"Where They Feel at Home": The Role of Latinx Student Clubs in Battling Exclusion

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

Abstract

Objective
Latinx youth often battle exclusion both outside and inside of schools due to hostile immigrant policies, xenophobia, racism, and school structures that reproduce racial/ethnic inequalities (e.g. Cammarota, 2008; Darder & Torres, 2014; Valenzuela, 1999). In navigating these challenges some Latinx youth turn to their high school Latinx student club as a counterspace where they can find nourishment and engage in collective resistance (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). I define “nourishment” as the sense of belonging, cultural affirmation, and border-crossing social capital found in Latinx student clubs. In this paper, I find that when Latinx students are nourished, they become engaged as critical actors in their schools and communities.

Framework & Methods
This paper uses critical race theories (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) particularly the LatCrit branch, which centers Latinx intersectional identities and experiences, to center the role of counterspaces in a school district with a growing Latinx population (Delgado-Bernal, 2002; Espinoza & Harris, 1997; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001). It also draws on borderland theories to highlight the symbolic boundaries that Latinx youth navigate in their daily lives and contributes the conceptualization of border-crossing social capital (Anzaldúa, 2012; Elenes, 1997; 2006). I draw upon data from an 18-month multi-site ethnography of three Latinx high school clubs and a youth group at a community center in a mid-sized city in Wisconsin that has seen a growing Latinx population and is struggling to meet the needs of students of color. This paper focuses on the school clubs to delve deeper into the role these spaces played in the educational experiences of Latinx youth.

Findings
This paper highlights the nourishment found in Latinx student clubs where youth found academic and socioemotional support and also constructed collective resistance. In the clubs, students took respite from the exclusion they often felt in their schools. As a counterspace, Latinx clubs allowed for students to create events that were driven by their experiential and cultural knowledge. Through these events, Latinx students disrupted the invisibility of Latinx histories and cultures. Findings also reveal the unique role of club advisors, mostly Latinx support staff, who knew how Latinx students moved through the school and therefore connected with students throughout the school day to create relationships of critical care (Rolon-Dow, 2005). Through these relationships, Latinx students developed border-crossing social capital: the information and resources needed to cross borders between home, school, and community. Finally, this paper speaks to the possibilities and limitations of Latinx student clubs as spaces of collective resistance.

Significance
This findings in this paper push us to rethink which spaces are seen as “educational” and provides insight into the unrecognized nourishment work that is done in spaces like student clubs. Educators and policymakers can reimagine what schooling can look like, as they learn from the practices and relationships provided by school support staff, who are rarely positioned as experts in schools. These spaces can also play an important role in our current political time where youth must feel nourished, seen, and heard as knowledge-holders and change-agents in their communities.

Author

• Julissa Ventura, University of Colorado - Boulder