Espacios de Confianza: Affectively and Systemically Resisting Color-Blind Ideologies in Two-Way Bilingual Education Home-School Planning

• In Event: Gentrification and Dual-Language Bilingual Education: A Texas Two-Way Bilingual Education School Across Seven Years

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper describes Ms. Trevino’s (pseudonym) community organizing space as an ‘espacio de confianza’ at Hillside, a space where working-class, Latinx families could congregate to critically analyze the neoliberal, White Supremacist forces that impacted their children’s schooling. I describe and explore how color and class-blind ideologies were framed in dominant educational policy narratives in the debate to adopt a two-way bilingual education (TWBE) program and how this group of working-class families responded by building an ideological community that could counteract dominant deficit perspectives of this debate. I frame this description by highlighting how Ms. Trevino’s espacios de confianza socially supported families in critiquing dominant narratives at the school and politically supported them to promote policies that enhanced the schooling of their children.
Perspective(s):
I describe how dominant social and political systems at Hillside promoted color-blind ideologies systematically as an effort to promote White supremacist and neoliberal group interests (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). Viewing ideologies as systems of thought allows me to analyze ‘espacios de confianza’ as a counter-space which creates its own counter ideological system with its own sociocultural and political counter systems. Drawing on resistance theory and Latina epistemological research, I analyze how Ms. Trevino systematically used relational organizing strategies to build social and political systems of confianza that supported their efforts to promote alternative forms of schooling for their children.
Methods:
This chapter is based on a two-year critical ethnographic study between 2008 and 2010 in which I volunteered as an educational organizer at Hillside. I analyzed individual interviews, focus groups, field notes, organizational and contextual documents through a critical pedagogical, LatCrit and critical race lens (Anzaldúa, 1987; Author & Redacted 2016).
Results:
I contextualize the Hillside school and neighborhood within the context of neoliberal and White supremacist social forces occurring in Austin between the years of 2008 and 2010, focusing on dominant color-blind and class-blind ideologies and how social narratives that framed middle-class, White gentrification promoted White, middle-class wealth accumulation.
I then describe Ms. Treviño’s community organizing space and how their TWBE counter narratives complicated Hillside’s early TWBE proposals in spring 2010. In particular, I highlight how dialogues with bilingual teachers critiqued class-blind proposals that ignored the systemic needs of working-class children and how they were able to insert systems that targeted their own children’s instructional needs.
Significance
Studies examine how TWBE communities come together to critique the dominant ideological forces assailing TWBE schools to solely promote the interests of the White, middle-class community. This study adds to this literature by providing a model of a sustained approach based on the epistemological and systemic systems of working-class communities. It explores the importance of counter-systems led by working-class, Latinx families in critiquing and promoting programs within TWBE programs.
Ms. Trevino’s systems highlight the importance of affective critique to augment social and political critiques of the TWBE system. This positive critique also provides some ideas of how to integrate the affective component of ideologies into positive ideological systems.

Author

• Christopher L. Milk Bonilla, Texas State University
  Presenting Author