18.025 - (Un)Educating Diversity: Afro-Latinidad in the U.S. Educational Context

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This roundtable brings together scholars interested in the ways Afro-descended Latinos negotiate blackness in relation to U.S. educational contexts. The hyphenated nature of Latino identities and the complexities of race in America leave African-descended Latinos out of the national conversation on blackness. In common discourse, blackness and latinidad are perceived as being two separate entities; in this discussion we bring together a variety of methodologies, frameworks, and perspectives to challenge this belief. Particularly, participants are interested in calling attention to tensions that arise for Afrolatino students (prek to adult) in learning contexts, inside and outside of schools, as they navigate their racialized identity. Through this conversation, we seek to interrogate the use of education to re-conceptualize blackness and latinidad.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 2: Studies of diversity and variation with social contexts of education

Chair

• Maria Roberta Diaz

Papers

• Between Blackness and Africanness: Indexing Puerto Rican Identity Through Discourse - Krista L. Cortes, University of California - Berkeley

• Learning to Coexist. Black Latina/o: A Critical Race Theory Approach to Education - Maria Roberta Diaz

• Interrogating Blackness and Overlapping Diasporas in Afro-Central American First-Generation Communities - Nicole Denise Ramsey, University of California - Berkeley