Latinx Community College Students Traversing a White Supremacist Off-Campus Environment

• In Event: 16.029 - Pre-K–16 Latinx Education in the Context of White Supremacy

Abstract

Purpose of Paper
This paper seeks to better understand factors contributing to the successful persistence of 16 Latinx students at a community college in the midwest that had a 34% fall to fall persistence rate. These 16 Latinx students overcame numerous institutional and non-cognitive barriers on their journey towards pursuing a college education (e.g., Davila, 2011; Rendón, Justiz, & Resta, 1988). A particular barrier reported among participants was having to traverse racist and discriminatory encounters off-campus. Due to work and family obligations, participants spent a majority of their time off-campus, citing numerous examples of racial hostility and discrimination. This paper will highlight how 16 Latinx community college students overcame incidents of white supremacy while pursuing their academic aspirations to obtaining a college education.

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws from the theoretical framework of Latina/o Critical Theory (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), which seeks to understand the unique and multifaceted experience of the Latinx community, which includes issues of language, ethnicity, sexual identity, and immigration status. Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth model also informed this study.

Data sources and Analyses
This case study took place over the course of 9 months in 2014 and focused on 16 Latinx community college students. The data collection consisted of three in-depth one-on-one interviews per participant (Seidman, 2006), participant observation, document analysis, and researcher’s journal. The three series interviews generated a total of 2,600 minutes of recorded conversation between the 16 participants and researcher. Since the purpose of this case study was to understand the experiences of Latinx students, a direct interpretation analytical strategy was employed during the data analysis phase (Stake, 1999).

Findings
Since many participants reported working between 30 to 40 hours a week off-campus, they readily shared encounters of racism and discrimination off-campus. For example, Esperanza described how one of the managers made a racist comment on how authentic her documents for establishing work authorization were:
. . .when I was giving my paperwork, I had already been hired. I was just giving my paperwork, so they told me to bring in my ID and my Social Security. And so when I gave one of the managers my Social Security card, she was like "Oh wow, it looks so real." And stuff like this. And I was just like “What?”
Esperanza was one of many participants to describe the unwelcoming and racist environment around the community college campus. These incidents of white supremacy can easily cool off the educational aspirations of Latinx students, but participants used these incidents to reaffirm their commitment to obtain a college education.

Scholarly Significance
This paper seeks to contribute to the overall body of literature in higher education by examining how encounters of racism and discrimination off-campus can play a major factor in inhibiting the academic persistence of Latinx students at a community college. Moreover, participants in this study offer examples on how wealth-based approach can serve as mechanism to better support Latinx along their educational journey despite encounters of racism and discrimination on- and off-campus.

Author

• Moises Orozco Villicana, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign