In Search of Mi Gente: Racial Identity and the School Choices of Middle-Class, Latinx Parents

• In Event: Expanding School Choice Narratives: Parents, Teachers, and Rural, Suburban, and Urban School Choice

Abstract

Demographic inversion- where city neighborhoods that were once considered “forbidden” are now seeing influxes of more affluent, mostly white, residents while once all-white suburbs are seeing influxes of Families of Color (Ehrenhalt, 2012; Frey, 2018)- has been a powerful trend (re)shaping metropolitan areas for the last two decades. The New York City metropolitan area has provided one of the starkest examples. At the same time that Latinx families were pushed out of more gentrifying neighborhoods than any other city in the country (Richardson et al., 2019), the share of Latinx people living in suburbs in the Northeast rose from 19 percent in 2000 to 39.7 percent in 2015 (Massey & Constant, 2017). Yet, despite the growing presence of Latinx communities across NYC’s metropolitan area, and in the US overall (Clemetson, 2003), we know surprisingly little about how Latinx parents decide where to live or where to send their children to school.

Drawing from a comparative case study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017), this paper focuses on how local schools factor into the decisions these parents make about where to live and how they conceptualize school quality in the process. I rely on 28 in-depth interviews with parents who have left the city for nearby suburban neighborhoods and 26 in-depth interviews with parents who have stayed in gentrified city neighborhoods to understand how race, class, and local school reputations play a role in the decisions parents make about where to send their children to school. Especially salient to understanding how Latinx parents make decisions is an understanding of how they position themselves within what has largely been a binary Black-white understanding of race and racism in the United States (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001)- particularly in the Northeast, where Latinx populations are most diverse in terms of their nationality and racial identities (Massey & Constant, 2017). However, much of the extant research on school choice largely obscures this racial variation.

Building on research that centers racial variation with Latinx communities (i.e. Arce, Murguia, & Frisbie, 1987; Kim & Calzada, 2019; Gomez, 2000; Gonzalez-Barrera; 2019; Murguia & Telles, 1996; Ryabov, 2016; Telles & Murguia, 1990), I find that parents’ perceived racial identities are central to how they choose and define schools. Latinx parents who identify as Black or “not white”- as one father put it- have a heightened sense of community and desire for visible ethno-racial diversity and a different set of tradeoffs in the school choice process than other Latinx parents. That said, their evaluation of what is a “good” school- still aligns with deficit-based narratives about Communities of Color. To make sense of these contradictions, I employ a framework of complimentary social theories that places middle-class Latinx parents within the system of ethno-racial stratification in the US and the ever-present social constraints that inform their daily lives. Given the complexity of these parents’ choices, their stories provide a microcosm of the (re)shaping of the ethno-racial landscape of metropolitan neighborhoods that are vital to social scientists’ understandings of how metropolitan neighborhoods and their associated public schools will be (re)defined in the coming decades.

Author

• Diana Cordova-Cobo, Teachers College, Columbia University