Giftedness From the Margins: Mapping the Identities of Mexican-Origin Ghetto Nerds

• In Event: Employing Asset-Based Frameworks to Understand Latino Male Achievement in the K-16 Educational Pipeline

Abstract

Drawing on the work on “scholarship boys” (Carrillo, 2010; Hoggart, 1957; Rodriguez, 1982), this paper explores the schooling trajectories of working-class, Mexican-origin “ghetto nerds” (Diaz, 2007) in order to introduce Mestiz@ Theory of Intelligences (MTI). The term “ghetto nerd” is a concept that captures the political, cultural, social, and aesthetic dimensions of three academically successful Mexican origin males that were born and raised in low-income, urban settings in the southwestern U.S. This research expands on Howard Gardner’s (1985) Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory by conceptualizing a Mestiz@ Theory of Intelligences and extends Rodriguez’s (1982) ideas on Latino scholarship boys.

For working-class, Mexican-origin males, many of them interact with what Rios (2011) refers to as the youth control complex, a systemic apparatus of oppression and criminalization that comes from the way their identities are conceptualized by entities such as the police, the media, businesses, and schools. Notions of who gets to theorize and how intelligence is allowed to be performed are deeply imbedded in our social system and are profoundly hegemonic. In other words, it is the enactment of very specific behaviors, discourses, and styles, usually characteristics of white, middle-class dispositions, that are associated with being intelligent. As such, being male, of Mexican descent, working-class, and viewed as academically “successful” is, in many respects, rare. Historically, working-class Latino male bodies have not been associated with intelligence. In fact, there is nearly a double digit percentage gap between white male students enrolled in gifted and talented programs and Latino males (Torres & Fergus, 2012), only 49% of Latino males graduate from high school in the U.S. (Winters & Greene, 2006), and Latino males are overrepresented in low-wage labor (Noguera, Hurtado, & Fergus, 2012).

A snowball sampling (Weiss, 1994) process was used to identify the participants. After reading an essay that I authored (Carrillo, 2007), in which I discussed my schooling trajectory, many students and faculty contacted me to share their connections to the “scholarship boy” type themes in the piece. From my communication with these students and professors, I gathered referrals that aided me in selecting three participants. I conducted and transcribed four interviews per participant, each lasting from one to one and one-half hours in length. Triangulation consisted of the use of documents, my own reflexive journal, and life-history interviews. I drew from Erlandson, Harris, Skipper, and Allen (1993) to create a reflexive journal that explored logistical questions, provided initial interpretations after each interview, and unpacked critical reflections about the research process. I selected scholarship boys who fit the following criteria: (a) were raised in working class families, (b) are of Mexican-origin, (c) were raised in urban communities, (d) attended low-SES public schools, and (e) earned graduate degrees. This paper analyzes the gifted identities of two professors and one doctoral student.

Findings provide a critical contribution to current debates on the academic underperformance of Latino male students and notions of intelligence, and they offer the potential for cultivating and affirming gifted mestiz@ identities.

Author

• Juan F. Carrillo, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill