Constructing Latinidad in the Rural South: Youth Negotiations for Epistemic Space and Educational Justice

• In Event: 68.027 - Spatial Justice, Educational Equity, and Critical Pedagogy in the New Latina/o Diaspora

Abstract

Objective & Perspectives

Through the New Latino Diaspora (NLD), Latin@ youth are entering schools in the rural south in unprecedented numbers (Hamann & Harklau, 2015). However, the educational terrain they are confronted with is increasingly restrictive, politically contested (Adair, 2015), and marked by reductive curricula and underprepared educators (Contreras, et al., 2015). As decades of critical and decolonial scholarship has demonstrated, such conditions are threats to youth agency, cultural identity, and educational opportunity (e.g. Darder, 2012), as well as issues of spatial justice (Soja, 2009).

With this context in mind, this inquiry follows recent research on the importance of making space for culturally sustaining learning (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014) and sociopolitical development (Sanchez, et al., 2015). Specifically, I examine the ways in which Latin@ youth in the rural south, participating in the Avanza afterschool program (a design-based research space), leverage culturally-sustaining learning and development to negotiate agency, identity, and epistemic space in contested educational terrain.

In short, this work explores a critical question for Latin@ education in the NLD: in what ways are Latin@ youth negotiating new cultural and sociopolitical identities, learning, and space (real and epistemic), in and beyond their schools in the NLD?

Methods & Data Sources
This presentation draws on data from an ongoing study of the evolving identities, literacies, and assets of Latin@ youth situated at a focal middle school in the rural south. Critical ethnographic and design-based research elements function in complimentary ways to deepen the inquiry: the aforementioned after-school program, Avanza, provides Latin@ youth space and opportunity to explore interdisciplinary cultural-studies content (e.g. autoethnography, racial justice inquiry), while researchers employ ethnographic methods to document their learning and development as it moves across contexts in, through, and beyond school.

Thus, the corpus of data includes several months of observational data (video, audio, field-notes) collected in the Avanza program, focal school, and community, as well as interviews with participants. For this presentation, a case study model (Yin, 2014) is employed to examine the shifts in practice, sociopolitical development, and negotiations for spatial justice, of three different Latin@ youth and their families.

Results & Significance

Initial results depict a Latin@ community with rich, compelling, and evolving cultural practices, still grappling with restrictive spatial constraints, for which culturally-sustaining learning was vital to their academic growth and sociopolitical development. Over the course of their engagement with the Avanza program, youth participants and their families demonstrated novel ways in which they were negotiating tense spaces in and beyond their schools, and leveraging new, culturally sustaining knowledge to reframe their identity-performances and claim agency in contested terrain.

These findings hold significance as further evidence in support of the importance of carving out space for culturally sustaining learning and positive re-framings of community wisdom both in, and beyond, the specific context of the NLD. Effectively, this work offers important commentary on how we might turn knowledge into action in liberatory, decolonial ways – embracing and cultivating the assets and identities of youth and communities – even in restrictive, anemic, and contested educational terrain.

Author

• Michael C. Dominguez, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill