Latiné Parent Resistance to Housing Insecurity: Efforts to Stay Rooted in their Homes & Communities

• In Event: Resistance to Gentrification and Housing Insecurity: Centering the Situated Knowledge of Youth, Parents, and Community-Based Educational Spaces

Abstract

Education scholarship that examines the nexus of housing and schools focuses predominantly on the connections between homeownership and schools. Inadvertently or intentionally neglected is the nexus between tenancy and schools. In contexts of the restructuring of the (rental) housing market (Aalbers, 2016; Farha, 2017) –where housing is out of reach and disproportionately informing the livelihood and housing insecurity of low-income minoritized households, particularly those with children (Davalos et al., 2021; Larrimore & Shultz, 2017) –this paper centers the voices and situated knowledge of low-income Latiné renter parents who actively seek to disrupt their housing insecurity to stay rooted in their neighborhoods and community institutions, including schools.

Theoretical Framework
I draw on the concept of geography of opportunity that keeps at the forefront issues of power and the role deliberate policies play in shaping opportunities that exist in neighborhoods along race and class lines (Squires & Kubrin, 2005). This includes reckoning with the exclusionary landscape low-income and minoritized renters navigate as a result of inadequate housing policy and exclusionary zoning (Airgood-Obrycki et al., 2024; Briggs, 2005). Additionally, I draw from a racial capitalism framework, that considers the role housing plays as a race-making institution and its connection to the carceral state (Bonds, 2019). This framework enables a critical examination of the “ongoing settler colonial displacement, urban fiscal crisis and infrastructure, gentrification, eviction, and speculative planning and development, and the proliferation of mechanisms to securitize [sub]urban space” (Bonds, 2019, p. 576).

Methods and Data
Data comes from a larger study that examines the connections between tenant housing and schools through the advocacy and organizing of Latiné and Black parents in two suburbs in the California Bay Area and a follow-up study in these suburbs and other cities in the Bay Area. This paper draws from multiple years of observation in city council meetings (2019-2024) and interviews with parents and community advocates and organizers. Critical race spatial analysis (Annamma et al., 2017), multiple case study (Stake, 2006) and critical discourse analysis (Wodak, 2012) are used to interrogate the role of race, class, place, and housing precarity in informing the lives and resistance of Latiné parents and their broader connections to their neighborhoods and childrens’ schools.

Findings & Significance
Across contexts, working-class Latiné renter parents draw attention to single- or multiple-prong issues in tenant housing that inform their housing insecurity and precarity. This is further perpetuated by policy (in)action and discourses that seek to minimize or dismiss the issues they are navigating and advocating to disrupt. Latiné parent public comments and interviews show how their advocacy and organizing is deeply informed by efforts to provide their children housing stability and quality housing, as well as their ongoing efforts to stay rooted to their neighborhoods and schools. This study provides empirical and theoretical contributions to the extant scholarship on tenancy and schools. Additionally, it contributes to broader scholarship that draws attention to the disadvantaged status renters occupy socially, economically, and legally (Drier, 1985; Pattillo, 2013; Schindler & Zale, 2023), while expanding it through a racial capitalist framework.

Author

• Maria Velazquez, Stanford University