Socializing Settler Desire and Competency: Considering a College Preparation Program for Latinx Youth in Relation to Place

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Desire Within Empire, Land-Based Pedagogies, and "Latinx" Sites of Learning

Abstract

In this paper, I respond to calls for greater attention to place in social science research (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015; Basso, 1996) and for anticolonial understandings of how we come into relation in and across settler states (Patel, 2016; Calderon, 2014). I draw upon data from a “multi-sited place project” that centers place within an ethnography of schooling (Author, 2019; forthcoming), specifically, the Cedarville High School Bridge Program, in the San Francisco Bay Area, unceded Ohlone territory. I examine how youth in the Bridge Program, designed to increase Latinx college-going rates, are socialized into settler logics and relations through their participation in a local history event, Cedarville’s annual township festival’s parade. Namely, I consider college-going competencies alongside youth/familial desires for stability, tracing their intertwinement with socialization into settler colonial orientations to land and community.

A small SF Bay Area city surrounded by settler institutions such as California missions and land-grant universities, I frame Cedarville, its schools, and local history sites, as interconnected by local “capillaries” of “white possessive logics” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) to the U.S. settler nation-state. I assembled data from these sites through a year and a half of participant observation documented by field notes, analytic memos, selected archival materials, and researcher-generated photographs (Marcus, 1995; Sarmento, 2009), in addition to pláticas (Aviña, 2016) and interviews held with youth and program educators. Emerging from the aftermath of California’s Proposition 209, the need for such college preparation programs reflects the congruence of the state’s liberal racism with how the place of California came to be (HoSang, 2010; Madely, 2016; Almaguer, 1994).

To underscore the Bridge Program’s college-going pathways as springing from this place-specific context, connecting them to the future of the settler nation-state, I engage the language socialization concept of “competency,” which requires recognition by established community members (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002). I make these connections via my discussion of Bridge Program youths’ participation in Cedarville’s annual township festival parade and the ways that community service was taken up by the program. Youth participation was meant to gain positive recognition for the program by city leaders. Promised community service hours for their time, Bridge youth became active participants in the retelling of a local settler narrative that perpetuated the “fantasy” required for ongoing Indigenous erasure (Veracini, 2010). Through extended analysis, I maintain that the shape of Bridge youth/familial desires for the stability were forged by not only the displacement wrought by empire but also the ways that the college preparation program socialized youth to imagine better lives for their communities only within empire’s boundaries. As a Xicana scholar, these competencies are familiar; I do this work to again make them strange. In all, my findings suggest that the types of competence required to be recognizable as ‘college going material’ support hierarchical, settler rather than Indigenous and widespread, dignified futures. This work contributes to examinations of the effects of “Latinx” focused educational interventions by institutions of the settler state and understandings of the socialization of racialized peoples within and to the U.S. nation-state.

Author

• Theresa Burruel Stone, Sonoma State University