Postcolonial Theory and Alternative Financial Understandings for Low-Income Latinx College Students

• In Event: 41.061 - "There Can Never Really Be Justice on Stolen Land": A Discussion for Emerging Scholars

Abstract

Latinx students in higher education often face many issues to degree completion. Many of these barriers and solutions to barriers are centered on students, families, and cultural frames. I illuminate student and family financial practices and pedagogies of the home as students respond to homogenizing and flattening financial logics, like FAFSA. Specifically, I looked at the financial practices of six low-income Latinx students. How did these students engage in financial practices? What did they identify as issues to degree completion? Were these students responding to official logics through contrary family financial practices, and pedagogies of the home? The purpose of this paper is to explore alternative financial understandings for low-income Latinx college students. Paying for college is a process affected by cultural understandings and resources (Goldrick-Rab, 2016). What practices and pedagogies do Latinx undergraduates from low-income families employ when managing money? This study examines data from repeated in-depth interviews conducted with six students attending 2- and 4-year colleges and universities across Wisconsin. I use postcolonial theory (Mignolo, 2012; Quijano, 2000) to identify colonizing logics within financial aid institutions and use Chicana feminist pedagogies of the home ( Anzaldúa, 2007; Delgado Bernal, 2001; Villenas & Moreno, 2001; Villenas, 2005) to understand the financial practices of low-income Latinx students. Pedagogies of the home center immigrant mother understandings of education and are spaces of resistance and possibility. I find that low-income Latinx students often counter official homogenizing and normative logics about money and family. They do this by practicing and modeling alternative financial pedagogies such as: understanding money as a communal asset, sharing financial responsibilities, challenging the normative idea of flow of money from parent to child, and by families modeling financial pedagogies of value through their lived experiences.

Author

• Kathy Villalon, University of Wisconsin - Madison