“Babe, I finally feel proud of myself:” Formerly Incarcerated Latinas and their Postsecondary Educational Pursuits

• In Event: World-making in the Carceral Classroom: Centering Abolition Feminism as an Analytic Lens

Abstract

Objective: In the United States, it is estimated that 19% of all women who are incarcerated were identified as Latinx (Kajstura & Sawyer, 2024). In California, Latinas are nearly 36% of all incarcerated women– the largest ethnic group of all. Despite these staggering numbers, the experiences of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Latinas are often underrepresented in the existing body of literature across disciplines. The field of education is no exception. The educational experiences and needs of women and gender expansive students who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated are widely overlooked, underexamined, and rarely prioritized. As such, this study centers the experiences and insights of formerly incarcerated Latina college students.

Perspectives and Framework: Guided by the symposium’s overarching theoretical framework, this study uses an abolition feminist approach (Davis et al., 2022) to interrogate how gender, access to education, and agency are shaped by carcerality and our collaborators’ refusal to accept the institution’s totalizing effects (Goffman, 1967). In doing so, this framework allows for a more complete interpretation of how Latinas who are incarcerated make decisions about how to “do their time” and which educational opportunities to pursue within the racialized and gendered context of jails, prisons, and postsecondary institutions.

Methodology & Data: Drawing on interview and photo data gathered during the spring and summer of 2025, this study examines how formerly incarcerated Latina students make decisions about their educational experiences both during and after their incarceration. More specifically, this study examines the experiences of formerly incarcerated Latinas, both cis-and-transgender women, who were incarcerated in a California women’s designated facility. While the larger sample includes women who did not continue their education upon release, for this manuscript, I examine the set of interviews (n=30) in which our research collaborators were enrolled in postsecondary education programs after their release.

Findings: Emerging findings suggest that for formerly incarcerated Latinas, choosing to continue their educational pursuits after their incarceration was often seen as one of the most viable and generative opportunities at their disposal. For many, returning to school provided much-needed reprieve from the challenges they faced due to employment, caregiving, relationships, and court supervision. Through an abolition feminist lens, what became visible was the participants’ refusal to be relegated to the margins of society. Instead, they tapped into existing networks (e.g., Rising Scholars, Underground Scholars) of other formerly incarcerated students and programs that support first generation, systems-impacted students of color. Through these informal and formal networks, Latinas were able to forge paths forward and reclaim a student identity. Still, women shared that many of the informal and formal support systems that existed catered to cisgender men. As Alexxess, a 50-year-old Mexican and Cuban transwoman, described, “The guys were welcoming and everything, and I built community with them, but it's just most of the programs that they brought to us were focused on men, or for men. It's open to women as well, but it was mainly for men.” This finding highlights the often gendered carceral landscape that centers cisheteropatriarchial forms of inclusion that women and gender expansive students must navigate, even after their release.

Author

• Julissa O. Muñiz, University of California - Los Angeles