More Than Music, More Than Sex: Latina College Students Performing “Smartness” and Embodying Institutional Logics

• In Event: 324 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. RGC, Education, and Identity

Abstract

Building on Beth Hatt’s (2011) conceptual framework of “smartness as cultural practice,” I explore how Mexican American, female, undergraduate students make sense of themselves as “smart students” who made “smart choices” that rewarded them with the opportunity to attend college. Following an intersectional, feminist take on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, I posit that the students who “make it” to college had particular dispositions developed early on in the educational pipeline, to attend to the expectations of appropriate Mexican American femininity within white-dominated, patriarchal institutions. In other words, to appear smart for Mexican American women in the US entails not just getting good grades, but also keeping an alleged “hypersexuality” under control. The study reveals the institutional logics of whiteness and patriarchy that dominate US educational institutions, as well as the ways in which Latina college students appropriate and remake these logics to work in their favor, as they simultaneously construct individual and institutional identities within universities. In the end, they attempt to achieve an “equal opportunity” by reproducing the gender, racial, and class hierarchies that created an unequal playing field for them in the first place. Nevertheless, their strategies for class advancement provide new understandings of Latina students and the gender, racial and class hierarchies of the social contexts they navigate. Instead of seeing them under a deficit lens, or blamed for the inequality that exists in universities, this study points back at the structures that create (or limit) opportunities for students based on gender, race, and class.

Author

• Juan Ramon Portillo-Soto, University of Texas-Austin