Latinx Youth in White Suburbia: Understanding Identity, Opportunity, and Belonging

• In Event: 81.032 - MTCC Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: 81.032-3 - Interrogating Suburban Schools: Race, Class, and Opportunity in the Suburbs

Abstract

Objective
Latinx youth are a growing population in suburban schools. While Latinx youth continue to diversity classrooms, questions surrounding their academic and social experiences remain understudied. While the miseducation of Latinx students in urban schools has been widely documented (Darder & Torres, 2013; Delgado Bernal, 1999; Gándara & Contreras, 2009; Valenzuela, 1999) little is known about how this legacy of manifests in suburban schools. This paper examines the impact that discourses and practices rooted in deservedness, respectability, and opportunity impact how 19 Latinx youth navigate their predominantly white and well-resourced suburban high school outside of Chicago, Illinois.

Theoretical Framework, Methods, & Data
Drawing from critical whiteness studies (Leonardo, 2009; Matias, 2016) and from performativity (Bettie, 2014; Butler, 1990) this paper examines how whiteness operates in the lives of Latinx youth and how they respond by the ways they enact their identities. My data are drawn from a two-year critical ethnography at a predominately white and well-resourced high school in Chicago, Illinois. I engaged in participant observations with 19 student participants in and out of their classrooms, conducted 19 semi-structured interviews, and analyzed artifacts (e.g., student work).

Findings
Attending a school with plentiful resources comes with tradeoffs that Latinx youth confront regularly. Whiteness played a critical role in shaping their identity performances. This context left youth in a liminal position, having to straddle the boundaries of their Latinidad and those of the white middle-class community. For example, a participant shared, “Sometimes I have to change who I am in order to fit in. I’ve realized that I’ve changed stuff about me, but if I’m proud of who I am why am I changing? Why do I keep stuff away from white culture?” While several school initiatives had a meaningful impact (e.g., undocumented student support group) the school was a place where some staff voiced opinions such as, “if only they’d take advantage of the opportunities the school has to offer.” These words were representative of several educators and students who were puzzled as to why Latinx students were not “succeeding.” Yet, all participants spoke about their awareness and appreciation of what their school offered. While grateful, participants had grievances, but felt they could not voice them because of the pushback they would receive and thus deemed ungrateful and unworthy of resources.

Scholarly Significance
The experiences of Latinx youth of this study help paint a more complicated view of suburban schooling.
While suburban communities and schools are often viewed as places of opportunity, they are also placing that reproduce inequality and create contexts in which students of color must make savvy decisions of how they project themselves to the world (Conchas, Oseguera, Vigil, 2012; Ispa-Landa & Conwell, 2015; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Lewis-McCoy, 2014; Shiller, 2016; Posey-Maddox, 2014, 2016). Therefore, as Latinx youth continue to enroll in suburban schools across the country, educators and researchers must remain steadfast in de-centering whiteness and embracing the sociocultural worlds of students as they offer insights into how to engage in transformative academic and social outcomes.

Author

• Gabriel Rodriguez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign