Toward the Fulfillment of Full Personhood: The Persistent Invisibility of Latinx Communities Across Institutions and Educational Scholarship 3.0

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

The demand for “paramount national citizenship” was the creed of the abolitionists after the civil war. And it has been an ambition of all Latinae immigrants since the first communities were formed in the US by Mexican immigrants- to be treated equally and justly. A call to be treated as fully human has endured within and across the hugely diverse Latinx communities. And yet Latinae communities, particularly indigenous Latinae, their historical, linguistic, geographic/spatial, and intersectional specificities continue to be flattened out and erased in scholarship, policy, and civic life.

This session reconvenes intergenerational pairs of Latinx scholars to lift up their scholarship and contribution and to engage and elaborate a range of relevant topics that both remain central or at the edges of new scholarship with implications for the field, the academy, and communities. The pairs will engage in a twelve minute ignite conversation in which they address a series of questions to create dynamic conversations that will cumulatively contribute to the larger focus on achieving full personhood as a community.

Dismantling racial injustice across educational systems, in the academy, and in the public sphere, involves more than inclusion and instead requires complex understandings and representations of Latinx people, their histories, and their possibilities. This is an area of scholarship rarely featured at the level of the presidential session or the larger conference, and thus provides opportunity to advance more expansive understandings of Latinx communities, their regularity and variances, while troubling and disrupting extant theories, methods, and discourses around these significantly diverse communities. The presentations will engage tensions in the scholarship, opening up new conversations for the AERA community and will address a range of topics, from Hispanic Serving Institutions which have tripled since these institutions were first federally designated in 1992, to discussions of the complexity of the Latinae experience relevant to national origin, languages, race and gender, various notions of citizenship and civic life, as well as to historical and geographic landscapes.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

Papers

• Epistemological Invisibility in Research, 3.0 - Alfredo J. Artiles, Stanford University; Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, University of California - Los Angeles

• Examining the Afro in Afro-Latinidad 3.0 - Krista L. Cortes, University of Pennsylvania; Amalia Z. Dache, University of Pennsylvania

• The Historical Arc Toward Full Personhood 3.0 - Laura K. Munoz, University of Nebraska - Lincoln; Mirelsie Velázquez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Latinx Epistemologies and Decolonial Thinking: Trans* and Queer Futures 3.0 - Omi Salas-SantaCruz, University of Utah; Cindy Cruz, University of Arizona

• Indigeneity and Latinidad 3.0 - Luis Urrieta, University of Texas at Austin; Dolores Calderon, Western Washington University

• Transforming Hispanic-Serving Institutions to Expand Educational Opportunities Toward Full Personhood 3.0 - Anne-Marie Nunez, University of Texas - El Paso; Gina Ann Garcia, University of California - Berkeley

Discussant

• Dolores Delgado Bernal, Loyola Marymount University