Reexamining Theories of Resistance to Include Chicana/o/x Elementary-Aged Youth

• In Event: 42.083 - Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 42.083-5 - Reflexiones From Nepantlerx Researchers: Exposing the Tension-Rich Realities of Working With Latinx Youth

Abstract

This paper extends Solorzano’s and Delgado Bernal’s (2001) seminal work, Examining Transformational Resistance through a Critical Race and LatCrit Theory Framework: Chicana and Chicano Students in an Urban Context, to and through the endarkened epistemologies (Dillard, 2000; Paperson, 2011) of Chicanx elementary aged youth. By revisiting Solorzano and Delgado Bernal’s theory of transformational resistance used to understand Chicanx college students, and dialoguing with scholars who have taken up their work, this paper focuses on the contemporary contexts and forms of resistance of Chicanx elementary aged youth. Through the work of Chicanx/Latinx, indigenous and black feminist scholars, I explore non-teleological theories of resistance (Tuck and Yang, 2011) that explode dominant understandings of resistance, offering a discussion that is inclusive and provides a complex analyses of the oppositional behaviors of Chicanx elementary aged youth.

Tuck and Yang (2011), in their edited book, Youth Resistance and Theories of Change, present the following questions to begin interrogating dominant understandings of resistance and youth resistance: “What does resistance do? Does it do what we think it does?” (p. 521). They take to task the Western gaze on resistance, offering teleological theories of resistance and change suppose ideas of progress that are in line with Western philosophical frames and consistent with the worldviews of settler colonial societies, which have co-signed occupations, genocide, and state violence. In contrast, non-teleological theories of resistance “do not fetishize progress, but understand that change can happen in ways that make new, old-but-returned, and previously unseen possibilities available at each juncture,” (p. 522). In other words, there exist non-teleological theories of resistance and change beyond our dominant understandings that function more effectively in understanding the ways in which indigenous students and students of color exist and resist in their social worlds.

Through non-teleological theories of resistance, the endgame changes for students of color, as traditional understandings of what education means and should do for students is interrogated and re-imagined through youths’ paradigms. This is useful in an examination of Chicanx elementary aged youth, as their oppositional behaviors and forms of resistance do not fit into current theories of resistance and change. Many of their behaviors can be misinterpreted as counterproductive, destructive even, and not at all transformational. However, non-teleological theories of resistance allow for an understanding of the ways in which Chicanx elementary aged youth, who are multiply marginalized and denied basic human rights as children (Grossberg, 2005), might have as their endgame the preservation of their humanities as opposed to traditional educational goals adults and educators hold for them. Understanding youths’ forms of resistance with and through their own paradigms offers the potential to transform and improve education for Chicanx elementary aged youth, youth of color, and certainly all students.

Author

• Sylvia Mendoza, Palomar College