“It’s the Voice of the Voiceless, Hope for the Hopeless”: Envisioning an Aesthetic Capital Through a Community Cultural Wealth Lens

• In Event: Gutter Rainbows and Concrete Roses: Utilizing Community Cultural Wealth to Find Beauty in the Hideous

Abstract

The arts have played a critical and historical role as a tool for resistance within Communities of Color in naming oppressive structures and the struggle for social justice (Anzaldúa, 1987; Baraka, 1963; Lorde, 2001; Moraga, 1992). In this paper, we illustrate how as educators we build on the cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) of our young, poet-scholars in an after-school arts-based class at Anyhood High School in the Los Angeles area. We seek to answer:

How can an aesthetic capital serve as a platform, intersect and broaden the other forms of capital found in the community cultural wealth model (Yosso, 2005)?

Although Critical Race Theory (CRT) has its roots in the field of law, in relation to education, Solórzano (1998) argues that CRT acknowledges: 1) the intersectionality of race and racism; 2) challenges dominant ideology; 3) emphasizes experiential knowledge; 4) presents interdisciplinary perspectives; and 5) commits to social justice. For the purpose of this study, we focus on Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth model, which she defines as “an array of knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression” (p. 77). In the current model, Yosso identifies six key forms of capital that express the cultural wealth of oppressed communities: 1) Aspirational 2) Linguistic 3) Familial 4) Social 5) Navigational and 6) Resistant (pp. 77-80). We contend that an aesthetic capital needs to be added to this model because the arts has been a critical site for People of Color in expressing their voices and offering counterstories of lived realities from the margins or borders to critique dominant culture (Anzaldua, 1987; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 2001; Yosso, 2005).

Breaking away from Western approaches of research, we embrace and advocate for a methodology of the oppressed (Sandoval, 2000) where research serves the marginalized and allows them to tell their stories in their own words. The site of the study is an after-school spoken word poetry class that ran for three years in a Los Angeles area high school. The participants (45) in the class were primarily African American or Latino. The study incorporates 70-videotaped sessions and 16 semi-structured interviews. All data is transcribed and we employ grounded theory (Creswell, 1998) for qualitative analysis.

As expressed poetically by Lady D, a young Black, female, poet-scholar, “Education, to me, is born on the streets, and just migrated to classroom seats” (FN 10/06/04). In line with her claim, our results contribute to the growing body of research that advocates for the bridging of youth learning in the out-of-school context to classroom practice, while emphasizing the critical and creative use of the arts by Communities of Color in the struggle for social justice (Gustavson, 2007; Hull & Schultz, 2002; Street, 2005).

Through this study, we demonstrate how an aesthetic capital serves as a platform for the expression of the other forms of capital. Most importantly, an aesthetic capital provided our students with a medium to express their cultural wealth in a myriad of ways.

Authors

• Shiv Raj Desai, Thomas More College

• Tyson E.J. Marsh, Iowa State University