Historicizing Race and Space: A Critical Race Discourse Analysis on Black-Latina/o Student Conflict in South Central Los Angeles

• In Event: A Critical Look Into History: Implementing Our Cultural Intuition in Educational Research

Abstract

This paper represents an attempt to develop a methodology of reading documents that can inform the writing of educational history using a critical race lens. We turn our attention to a contemporary moment of conflict in South Central Los Angeles. The on-campus fights between Black and Latina/o students at Thomas Jefferson High School during the spring of 2005 captured significant media attention in the immediate and even into 2007. With our own memories of those morning newspapers still in mind, we asked the following research question: how does the mainstream Los Angeles print media frame relations between Black and Latina/o students at South Central high schools? Using area descriptions from the 1930’s by the Federal Housing Authority along with LA Times newspapers, allows to find parallels of how this community in general, and students specifically, have been framed.
This inquiry allows us to apply the theoretical lenses of Critical Race Theory and Latina and Latino Critical Theory with that of Critical Discourse Analysis to suggest another methodological tool that “interpret[s] the perspectives and voices of the narratives that remain unacknowledged, invalidated, and distorted” (Malagón, Perez Huber, & Vélez, 2009, p. 7) in mainstream written text. Coupled with a Chicana Feminist Epistemology methodology to allow me, as a researcher and also an alumnus of Jefferson High, make sense of the raced, gendered and nativist messages in print media.
We reviewed fourteen newspaper articles related to the on-campus fights at Jefferson High that were printed in the Los Angeles Times between 2005 and 2007. We coded the articles using both top-down and grounded approaches. For the former, we based our pre-established codes on a review of literature regarding Black-Latina/o historical relations in South Central Los Angeles. We also allowed themes to emerge from the articles themselves, thus resulting in a more grounded theory coding process.
Our review of the L.A. Times articles concerning the 2005 on-campus fights at Jefferson High School reveals a series of discursive strategies that framed Black and Latina/o youth as oppositional to not just each other, but also to any non-deficit portrayal of students of Color. We further found that in reporting a specific version of the 2005 events on the Jefferson campus, the mainstream print discourse became one absent of socio-historical context. Where CRT and LatCrit demand that research “situate lived experience within a broader socio-political frame” (Malagón et al., 2009, p. 1), the mainstream print media we studied reinforced individual behavior.
We began this paper in search of a methodological tool that could be used to write educational history from a critical race perspective. CRT, LatCrit and CDA offer us a tool that reinforce a need for the future development of a critical race educational history framework. The on-campus fights between Black and Latina/o students at Jefferson High School in 2005 have not been isolated incidents. It is only through a consistent search for the discourse operating in printed text and throughout our society that we can counter deficit-based and destructive frames of students of Color.

Author

• Lluliana Alonso, University of California - Los Angeles