Documenting Injustice: Consequential Learning in Everyday Resistance Practices

• In Event: 43.019 - Socializing Epistemologies That Consolidate Complexity, Weighing Evidence, and Interrogating Emotional Responses: The Role of Ecologies

Abstract

Youth move across diverse and complex spaces that index a range of linguistic and socio-cultural practices and identities. In many parts of the U.S., these spaces are circumscribed by language, racialized, and classed ideologies that mediate everyday life for Latinx youth. Multilingual youth continually develop, expand, and revise repertoires of cultural practices and linguistic tools that help them navigate the developmental, sociopolitical, and socio-cultural demands of being adolescents—tools and practices that serve as resources to mediate everyday life and the additional set of developmental demands imposed by a range of racialized, economic, sociopolitical, linguistic, spacialized forms of inequity. We argue that youths’ engagement in a cultural habitus marked by inequities which advance the linguistic dominance of English (Alim, 2016) and reproduce historically unjust spatial arrangements can result in the development of what we term socio-spatial repertoires (Authors, in press). Such practices challenge and resist the injustices of everyday life, what Pacheco (2012) describes as learning in/through everyday resistance practices.

One mechanism for engaging in resistance is to challenge the very notion of space; including who belongs? where? how? And, how space comes to be places of valued cultural life. Consider how public spaces have become contested spaces in which the quotidian practices of people of color are made “illegal” and “criminal, ” (e.g., BBQ Becky, Permit Pete)—spaces in which minoritized youth and adults have necessarily turned to documenting injustices that challenge interpretations and distortions of truth; documented accounts designed to expose truth in a post-truth era. However, as we learned from Goodwin’s (1994 ) unpacking of the video of the beating of Rodney King, even making inequitable practices visible does not insure justice.

This paper joins our recent work that takes documented public forms of resistance by or about Latinx youth to examine the tools, stances, practices, and identities that youth leverage as resources to assert their legitimacy to engage in valued and everyday practices. We present a case in which Latinx youths’ ongoing resistance practices (Pacheco, 2012) include the documentation of a racialized and heated encounter in a public space that has been the site of their weekly skateboarding. In a prolonged exchange, an older white man threatens to do a citizen’s arrest on the youth who he claims are trespassing, despite the fact that the youth have skateboarded there every Wednesday. The youths use their phone to capture the irate man’s threats and racialized taunts (e.g., “I’m gonna get a punk your age to beat your as*” “Mexican piece of sh*t .”). When the youth accuse the man of being a racist, he retorts, “I’m a racist; at least I’m something,” The youth now satisfied with the evidence they have captured, remark, “Let’s go. We got him. He’s a racist.” and leave feeling vindicated. Our ecological and discourse analyses surface how capturing evidence and documenting racialized encounters have become important tools in youths’ developing agentic stances and learning to jointly negotiate the spatial, linguistic, and racialized sociopolitical injustices that are part of everyday life.

Authors

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder