embracing a Filipino ethnic identity.

Author

• Erica Chutuape, The Graduate Center - CUNY