Pensadoras in the New Latino Diaspora: Mexican Girls Navigating Social Difference, Examining Identity, and Constructing Third Spaces

• In Event: 72.025 - Abriendo Brecha: Third Spaces, Heterogeneity, and Social Justice in the New Latino Diaspora

Abstract

Latina girls are commonly characterized as likely to make poor choices, drop out of school, become teenage mothers, or be girlfriends to gang members (Denner & Guzman, 2006, p. 1). Despite this popular perception, most Latina girls do not match these negative images and experiences of Latina girls in the U.S shift greatly depending on the context. Specifically, very little research has been conducted on characterizations, identities, and experiences of Latinas in New Latino Diaspora (NLD) towns like Marshall.

In recent years at Marshall Middle School (MMS), staff has struggled to understand and support Latina students. Staff has observed that Latina students have frequent fights and conflict within their peer group, date older boys, have sex and become pregnant at earlier ages, and are victims of sexual abuse more frequently than girls from other ethnic backgrounds. To address these concerns, the author created a girls’ group to gain insight into the girls’ experiences and provide the girls with a safe space to discuss such challenges and how to cope with them in positive, productive ways. This study is informed by ethnographic research conducted during girls’ group sessions and specifically explores how Latina girls in the group have engaged as youth co-researchers (YCRs) (Knight, Dixon, Norton, & Bentley, 2006), allowing them to examine and deconstruct the structural forces in their lives and reflect upon how their identities affect their positions in their social worlds. In this presentation, the author and a couple of YCRs will present their findings.

This paper amplifies the girls’ findings, voices and perspectives on the social construction of identities at MMS, social difference in Marshall, and an intersectional analysis of their experiences within their school and community. By conducting interviews, observations and facebook analysis and engaging in critical, reflective discussions, the girls produce an analysis of the social construction of identities in MMS and the axes of social difference- gender, race, immigration status, class, language, etc.- which produce those constructions. The girls also discuss how these axes of difference structure their peer groups, dating relationships, and classroom environments, producing social hierarchies at school and differentiated academic and personal trajectories. The author and YCRs also apply this intersectional analysis (Collins, 1991) to their and their peers’ emotional and sexual experiences and emphasize the importance of girls developing empowered emotional and sexual subjectivities. This presentation concludes by emphasizing the importance of Third Spaces (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999) and specifically girls’ group spaces, where minority adolescent girls can question who they are in their social worlds and have “safe exchanges of ideas, intimate discussions of desire, and expressions of anger and frustration felt in response to the external world” (Nakkula & Toshalis, 2006, p. 108). By embracing feminist pedagogies and encouraging a critical consciousness, these types of third spaces can support girls in the development of their emerging feminist visions, ability to discuss and deconstruct constructs of gender, race, sexuality, and class, and capacity to have self-determined, empowered identities and personal and academic trajectories.

Author

• Katie Clonan-Roy, University of Pennsylvania