Infiltrate, Populate and Take Over: A Critical Consciousness Project of Sovereignty With Recently Immigrated Youth

• In Event: Seize the Time: Decolonizing Social Justice Education

Abstract

Within an education system obsessed with language crises and assimilationist objectives and development, schools servicing large immigrant populations focus particular attention on language and literacy fluency in English, with the avowed hope that fluency in English will help students transition successfully to work and post-secondary education pathways. A starker view of the micro and macro-aggressive realities of surveillance, seizure, and deportation greatly complicates both a naive hope that immigrant youth can acquire stability through language arts objectives and the hegemonic views that promote access to a racist society as its goal (Author, 2011). For most first generation immigrant youth, both those with state-sanctioned documentation and those without, the structural barriers of poverty, institutionalized racism, legal and financial barriers to postsecondary education, and gendered family roles combine in different mixtures to dynamically impact immigrant youth’s access to achievement in society, a reality that becomes amplified and glaring in their final years in high school. These same sets of factors are the mechanisms through which most low-income immigrant youth of color experience “circuits of dispossession” (Fine & Ruglis, 2009) that systematically remove them from opportunities and sequester them into policed and precarious settings.
From a decolonizing perspective, what is needed, relevant, and timely for a critical education of low-income youth of color, in this case immigrant youth, simply cannot draw upon traditional school-based literacies. We need to start in a different place.
In this paper, I will shed light on the interlocking tools of dispossession and also report on active engagement with and disruption of these mechanisms from critical theoretical stances of praxis and critical consciousness (Freire, 1970) and critical race theory (Bell, 1993). In addition to being heavily shaped by Freire’s critical pedagogy work in Brasil, this project also draws from a need to focus on sovereignty (Tuck, 2010), as a crucial component to a dialectic of hope that does not reside solely in critical deconstructios of power, authority, and colonization.
This participatory action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000) project began with the youth-led question: Why do some people in society do better and how do they get there? Building from that question and the group’s skills, a project was launched in which seniors from an all-immigrant high school were matched with professional internships to investigate and gain exposure to professional contexts. The purpose of the internship was not to job-train these young people but to provide them with a scaffolded exposure to the dominant culture, while simultaneously adding to their catalog of critical analysis skills and their abilities to critically code-switch across cultural spaces. Our long-term goal is reflected in the paper’s title and nods to the logic and problematic history of radical progressive groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Radical Congress and Forum of Indian Leftists, which seek to dismantle power structures but that have also themselves struggled with internal power structures. In the paper, I will share the group’s complications with power and how we struggled over conceptualizing societies for other than capitalist order.

Author

• Lisa (Leigh) Patel, Boston College