Cultivating Lugares de Ambiente: Surveillance, Belonging, and Latinx Suburban Youth

• In Event: Construyendo Spaces of Belonging for Latinx Youth: Understanding Race, Space, and Place

Abstract

Purpose
Educational scholarship continues to imagine Latinx students as an urban population, yet most Latinxs in the U.S. live in a suburban community (Frey, 2018). Latinxs are helping re-write what these spaces look like and in turn what it means to be Latinx in predominantly White contexts. This project examines how Latinx high school youth at Shields High School (SHS, pseudonym), a predominately white and well-resourced suburban school outside of Chicago made sense of the racialized spaces they traversed and how constructed belonging.

Framework
I employ spatial and borderland theories to explore how Latinx youth navigated the academic and social borders they crossed or did not cross. Spaces throughout SHS were contested and racialized. In so doing, different meanings were ascribed (Lefebvre, 1991). The work of borderland theory scholars (Anzaldúa, 1999; Lugo, 2008) builds upon scholarship employing social theory by considering notions of belonging and agency. Borderland theory centers the subjectivities of Latinx youth by examining the ways they crossed borders, but also the spaces they choose to avoid. Scholars also center Latinx bodies to consider the ways people and policies seek to control and render them as outsiders (Cruz, 2001).

Methods & Data Analysis
I conducted a critical ethnography between 2014-2016, which entailed the collection of participant observations, informal-formal interviews, and artifacts (e.g., student work). 19 Latinx students were purposefully recruited. Youth were shadowed (Rios, 2011) in and out of their classroom. Further, each participant participated in a 90-minute semi-structured interview. Artifacts were also collected (e.g., student artwork) to help provide a holistic understanding of everyday life for Latinx youth at SHS. Situated in the interpretive approach (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) I coded three rounds of thematic coding, with the first round entailing open coding and the subsequent rounds being focused in nature (Emerson et al., 2011).

Results & Significance
My analysis highlights the profound role whiteness played in the lives of participants. Latinx youth were keenly aware of the space white youth took up and the ways in which they erased their presence, and how they policed their bodies. Moreover, because of this exclusionary context, Latinx youth forged their own paths to cultivate spaces of belonging for themselves. For some, those spaces of community came through initiatives fostered by their school, while others were of their own making. Yet, when Latinx youth forged their own spaces (e.g., hallway), they were often misunderstood and rendered as spaces in need of surveillance. Moreover, in spaces SHS had created to support Latinx youth (e.g., college access program), some failed to live up to their intentions because White youth took up too much space and did not consider the cultural worlds or desires of Latinx youth. As suburban schools change, it is important to center the experiences of Latinx youth to help shape curricular and policy changes that decenter Whiteness. If schools fail to grapple with how their initiatives miss the mark, schools in suburbia will reproduce damaging outcomes that will render resources obsolete.

Author

• Gabriel Rodriguez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign