Transnational Racial Literacies of Recently-Arrived Latin American and Indigenous Migrant Youth

• In Event: Towards Altermundos: Racial Literacies and Racial Sense-Making of Latinx/e/o/a, Indigenous, Latin American-Origin Youth

Abstract

Objective:
This paper examines how the racial ideologies and racialized positions that recently-arrived Latin American and Indigenous migrant youth carry with them into classrooms intersect with their racialization within the US and with their layered precarities (e.g. as migrants, as workers), to shape how they engage in learning about race, power, and solidarity in high school Ethnic Studies classrooms. I do this by paying attention to student discourse and meaning-making around racism—how they read the world racially. In doing so, I offer contributions around teaching about race and racism with migrant youth amidst a complex political climate.

Frameworks:
I bridge sociocultural theories of racial literacies (Chávez-Moreno, 2022; Guinier, 2004) with sociological theories of transnational racialization, including racial baggage (Zamora, 2022) and racialized illegality (De Genova, 2002; Menjívar, 2021) to advance a framework of transnational racial literacies (TRL). TRL are shaped by both the racial ideologies migrants have “carried” with them from their contexts of origin (e.g., mestizaje ideology) and the racialization they experience as migrants–especially (though not exceptionally) under the second Trump presidency. Pedagogies seeking to develop students’ racial literacies towards critical consciousness and solidarity must therefore take these intersecting processes into consideration.

Methods & Sources:
I draw from ethnographic data collected over 10 months in two high school Ethnic Studies classrooms in Northern California that exclusively serve recently-arrived immigrant youth. Students had all arrived to California within the last 5 years from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Chile, and spoke Spanish, K’iche, and/or Mam. Students had various educational backgrounds and a range of (sometimes shifting) legal statuses, including asylum seeker, unaccompanied minor, temporary protected status, undocumented, and/or legal permanent resident. Data sources include field notes, transcripts of semi-structured interviews with 13 students, curricular materials, and students’ written work. Analysis of ethnographic data was iterative and involved multiple rounds of inductive, deductive, and thematic coding (Saldaña, 2013).

Findings:
My findings focus on three dimensions of students’ TRL: how students 1) locate, 2) define, and 3) anticipate racism. These practices are rooted in both the racial ideologies they carry with them from Latin American contexts and in their experiences as migrants living in violently anti-immigrant times. Their sense-making is necessarily transnational and translingual—drawing upon the social narratives (e.g. racism as non-existent), linguistic frames (e.g. “negra is a bad word”) and figures (e.g. “los nacidos acá/those who were born here”) that have become available to them across the varied racial geographies that they traverse. Thus, I argue that critical pedagogies that aim to teach students about racism must take a transnational perspective, drawing upon students’ lived experiences, concerns, and curiosities to develop their TRL.

Significance:
This work deepens our understanding of Latin American and Indigenous migrant youths’ racial learning, challenging homogenizing narratives about students often clumped together as “Latino/Hispanic” in U.S. schools. It also offers important insights into pedagogies of racial literacies–how teachers teach about racism, power, and solidarity in classrooms serving increasingly diverse learners who bring intersectional identities to classrooms.

Author

• Rita Kamani-Renedo, Stanford University