Racialized and Gendered Vulnerabilities: Imagining Futures and Reproducing the Settler State in a Quiet Bay Area City

• In Event: The Curriculums of Settler (Un)Doing: Place, Historicity, and Deviance Across Educational Spaces

Abstract

As the largest, most rapidly growing demographic throughout the U.S., Latinx youth have been identified as a focal group for educational intervention as a means to improve the well-being of the entire nation-state (The Education Trust-West, 2017; Gándara, 2015). This paper considers how one such intervention, a college preparation program at a San Francisco Bay Area high school with curriculum designed for Latinxs, intertwined with what I describe as the youth’s place-based racialized and gendered vulnerabilities (building on the work of Iyko Day, 2015). Together, these vulnerabilities and the program’s curriculum shaped youth’s imaginable futures and in particular, the ways that their otherness would be incorporated into service of the “heteropaternal organization” of the settler colonial nation-state (Arvin, Tuck, & Morrill, 2013, p. 14).

Specifically, this paper recounts how Latinx youth in a college-going pathway experienced police harassment in one instance, and recruitment to police and military forces in another, all within a city chosen by Latinx families as a safe, quiet escape from what one family described as la vida recia. I juxtapose the vulnerabilities of these state engagements with conceptions of and service to “community” that youth in the program were expected to perform, allowing for an empirical examination of the dichotomous pathways through which “undesirable exogenous others” are subsumed into the settler-native-slave triad of the settler state (Glenn, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Examining racialized and gendered vulnerabilities through settler colonial studies deepens understandings of how racialized peoples’ efforts to navigate white supremacy most often serve to reproduce the settler state (Byrd, 2011; Glenn, 2015; Day, 2015). Methodologically, this paper engages language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) and critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) to connect the politics of place and dispossession of Indigenous Land to processes of becoming either competent members of the U.S. nation-state or disposable Others, “excess” within settler relations (Tuck & Yang, 2012). I draw upon data from a year-long ethnographic study of the college preparation program described above with methods including 1) pláticas with program youth (de la Torre, 2008; Aviña, 2016) and semi-structured interviews with district educators (Rubin, H.J. & Rubin, I.S., 1995); 2) participant observation of two college preparation program English classes, a Chicano Studies class, school and program events; and 3) a multi-sited place project (Marcus, 1995).

This paper reveals how the program’s community service melded with local historical events’ perpetuation of “settler futurity” (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013) within and surrounding the quiet city in which Latinx families chose to seek refuge from international imperialism and regional violences. Findings indicate that youth in the program were socialized into settler relations through the combination of program curriculum, conceptions and acts of community service, and the implicit lessons of their place-based racialized and gendered vulnerabilities. While serving to ameliorate the effects of such vulnerabilities on an individual level, this research suggests that such programs must be reconceptualized if they are to play a role in the undoing of the settler state.

Author

• Theresa Burruel Stone, Sonoma State University