Centering Black Geographies in Latinx Education Scholarship: Youth Perspectives from El Sur Latinx

• In Event: Critical Dialogues in Latinx Education

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores the implications of centering Black geographic thought in Latinx education scholarship to rethink how we conceptualize space, race, and identity in the educational experiences of Latinx youth. Rather than treating Black geographies as contextual or limiting analysis to Latinx racialization alone, the paper foregrounds how Latinx youth forge identities—and how ethnoracialization unfolds—through Black spatial formations, not merely alongside them. It examines how educational institutions, everyday spatial practices, and youth refusals illuminate the entanglement of Latinidad with Black placemaking, antiblackness, and spatial enclosure. .
Framework:
The paper builds on critical Latinx geography and palimpsestous thinking (Author, 2025), while advancing Black geographic thought as a primary analytic (e.g., Hawthorne & Lewis, 2022; McKittrick, 2016; McKittrick & Woods, 2007; Woods, 1998). It draws on AfroLatinx, Black feminist, and decolonial scholarship to theorize spatial processes of racialization, antiblackness, and refusal. Rather than layering frameworks, it argues for centering Black geographic thought to reveal how spatial imaginaries, institutional enclosures, and youth praxis shape the formation of Latinidad.
Methods:
The paper uses a reading/counter-reading method, inspired by Black feminist and decolonial approaches (e.g., McKittrick, 2006; Sharpe, 2016; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), to re-analyze ethnographic fieldnotes from an 18-month study in two middle schools in a predominantly Black Southern city. This method interrogates how dominant frameworks interpret youth experiences and what such readings obscure—particularly regarding space, race, and identity.
Evidence:
Evidence comes from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016–2018, including classroom observations, interviews, school meetings, and neighborhood walks. The analysis focuses on three youth-centered vignettes that illustrate how Latinidad is constructed through Black spatial practices such as placemaking, contestation, and refusal.
Conclusions:
The analysis identifies three oversights in dominant Latinx education research: (1) the erasure of Black spatial histories; (2) the invisibility of schools as sites of Black enclosure and contestation; and (3) the marginalization of Black refusal practices that shape Latinx youths’ spatial understandings. It argues that Latinidades are formed in relation to Black geographies and that centering youth insights can reframe how we theorize educational space, racialization, and identity.
Scholarly Significance:
This paper advances Latinx education scholarship by centering Black geographic thought as necessary for understanding how Latinidades—and Latinx youth subjectivities—are constituted through spatial logics of antiblackness, enclosure, and refusal. Building on work that explores AfroLatinx identity, antiblack discourse, and comparative racialization it asks: What becomes visible when Latinx education research begins with Black spatial formations? It foregrounds these as constitutive of the spaces in which youth of Latin American and Caribbean origin form their identities. It contributes to conversations on “Latinx senses of place” (Cahuas, 2024) by showing how youth challenge racial-spatial boundaries through everyday acts of refusal. This reorientation invites scholars to rethink how we study Latinidad—by examining the spatial processes that produce Latinx racialization, belonging, and exclusion in relation to Black geographies.

Author

• Rebeca Gamez, Vanderbilt University