Mapping Visual and Linguistic Intersections of Whiteness With Latinx Youth

• In Event: 43.041 - Dis/Orientations: Mapping Whiteness in Educational Spaces

Abstract

In the Golden Gulag (2007), Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 28). Languaging is a critical, yet often overlooked, process in group differentiation for the purpose of determining exclusion and belonging. Putting Gilmore’s definition of racism into conversation with Urciuoli’s (1996) distinction between ethnicization and racialization clarifies the ways in which Latinx are racialized in the US, despite being broadly defined by ethnic characteristics such as language and country of origin. Flores and Rosa (2015) further connect language and race using a raciolinguistic perspective, in which speakers produce speech based on “idealized linguistic practices of whiteness” (p. 151), and listeners interpret speech using not only linguistic features, but also racialized understandings of the speaker.

In this paper, I examine how race and language intersect to include or exclude based on the experiences of a racially and ethnically diverse group of Latinx adolescent youth. The primary question guiding this paper is, How do bilingual Latinx youth understand whiteness and deploy this understanding to make sense of issues of power, privilege, and American belonging? This question is explored using arts-based methods that visually map whiteness and its corollary, American-ness, through the use of media images, storytelling and theater, and mapping with post-it notes. This work foregrounds the voices of young adolescents, a perspective that is lacking in educational research, and utilizes visual understandings to explore concepts of languaging and racialization.

The research presented here draws from a case study that engaged Latinx bilingual middle school youth in an 8-week after-school program aimed at building youths’ critical awareness of the relationships between language and race, and better understanding youth perspectives and experiences of racialization. The findings of this study highlight Latinx adolescents’ understandings of the ways that raciolinguistic ideologies inform their own and others’ perceptions of race, ethnicity, and language, and work to marginalize and dehumanize some while benefiting those who fit within the paradigm of the white standard-English-speaking American. This research sheds light on the ways that youth connect visual and linguistic markers to processes of racialization, and young people’s abilities to engage in complex meta-analysis of social processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Author

• Sarah Hesson, Rhode Island College