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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel addresses the varied ways that Latinx students’ racial identities inform how they construct and negotiate space and place within schools. We investigate how Latinx youth: 1) make sense of their participation in student-led walkouts within a restrictive majority-Latinx middle school, 2) construct counterspaces of belonging and resistance within a predominantly white suburban school, 3) make places of belonging and meaning at a majority-Latinx high school, and 4) find nourishment and build collective resistance in Latinx student clubs in a district with a growing Latinx population. The panelists’ scholarship puts in conversation the work of spatial theorists and social geographers with the work of educational scholars who center race and racism in how Latinx youth construct communities of belonging.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 1: Education and Place, Space, Time

Chair

• Julio Cammarota, Iowa State University

Papers

• (Re)Defining Young Latinx Student Activism Through a Lens of Race, Space, and Place - Josephine Pham, California State University - Fullerton

• Racialized Boundaries and Belonging: How Latinx Youth Create Community in a Suburban High School - Gabriel Rodriguez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• How Latinx Youth Use Cultural Expression to Make and Shape Their School - Claudia Diera, California State University - Los Angeles

• "Where They Feel at Home": The Role of Latinx Student Clubs in Battling Exclusion - Julissa Ventura, University of Colorado - Boulder

Discussant

• Julio Cammarota, Iowa State University