Transnational Borderlands Cultural Wealth as Sustainability: Border Transcendence for Youth Counterdeficit Transformation

• In Event: Critical Race Parenting: Teaching for Our Children's Lives and Humanity

Abstract

Historically, young people have both assimilated and challenged dominant culture and hegemonic racial identity norms. In the spirit of the resistance and challenging of these norms by young people of color this paper aims to dismantle deficit theories that have labeled people of color and immigrants of color as “less than” and contrary to the hegemonic White, “American” norm. Identity constructs and borders maintain real material realities for marginalized people and families who do not fall into White hegemonic norms. In providing counter-deficit spaces for engaging youth, I invoke Anzaldúa’s (2015) borderlands theory, Yosso’s (2005) cultural capital model for people of color and Sanchez and Kasun’s (2012) use of transnationalism as a complex identity frame to combat deficit discourses and (re)claim new identities for borderlands and transnational youth of color.

Processes of racialization and “othering” via racial hierarchies are extremely complex. The theoretical frames that I use, as a general guide, have identified a racial hierarchy based on phenotype (Bonilla-Silva 2013). I use transnational-borderlands identities to represent the similarities that various groups of immigrant folks and later generation people of color.

In the United States, the historical realities of immigrants and people of color have been especially discriminatory in both legal and material matters. Fortunately for immigrants who can be racialized as White, the process of assimilation into an American identity is viable and essentially inevitable, especially by second and third generations. Unfortunately, for immigrants of color and other people of color, the process of assimilation and adoption into the “American” identity is oftentimes not fully accessible. To paraphrase Patel (2013), the implicit and explicit laws of inclusion that are part of the social, interpersonal and institutional laws and boundaries, guard who is deemed worthy and who is not, to claim a national American identity. On the other hand, as Anzaldúa has legendarily illustrated, these spaces of marginalization and ambiguity have allowed for a new and different identity construction and transformation. And more recently Sanchez and Kasun (2012) highlight the power in transnationalism and the tactics and identities that are implemented for survival. Race, culture and gender are all markers of identity that are used to maintain such borders and take the form of boundaries based on hegemonic “norms” of whiteness, read “Americanness”. Unifying these important theories, I introduce Transnational-Borderlands Cultural Wealth (TBCW), as a theoretical framework, and space for all disregarded folks of color to dismantle borders and create unity within racially marginalized populations. In engaging with our children, and in relationships with young folks in general (in education, family and other community spaces) TBCW provides the language to align people of color with the potential to dismantle and transform deficit discourses. In providing a space for critical consciousness that lies in historical and current material realities which vary amongst racialized people, the racialization process and systems that work to marginalize and “other” is a potentially powerful point of unification. TBCW affirms those realities and promotes border transcendence and space to engage in parenting young people of color.

Author

• Elizabeth Silva, University of Utah