How Latinx Youth Use Cultural Expression to Make and Shape Their School

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

Abstract

Objective
Majority-Latinx schools provide a particularly useful lens to understand how Latinx students make, shape and negotiate school space through everyday forms of cultural expression. This paper describes how Latinx students at a segregated high school in a long-standing Mexican community bring their culture, identity, community context or history—their cultural expression—into school spaces to make places of social belonging, membership and meaning within their schools.

Framework
Since geographers have well established that space is produced and is a social product (Lefebvre 1991; Soja, 1996), I use two constructs in this tradition (place and place-making) to think about how Latinx youth make and shape their schools, in spite of how power and dominant interest shape these spaces. Place is space which is lived and meaningful to the people within it while place-making are the activities enacted to make that space meaningful (Halttunen, 2006; Yi-Fu Tuan, 1977). I interpret Latinx youth cultural expression as a form of place-making that impacts the schools they attend.

Methods
This paper focuses on the experiences of two students and draws from several data sources: 1) a school tour led by the student, 2) one semi-structured, in-depth interview with each student, 3) at least three observations of students in their everyday life at school, and 4) one focus group interview with other study participants. Using a grounded theory (Willis, 2007) method that focuses on the interpretive process of analysis, conceptual themes guided the coding scheme and were later be reconfigured to capture the meaning that emerge from the data.

Findings
To address certain district actions or inactions, I found that student lives outside of school influenced the ways they addressed these issues within the school. For example, to combat a beloved art teacher being dismissed by the district, students collectively conceptualized and painted a mural in the school quad that represented meaningful areas and events in their community such as local restaurants, churches and annual parades. Other students organized and worked a community swap meet every Saturday to raise money to change the lunch tables provided by the district that were for elementary-aged youth to ones more appropriate for high school students. In these examples, student place-making of turning empty walls into art installations and changing inadequate seating in the school lunch quad served as ways they created places of belonging, membership and meaning within school spaces.

Significance
Students enacting cultural expression as place-making can be about making spatial claims onto school space “to remake its meaning in relation to themselves and their communities" (Johnson, 2013, p. 124). By looking at the factors outside of school that influence how students shape spaces within school to places of social belonging, membership and meaning, results from this study may inform educators’ efforts to create schools that are equitable for Latinx youth that support students’ community context, history, culture and identity while also supporting their enactment of agency at their schools.

Author

• Claudia Diera, California State University - Los Angeles