Understanding Latina/o Youth Identity in Suburbia: Negotiating the Tensions Through a Humanizing Approach

• In Event: 53.081 - Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 53.081-4 - Positionality on Trial: Examining Global Tensions of Privilege While Performing Humanizing Research With Minoritized Populations

Abstract

Living in a white supremacist society is an exhausting enterprise for Latina/o youth. Whiteness can suffocate and absorb all that it sees, it is a structure that shapes how we engage others and in tandem with other privileged structures and discourses (e.g. class, gender, sexuality, language) it can seem like a hopeless cause. Yet, Latina/o youth are survivors, persistent, and creative in the ways they challenge dominant frameworks that silence and subtract their capital (Fine, 1991; Quiroz, 2001; Valenzuela).

Latina/o scholars possess a great vantage point to understand the multi-varied lived experiences of Latina/o students because there is overlap in the negotiations, strategies, and voices to survive educational institutions (Conchas, 2015; Delgado-Bernal, 1998; Villenas & Foley, 2011). Yet, it is crucial that scholars reflect upon their positionality in the field by questioning their privileged identities by explaining who they are and where we come from (Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Villenas, 1996). In so doing, we can then produce humanizing research that involves building partnerships of care and dignity with our participants (Paris, 2011; Paris & Winn, 2014).

Through a critical ethnographic approach, I shadowed 19 students who attend a high school that is predominately white and well resourced in an affluent suburb outside of Chicago. I shadow students (Rios, 2011) by putting myself as close to their experience as possible in order to attempt to see through students’ eyes. I was in Shields High School (pseudonym) during the course of two years (2014-2016) To make sense of my data, I coded and categorized by themes (Bogdan, & Biklen, 2003) through a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

In order to understand the identities of Latina/o youth, it is vital as Cruz (2006) posits that we deconstruct the brown body. Cruz (2006) writes, “[…] the deconstruction of the body may offer the possibility of revealing how identities are discursively created and how the brown body is constructed through the narratives and the social mores of our communities” (p. 67). By centering the brown body, we better understand how structures inform identity, but also how people respond to their surroundings. I couple this emphasis with Butler’s (1990) work on performativity. People negotiate and deal with identity categories they inhabit (Bettie, 2003; Bucholtz, 2011), but they also evolve through “social practice and social interaction” (Bucholtz, 2011). In their interactions, Latina/o youth will enact different performances, which at times may be rebuffed by their white or Latina/o classmates.

Suburban schools are increasingly populated with Latina/o students, my work concentrates on the distinctive experiences of students in these communities, adding to the literature on Latina/o high school experiences that have largely focused on urban education. It is all the more pressing that we understand how Latina/o students make sense of themselves, resist categorization and rework identity as part of their education in multi-varied ways.

Author

• Gabriel Rodriguez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign