Introduction to Study: How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization

• In Event: How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
The panelist introduces the study on how a bilingual-education program constructed “Latinx” as a racial category, even as the program’s teachers and students explicitly described—albeit with contradictions—“Latinx” as an ethnic category. The presentation shows how the program forms Latinidad in relation to Asianness, Blackness, Indigeneity, and whiteness. Additionally, the panelist proposes the contention that the program problematically constructed the Spanish language as the signature boundary maker of the Latinx racial group. The panelist will discuss the broader implications of this racialization process for educational practice and policy, including the call to engage in ambitious teaching regarding the ambivalence of race, or the critical distance required to question its innerworkings and future as an organizing principle of society.
Framework:
The framework is a relational racialization lens, which shows how the bilingual-education program positioned Latinx/Latinidad in relation to other racial categories rather than in isolation or essentialist terms that reify the groups/categories. The session will elucidate how educational institutions participate in and reinforce racial formation and boundaries while considering the intersection of language and race.
Methods
The panelist will summarize the qualitative ethnography research methodology. This includes a three-stage data analysis conducted at different stages of the study (LeCompte & Schensul, 2013). To analyze the data, the study employed deductive, inductive, and theoretical codes (Saldaña, 2013).
Evidence
Data sources include classroom observations of the bilingual-education program; interviews with teachers, school/district staff, parents, students, and community members; observations in community meetings concerning the bilingual program and/or Latinx education; and documents, such as district/program policy documents and curriculum materials.
Conclusions
The panelist shows that bilingual-education programs—intentionally or unintentionally—contribute to the racialization of Latinxs by positioning the Spanish language as the signature boundary of the Latinx group. The session explores the affordances and tensions in conceptualizing Latinx/Latinidad as racialized terms, pointing out that attempts to make these terms based on a shared culture further obscures the racialization process and ignores how a key feature of racialization is essentialization, that is, ignoring cultural differences. The session concludes that recognizing and addressing this dynamic is crucial for developing equitable and inclusive educational practices for an anti-racist Latinx futurity.
Scholarly Significance:
This symposium: (1) advances the understanding of how educational practices contribute to the construction of racial categories, specifically Latinidad in relation to Asianness, Blackness, Indigeneity, and whiteness; (2) provides a critical examination of language’s role in the racialization process, including its problematic role, thereby offering insights into the intersection of bilingual education and race; (3) informs educational policy and practice by highlighting the need for ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race, which involves orientations that are simultaneously pro-race, anti-racist, and where necessary, anti-race; and (4) addresses the importance of the education field conceptualizing “Latinx” (as Latinxs comprise the largest racialized group in the U.S.), an especially important question given that how schools racialize Latinxs can tell us about U.S. racialization and how to foster Latinx student education success. By discussing these issues, the symposium aims to contribute to ideas for imagining more equitable and inclusive educational environments for all students even as it focuses on Latinidad.

Author

• Laura Chavez-Moreno, University of California - Los Angeles