Of cages and wings: K-12 Latinx immigrant youth in a community-based cultural arts program

• In Event: Navigating Belonging and Innovative Approaches to Workforce Education

Proposal

As we continue to navigate the (post) COVID crisis, we know it has had harmful effects on children’s education and socioemotional development (NAEd, 2020). For Latina/o children it added onto pre-existing educational conditions of anti-Immigrant racism, disproportionately low achievement, the pervasiveness of deficit thinking, and unequal access to high quality schooling (Ee & Gándara, 2020; Lowenhaupt et al., 2020; Valencia, 2020). In response, this study highlights Latinx immigrant healing and resistance through cultural arts, and the ways that digital technologies support/inhibit cultural identity and language learning.


This is an ethnographic study centered on humanizing pedagogies and critical literacies which leverage the intellectual, linguistic, and cultural heritages of students (Delgado Bernal et al, 2016; Freire, 1970; Gonzales et al., 2020; García & Kleifgen, 2018) their funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2005), and sociopolitical pedagogies of immigration (Author, 2020; Bajaj et al., 2017). Specifically, I used multimodal literacies (Street; 2017) and Community Cultural Wealth to uplift the knowledge, strengths, and cultural resources “possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression’’ (Yosso, 2006, p.75).


The Sueños Community Summer Program is a qualitative community engaged study of a summer cultural arts and education program. I supported the pedagogical work and organization of the curricular elements of the program. Simultaneously, I conducted ethnographic research guided by the research questions: (1) What meaning did Latinx immigrant youth make from an out-of-school Latinx cultural arts program? (2) In what ways did cultural arts support youth identities as immigrants and Latinx students? (3) In what ways did digital technologies support (and inhibit) wellbeing and learning through the cultural arts program? It was a partnership of university researchers, local educators, and both adult and high school volunteers. Eighty youth were grouped by age and ability as they attended various culturally relevant workshops including: Hip Hop dancing, singing, mariachi guitar, Afro-Latinx drumming, soccer, art/painting, and language, literacy, and digital literacy storytelling.

I conducted participant field notes throughout the summer program. I also conducted in-situ interviews throughout the summer and asked students about their experiences and perspectives of the program. I collected field notes, interviews, and youth-produced digital testimonios. Additionally, I used digital photographs and narrative by youth of their experiences. The focus was about their lived experiences as Latinx immigrant youth and as students learning in the summer through cultural, critical and digital literacies.

Data analysis included developing activity logs, domain charts, data triangulation, researcher memo, and member checking. I began with open coding followed by axial coding (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Ali & McCarty, 2020). Additionally, writing up the findings in an ethnographic narrative format, utilizing our fieldnotes and highlighting youth perspectives through their interviews, digital artifacts, testimonios, performances, and other multi-media.

The Sueños Community Summer Program provided a safe space to heal from the harms of oppressive schooling and farmworker living conditions. I illuminate youth voices through their digital representations. Many youth in expressed notions of not being “free” or of "being in cages" about their time before the summer program, signaling two aspects of their lived experiences: 1) learning within traditional school models made worse even after the alienation of hybrid/remote pandemic learning; and 2) the cages as analogies to immigration detention—some of the Newcomer youth experienced being in US immigrant detention camps with (or separated from) their families, while other youth in the program who were not in detention, held family memories of their family stories of immigration and loss of freedoms. Many youth used digital images to build their life stories and testimonios.

Here, I share a few of the youths’ perspectives shared via digital voice/video and multimedia art. Ismael, a nine-year-old child of Latino immigrants, came to the Sueños summer program full of energy. At times, instructors needed a bit of support because of his high energy, but with guidance, he thrived. In a project, he shared a voice recording and visual images to describe his experiences:

Ismael: I felt like I was set free for the first time. At home, I felt like I was in a cage. Estaba atrapado (I was trapped) and it was hard being stuck inside. And in the summer, we don’t have anywhere to go because our parents work.

Eduardo, a 16 year old youth, who endured living in the migrant tent camps along the Texas/Mexico border for many months shared that the Sueños program helped him develop his voice and understand his journey. In his visual multimedia testimonio, he included songs, video clips of his walks through the region, and a spoken word piece in Spanish - translated here: “They say that I’m not much, an awkward guy with glasses. But behind those glasses, you’ll find someone from Honduras who walked through Guatemala, Mexico, and through Texas. I’m in the U.S. now. Sobreviví (I survived). I tell you never judge someone for how they act or how they look or before knowing their story. Because within each person lies a great history.”

As students participated in cultural arts, digital literacies, affirming curricula, and discussed their experiences through frames of survival, racial justice, and resilience, they were able to heal their own migration stories. The summer community education program offered youth spaces of "feeling free," and a love for learning; it nurtured wings of freedom in a time of anti-immigrant policies.

It is my aim that The Sueños Summer Program brings to light our collective imaginations of a more just education. This study illuminates the complex ways dislocation, resistance, and immigration impact Latinx youths' lives; it describes community engagement, digital learning and cultural arts as a pedagogy of truth-telling. This approach counters anti-immigrant narratives and nurtures excellence. These findings contribute to much-needed research and provide important insights for how we might rethink K-12 schooling practices, partner with community based organizations and advance research for Latinx immigrant youth.

Author

• ROSA M JIMENEZ, University of San Francisco