Embodying Playfulness: Lugones’ “World”-Traveling in the Life of an Undocumented Latinx Secondary School Student

• In Event: Reimagining Resistance: Playfulness as Decolonial Praxis in Marginalized Communities

Abstract

This essay explores an undocumented Latinx secondary school student’s experience at an urban high school in Los Angeles California. Through a close reading of one interview excerpt, I examine how Rodrigo’s narrative of an incident that happened during a school lunch hour, embodies a “world”-travelling practice informed by a playful attitude (Lugones 1987, 2003). For decolonial feminist philosopher María Lugones (1987, 2003), playful “world”-travelling consists of an activity that is done willfully to identify and recognize others lovingly. Lugones encourages people to be playful in their “world”-travelling as being playful opens creative possibilities for coalition building via different social practices. Rodrigo’s narrative excerpt becomes useful to understand how an undocumented Latinx student’s experience with his friends allowed a mutual confirmation of each other’s personhood.
Methods & Data Sources.
The excerpt I examined in this essay derives from a larger research project conducted in 2021. This larger project employed a qualitative narrative inquiry approach that allowed me to use participants’ first-person stories as data. (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Convenience sampling was used to select participants, and the data was collected using semi-structured interviews (Brenner, 2006). Additionally, I employed Josselson and Hammack’s (2021) framework to analyze the data. Grounded in interpretive research methodologies, this five-phase analysis framework allowed me to identify codes, themes, and different voices of participants. For this essay, I closely examined one participants’ response to the question: why do you think you feel the safest in school when you are with your friends? Rodrigo’s response embodied a “world”-travelling practice informed by playfulness that allowed him to disrupt the academic and social oppressions undocumented Latinx students experience in secondary schools.

Results and Significance. Lugones (1987, 2003) argues that people of color in academia are outsiders to the dominant ways that the academic world is formed. Specifically, she argues that in the US, the academic world is formed by and for white academics. As a result, academics of color experience multiple challenges as they navigate academia. Thinking with Lugones, I argue that undocumented Latinx students are also positioned as outsiders in their school environments, and this is evident by the myriad of challenges the literature describes about this population, which happens to be the most prominent theme in the literature. Specifically, this theme highlights how undocumented students face academic (Ee & Gandara, 2020; Norrid-Lacey & Spencer, 2000; Szlyk et al., 2020), emotional and psychological (Castro-Salazar & Bagley, 2010; Craven et al., 2018; Del Razo, 2022), and socio-political (Bernal-Arevalo et al., 2021; Michaels, 2020; Rodriguez, 2020; 2022) challenges. Thus, because undocumented Latinx students are framed as outsiders, and because Lugones explains that people framed as outsiders are “inhabiting more than one “world” at the same time and “travelling” between “worlds” (p. 11), Rodrigo allowed me to examine how through his excerpt he is “world”-travelling with a playfulness attitude, and ultimately he is “world”-making. His excerpt and the analysis can serve to create possibilities in creating coalitions in classrooms, schools, communities, and beyond.

Author

• Raul Meneses Samperio, University of California - Santa Cruz