A Broad Politics of Justice: A Practitioner Inquiry Study into Latinidad & Latine/x Education at a College Education Symposium

• In Event: Critical Dialogues in Latinx Education

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
Many U.S. college campuses have been actively uplifting Latine/x educational endeavors (e.g., HSI initiatives). However, researchers have highlighted the limits of these initiatives and their role in dampening radical visions of educational justice (Garcia, 2023). This study examines how a critical community of Latine/x students, faculty, staff, and community members at a large university conceptualized and engaged Latine/x education through a “Chicane/x and Latine/x Education Symposium” (CLES). Designed as practitioner inquiry, this paper inquires into the meaning of “Latine/x Education.” Findings identify a broad politics of justice as the defining quality of Latine/x education signified by CLES.
Framework:
This study uses a cultural studies framework to trace the ways Latinidad is made real through language and representation, rather than fixed and predetermined boundaries (Leonardo, 2013). For Hall (1986), racial signifiers or concepts, such as “Latine/x Education,” are not innately good or bad, and truth, authenticity, and justice are not guaranteed. This framework helps us analyze the cultural politics of signifying and performing the work of a Latine/x educational initiative on a college campus. Here, “Latinidad” and “Latine/x education” are both vulnerable to co-optation as well as worthy sites of political struggle.
Methods
As researchers and co-organizers/co-facilitators of CLES, we employed practitioner inquiry (PI - Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to make our familiar practice strange (Erickson et al., 1980), ultimately learning from and theorizing from it. To center Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies (Latina Feminist Group, 2001) in our PI, we engaged critical reflexiones (Espino et al., 2012). Inherently political, reflexiones facilitate a collective, introspective, critical meaning-making process, analyzing Latine/x experiences within broader social/ institutional power structures.
Data sources
Our ethnographic methods included “observant participant” fieldnotes (Erickson et al., 1980), photography, video, as well as artifact collection, such as planning documents and event materials. Analysis involved a layered process: a) deductive, inductive coding and related analytical memos (Saldaña, 2011), and b) individual critical reflexiones (Espino et al., 2010) on the event.
Conclusions
Our study found Latine/x education was represented and expressed by CLES in non-essentialist ways; an array of justice-oriented themes, such as transnational solidarity, analyses of anti-Blackness, and critical approaches to carcerality resonated with this campus community. Overall, this broad notion of justice served as a uniting priority for the diverse people of CLES who assembled under the banner of Latine/x education.
Scholarly Significance:
At a moment when the field of education is assessing what we mean to signify or affirm when we claim an educational project as Latine/x, our practitioner inquiry demonstrates that there are no guarantees of justice. Our study invites educators to see Latine/x education not just as a transfer of knowledge to a set group of learners, but as a radical act of collective liberation across and beyond Latinidad.

Authors

• Yianella M. Blanco, University of California - Davis

• Alicia Rusoja, University of California - Davis

• Michael V. Singh, University of California - Davis