Trabajando en ambos: Toward a Latinx-Centered Cultural Political Economy of Urban Education

• In Event: 34.036 - Ghetto Schooling 20 Years Later: New Directions in the Study of the Political Economy of Urban Education

Abstract

Inspired by Jean Anyon, this paper is a conceptual exercise in trabajando en ambos, or “working in both” political economy and a cultural politics of race in urban education research. Educational crises, as Anyon reminded us, do not happen outside broader political economic conditions. Specifically, Anyon mapped the material effects of the political economy but also sought to take into account the oppression of racially minoritized groups within cities and schools. Still, a political economic analysis that recognizes race is, I contend, different from an analysis that maps how racism functions as a social force, or master category (Omi and Winant, 2014), in its own right. An analysis of the “neoliberal turn” in urbanism and urban education must, I argue, address the complexities of structural racism that have emerged over this period of time in relation to capital in order to provide a more robust analysis. Trabajando en ambos, is a move toward a Latinx-centered, cultural political economic (CPE) framework that sits at the intersections of urbanism, racial capitalism, Latinx education in the U.S., and various modes of resistance.

Drawing on this framework, I present data from a study conducted by the Education in our Barrios project (#BarrioEdProj), a youth participatory action research collaborative. The study traces the remaking of a New York City Latinx core community (barrio) and local educational sites during the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013). Methods included archival document collection and analysis, twenty semi-structured interviews with a multigenerational group of community and school stakeholders, and co-researcher “data conversations.”

The study led to two major clusters of findings; one of dominance and one of survival/resistance. The re/formation of urban schools and communities during this 11 year period followed a racial neoliberal grammar that culturally and materially dominated, exploited, and erased Latinxs and poor people of color. In the midst of these processes of dominance, the people of El Barrio have also engaged in survival practices that included cultural/historical preservation, accommodation, complicity, and resistance as acts of both survival and transformative justice. I conclude that a cultural political economic documentation and analysis of dominance and survival is a generative path to expand the explanatory power of political economic traditions to inform urban education policy-making and social movement in the streets, in classrooms, and in cities.

Author

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College