Toward a Ratcheta/x Resistance in Schools: Understanding the Nuanced Experiences of Brown Youth

• In Event: 47.046 - (Re)Visiting and (Re)Imagining Youth (Transformational) Resistance

Abstract

Objective:
We draw from Solorzano and Delgado Bernal’s (2001) model of transformational resistance and woman of color feminisms (Cooper, 2012; Lindsey, 2012; Love, 2017; Morgan, 2000; Brown & Young, 2015) to understand the oppositional behaviors, identity expressions, and material realities of elementary aged youth of color. Our research in an after school Introduction to Ethnic Studies course with fifth and sixth grade Chicana/x and Latina/x youth prompted us to explore what it means for these youth to self-identify as “paisa” and “ratchet.” Ratchet, as used by the youth in our study, signifies “ghetto” or “hood” while paisa is often used by Latina/x youth and communities to indicate perceived “negative” traits that are often associated with first generation immigrant status. In our work with youth, we recognized how their behaviors did but also did not fit into the frame of transformational resistance. We found that their behaviors reflected actions that are traditionally thought of in school as maladaptive. In shifting our focus away from viewing resistance solely as linear in achieving a specified end goal (social justice), we were able to locate how these students embodied resistance, contradiction, and how they reframed ratchet and paisa, traditionally used to stereotype people of color, to fit and meet their own needs.

Framework:
Though we argue that the actions of the Chicana/x and Latina/x youth we worked with is indicative of a purposeful way to resist schooling practices that they know undervalues them, we are still left wondering the answer to the questions posed by Tuck and Yang (2011) in their edited book, Youth Resistance and Theories of Change: “What does resistance do? Does it do what we think it does?” (p. 521). To explore these questions, we bridge scholarship on youth resistance with woman of color feminisms to understand the ways communities respond to respectability politics, surveillance, and the policing of Black and Brown bodies. Through this framework, how youth of color theorize about their lives and the world is identified and celebrated as complex and valuable.

Methods/Data Sources:
This study utilizes the Chicana feminist practice of platicas with self-identified Mexican, Mexican American and Chicana/x fifth and sixth grade youth. Student journals, drawing activities, essays, and poems completed by the youth were collected and analyzed, along with the researcher’s field notes and memos.

Findings:
The embodied knowledges of these students reflected how they understood their positionalities as low income, Latina/x youth, living in a conservative state and tumultuous political era. Specifically, they embodied everyday practices that were steeped in humor and play as a way to confront, re-enact, and cope with trauma.

Significance:
We take up the discourse of ratchet and paisa offered by the students to better understand how their embodiment of these subject positions functioned as resistance that can be overlooked and misinterpreted. Building from our previous work in conceptualizing how Latina/x youth embody ratchet subject positions (Mendoza Aviña & Morales, forthcoming), we focus on our development of an emerging concept, Ratcheta/x Resistance, that makes space for contradictions and actions that fall outside of, within, and between, the quadrants of transformational resistance.

Authors

• Sylvia Mendoza, Palomar College

• Socorro Morales, University of Utah