Toasted O's: Navigating Violence and Unbelonging as a Latina Girl in a U.S. Elementary School

• In Event: Perspectivas y Problemas en Educación: Storytelling Across the Americas

Abstract

Objective
This paper illuminates the everyday violence encountered by Latinx children in white supremacist schools through a narrative based on true stories. Piece by piece, the framework deconstructs the events of the story to reveal the deep racial meaning in each word, thought, and action the characters experience, no matter how seemingly mundane.

Theoretical Perspectives
This paper analyzes the story using a framework of Reynolds (2015) and Tse & McQuillan’s (1996) cultural and language brokering, Bonilla-Silva’s (2012) racial grammar, Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectionality, and Bell’s (1992) racial realism. First, cultural brokering demonstrates how minoritized students mediate between family adults and outside authority figures, assuming adult responsibilities. Second, racial grammar examines the centering of white perspectives and experiences as normative within classroom spaces and school systems, and the exclusion of people of color from understanding and belonging within U.S. society. Third, intersectionality illuminates poor women of color’s unique susceptibility to violence because the combined forces of sexism, classism, and racism prevent them from utilizing intervention strategies designed for white or upper-middle-class women. Fourth, racism as normalized, normative, and ineliminable reveals how regulations meant to produce fairness or equal opportunity instead reproduce white supremacy, oppressing and marginalizing students of color.

Methods/Data Sources
This paper uses the counter-storytelling method, rooted in Critical Race Theory, to convey the experiences of Latina schoolchildren and their families through three vignettes about four women. The data used to construct the story come from interviews conducted with non-profit workers and Latina former students of a school district in the southeast U.S. In my analysis, I use the theoretical framework to demonstrate the significance of their experiences to scholarly work.

Findings/Significance
I find that the classroom’s racial grammar ignores the cultural and economic context of Latinx parents, erases a Latina student’s racial, ethnic, linguistic, and national identity, and compels that student to adopt white cultural ideals and devalue her own in order to reach for equality in the classroom’s social space. This grammar is particularly marginalizing and harmful for a poor, indigenous Latina student and the women in her family, who live at complex intersections of oppression. Furthermore, I find that it is entirely normalized for a Latina student to experience symbolic and verbal violence from her peers and teachers, and to suffer academically because her learning space is hostile to her racialized identity. Similar to the way in which Brown v. Board placed the burden of integration on black children (Bell 1980), forcing a Latina student from a Spanish-speaking family to enter a monolingual English school places the burden of translating, negotiating authority, and engaging multiculturally on her, and will continue to do so in a system designed to maintain white power. The analysis herein demonstrates how a Latina student navigates the structures that marginalize her in the classroom and society, reflects on her own oppression, and attempts to negotiate a space for herself while acting as a bridge between her family and the society and systems around them.

Author

• Anna Rodell, University of Florida