(Re)Defining Young Latinx Student Activism Through a Lens of Race, Space, and Place

• In Event: 63.032 - Constructing Communities of Belonging: Understanding Latinx Youth's Sense of Race, Space, and Place in Schools

Abstract

Objective
With the resurgence of student-led social movements, more attention has been placed on students at the high school and university level than younger-aged students (Cammarota & Romero, 2011; Otero & Cammarota, 2011). Furthermore, white students have garnered national recognition for their activism (e.g., Parkland, FL students) in ways that erase and disregard the agentive resistance that Students of Color already exert (Diera, 2016). Challenging these dominant narratives, in this paper, I examine the process within which Latinx middle school students from Southeast Los Angeles, CA participated in a student-led walkout as part of a nationwide protest to demand action on gun violence on March 14, 2018. Applying a dual examination of their resistance as a product of both racial and spatial processes, I explore the relationship between the national and local dominant social order within which they enact agency for social change at school.

Framework
Drawing on regional racial formation theory (Cheng, 2013), I examine the hegemonic forces and social factors that shape the process of Latinx students’ contestation of school spaces. The formation of racial hierarchies are integrally tied to places, localities, and regions (Pulido, 2006), and regional racial formation theory enables me to understand how “regionally specific identities” are dynamic and socially constructed through local demographics, regional economies, local history, as well as larger scale racial ideologies. In other words, an understanding of students’ agency must consider the relationship between the dominant social order and their racialized positioning.

Methods
This study takes place within the context of an eighth grade teacher’s history classroom in a public school serving 99% Latinx students. Utilizing a phenomenological approach to analyze how students experienced the walkout within their schooling context (Merriam, 2009), I rely on video recordings, field notes, and interviews as data to investigate the social dynamics leading up to and after the walkouts. I also draw on public documents and artifacts to triangulate findings and contextualize this event within the broader schooling and national context.

Results
Findings reveal that how teachers and administrators communicated and implemented policies and practices influenced how Latinx middle school students perceived support for action; thus, the class and teacher that students had at the time walkouts occurred influenced their decision to participate. Due to perceived unorganization of the walkout, some students engaged in alternative practices of resistance (e.g., drawing the number 17 on their faces to honor the 17 people who were killed, silent protest). Out of fear of punitive action, students who were deemed “bad students” decided to stay in class, while others regretted walking out in fear of disappointing their parents.

Significance
This study suggests that social context plays a crucial role in cultivating young people’s capacity to take formal action. A shared lens of race, space, and place 1) unveils the racialized nature of who gets deemed an activist, considering that Students of Color are more likely to inhabit places that are heavily surveilled, and 2) recognizes the creative ways they resist in spite of and in response to restrictive contexts.

Author

• Josephine Pham, California State University - Fullerton